About
A better shared address book, without the surveillance
Crowdbook started from a simple frustration: keeping everyone's contact details current is hard, because only the contact knows when their information changes. Solving the problem shouldn't require handing your address book to a company that reads it.
Why we're building this
Group contact management today forces a bad trade: either everyone updates everyone else by hand, or you all pour your details into a service that can read, mine, and lose them. We thought there should be a third option — the convenience of shared, always-current contacts with none of the exposure. Crowdbook is our attempt at it.
When our information changes, we are pretty good at getting those changes to the people in our immediate circle, but even that process leaves room for a lot of error. If only there were a way to change our information in one place, and have those changes get to everyone we care about without any additional effort.
What we value
Privacy is the product
We didn’t bolt encryption onto a contacts app. The zero-knowledge model is the reason Crowdbook exists — everything else is built around it.
Minimalism over data hoarding
We collect the least we can and share only what you explicitly choose. Data we never hold is data that can never leak.
Honest about what we’ve built
We describe the system as it actually works today, note what’s still in progress, and welcome scrutiny of our claims.
The team
Crowdbook is a small project led by Ben Newman, a software development professional with over 30 years of software development experience, a native Texan, and a member of a huge extended family for whom many of his address books entries are soon to be updated.