Cyd is now open source!

Lockdown Systems is excited to announce that Cyd, the app that lets you claw back your data from the billionaire-controlled tech platforms, is now open source! The code is available on GitHub and is released under the GPLv3 license.

I (and the other engineers working on Cyd) have a deep background in developing open source security and privacy tools such as Dangerzone, OnionShare, SecureDrop, and OONI. By making Cyd open source, we hope to get a wider community of people involved in making Cyd better, with support for more tech platforms and translated into more languages.

As an open source app, it's easier for people to confirm that Cyd is secure. We promise that when you use Cyd to login to an account on X, Facebook, or any other platform to delete your data, that we don't have any access to your account or the data in it. By inspecting the code, you can now confirm that we're telling the truth.

And if there are any security issues with our app, we're hoping that making Cyd open source will make discovering and fixing them quicker. (By the way, if you do find a security issue, please report it to security@lockdown.systems instead of opening a public issue on GitHub.)

Even though Cyd is open source, we're still working to turn it into a sustainable business so that we can make a living working on it. Cyd is still a free app with premium features for individuals and business – check out the pricing page. If you're a developer, you're of course welcome to clone the git repo and use the premium features as you're contributing to the project. But if you'd like to support Cyd, please consider paying for a premium plan.

If you want to contribute to the Cyd open source project, start by checking out the GitHub repo. You'll find instructions on setting up a local development environment. If you're not a programmer, you can still use GitHub issues to report bugs and post feature requests. In the future there will be more ways for non-programmers to help too, such as by translating it into your native language.

Tell your friends!