Rebuilding trust in
browser software
Extensions have an ownership problem. Tools get acquired, mission statements drift, and users are left wondering what their browser is actually doing.
The problem
Extensions shouldn't be a black box
Browser extensions have broad access to your browsing activity. Most of the time that's fine — but when an extension is acquired, or updates quietly in the background, or adds "analytics" in a minor version bump, users have no way to know.
The trust model for browser extensions is broken. You install something, you trust it forever, and you have no visibility into whether that trust is still warranted.
LocalWard exists to fix that with a simple approach: every tool we build is open source, single-purpose, and committed to staying that way. No acquisition clause. No pivot to SaaS. No silent telemetry.
We are local-first and privacy-first — not local-only. Local storage is the default for every tool. When a feature benefits from a server, that server is open source, self-hostable, and strictly opt-in. Trust comes from transparency, not from a blanket no-network promise.
We run a standardized security and privacy review for every extension before it ships, and every line of code is auditable on GitHub.
How we build
Our standards
Every LocalWard tool ships with the same commitments, reviewed before release.
- Permission minimalism — We only request what a tool genuinely needs. Every permission is documented and explained.
- Local-first by default — Data stays on your machine unless you explicitly opt in to a server feature. Network features are additive, never required.
- Open server components — Any server we build is open source and self-hostable. No closed binaries, no "trust us." If we can't open-source it, we don't ship it.
- Data ownership — Anything a tool stores belongs to you. Export is always available, in a portable format, without our involvement.
- Auditable updates — Every release has a public changelog and diff. Review what changed before an update applies.
Get involved
Open source means open collaboration
Found a bug? Have a feature idea? Want to audit the code? All of it happens in the open.