Community relay grants
We fund independent groups that keep essential communication available during network disruption.
Fieldnote Systems builds private, resilient connection tools for people who need to work and communicate across borders.
Make digital privacy practical—not mysterious. We design safeguards that feel quiet in daily use, remain legible under pressure, and respect the person on the other side of the screen.
Our founders met while documenting communications blackouts for a regional research project. Existing security tools were either too brittle for patchy networks or too opaque for ordinary teams.
They sketched a smaller, clearer system: encryption that could recover gracefully, explain itself plainly, and never turn attention into a commodity.
“Trust grows when a product tells you what it is doing—and what it refuses to collect.”
Lessons from the teams and communities who shaped our work.
We are an independent group of engineers, researchers, writers, and support specialists spread across nine time zones. The range of our lived experience keeps the work honest.
We fund independent groups that keep essential communication available during network disruption.
Our applied research and threat models are published for peer review whenever safety permits.
Free, translated guides help newsrooms and non-profits make informed security decisions.
Outside reviewers examine our applications, infrastructure, and data-handling commitments each year.
People should be able to think, learn, organize, and create without being profiled along the way. That principle guides our business model as much as our code.
We minimize the information our systems can see, document the difficult trade-offs, and put clear controls within reach.
A private tool is only useful when it works on an old laptop, a crowded network, or a long journey. We test for the uneven conditions that polished demos tend to ignore.
Progress means fewer hidden decisions, fewer anxious moments, and a service that earns its place every day.
Selected notes from researchers and product reviewers.
One of the rare privacy products that explains advanced safeguards without hiding behind jargon.
A measured, humane approach to resilience—especially strong when connections become unreliable.
Fieldnote’s audit trail is unusually candid, with decisions and limitations presented side by side.

Network resilience researcher and former public-interest technologist.

Security engineering leader focused on verifiable systems.

Digital rights counsel working across borders and institutions.
Product operator and advocate for accessible technology.
Join a distributed team that values patient craft, plain language, and responsibility for the details.
Fieldnote Systems is independently held by its founders and employees. We do not sell personal attention or activity data.
We are fully distributed, with colleagues across Europe, North America, and the Asia-Pacific region.
Early product decisions lived in battered research notebooks. The name reminds us to observe real conditions before designing for them.