About Jackdaw Book

Why a jackdaw

The jackdaw is the smallest member of the crow family — a close, smaller cousin of the raven and the crow, easy to tell apart by its pale, ice-grey eyes and the soft silver hood behind its head. Jackdaws are also some of the most socially sophisticated birds known: they live in tight, lifelong pair bonds within larger colonies, and they are remarkably good at recognising and remembering individual faces, both other jackdaws' and ours. Researchers have found that jackdaws can distinguish specific human faces associated with danger and pass that recognition on to each other. It is exactly the kind of quiet, specific memory for who's who that this project is named for.

One more thing worth knowing

A jackdaw's eyes are pale white to ice-blue from a young age, almost startling against its otherwise black-and-grey plumage — a rarity among crows, whose eyes are typically dark. Some researchers think that pale eye is itself a signal, used in close contact with a mate or a threat, which is a fitting detail for a bird now lending its name to a book about the small signals — a birthday, a nickname, a face — that tell you who matters to someone.

The idea behind the book

Jackdaw Book started from a simple frustration: the names and details worth remembering about the people in our lives don't fit neatly into a phone's contacts app, and they definitely don't belong on someone else's server. So the whole product is built around one constraint: nothing you type ever has to leave your device.

Local-first, on purpose

Every name, relationship, birthday and note lives in your browser's own storage, or your phone's own storage in the mobile apps. There is no Jackdaw Book account to create and no Jackdaw Book server holding a copy of your book. If you never set a passcode, that data sits unencrypted on your device, exactly the way a paper notebook would. If you do set a passcode, your entire book is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it ever touches storage, with the key derived from your passcode and never saved anywhere — not even by us.

No accounts, no data collection

There is nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into. We do not collect, store, or have any way to see the names you save. The only data this site can see at all is anonymous traffic and ad-interaction data from Google Analytics and Google AdSense, and only if you say yes to that on the consent banner — and even that never includes anything from inside your book.

Where this is going

This is a beta. The web app, the mobile apps, and the ideas behind both are all still being built in the open. If you have thoughts on what a memory book like this should do next, the contact page reaches a person.