OBSCURA for teams

There is no data to protect

OBSCURA has no accounts, no login, no database and no upload. Every tool runs inside the browser tab. A document your team redacts, a contract they read, a photo they strip the location out of: the file is opened from their disk, worked on in memory, and written back to their disk. It is never sent anywhere, because there is nowhere to send it.

That is not a policy we promise to keep. It is how the software is built, and you can confirm it in a minute: open any tool, open the network tab, and use it. Nothing goes out.

The practical consequence is the reason this page exists. There is no processor relationship, so there is no data processing agreement to negotiate. There are no sub-processors to list. There is no region to pick, no retention period to set, and no deletion request to honour, because we never had anything of yours.

There is nothing to install or administer

Today OBSCURA is a website. There is no agent, no browser extension, no admin console and no directory integration. Your team opens a page over HTTPS, the same as any other page. Nothing runs in the background and nothing starts at login.

If someone wants it in its own window, Install adds it as an installed web app from the browser they already use: its own icon and window, the same code from the same address, and no binary to vet. It opens with no connection. The workspace apps are stored on the machine when it is installed, and every other page once it has been opened. A signed native application for Windows and macOS is still to come, and is on the waitlist along with Sync, which will encrypt on the device before anything moves.

What it costs

The Workspace costs nothing, at work included, and needs no account: documents, spreadsheets, slides, the PDF editor and the rest, for everyone on the team. Every other tool is free to open and to check a file with; saving the result is Pro.

For now each person needs a plan of their own: a key is for one person, on every browser they use. Everything is US$9 a month or US$79 a year, and covers saving and exporting in every tool, the Photo Editor, the Engineering Suite with its 2D drawings in Foundry, and the whole Sovereign Suite application, including the services a security team would otherwise buy a platform for: readiness for SOC 2, ISO 27001 and five other frameworks from one set of controls, an evidence locker, access reviews, vendor and risk registers, incidents run from a playbook, and checks on the code and config you ship. Somebody who needs only one application can have it on its own for US$4 a month or US$35 a year. Either comes with 7 days free: Stripe takes the card at the start and charges nothing if the plan is cancelled before the seven days end.

Plans for a team or a business are not offered at the moment. A team or business that already has one keeps it, and whoever holds its key goes on adding people and taking them off at /seats.

How a team works with it

1. Everyone uses the Workspace and the free checks with nothing to buy and no account to make.
2. Whoever needs to save from the tools, or works in one of the applications, starts a plan of their own on the Pro page: everything, or the one application they use. Somebody who only keeps the books can have Books alone while the person who redacts disclosure has everything.
3. Each person copies their key from the Pro page and pastes it under Sign in on any other computer they use. It is checked on the device, and nothing counts the devices.
4. Work stays on the machine it was made on, in the browser and in a folder the person chooses. Colleagues share it as files, by whatever the team already uses, and a file that must not be read on the way can be encrypted before it is sent.

It runs on each person’s machine like everything else here: nothing is uploaded, and the only thing the server ever sees is the key.

Which tools, for which kind of work

The same tools do different jobs depending on whose files are on the desk. By industry takes six kinds of work, names the problems each has with files and the tools that deal with them, and walks through an example:

• Law firms and legal teams: redaction that removes the text, clean drafts, compared versions and numbered bundles.
• Journalists and newsrooms: the location in a photograph, the corner of a screenshot, a voice, printer dots.
• HR and recruiting: blind CVs, subject access requests and personal data in spreadsheets.
• Clinics and healthcare: masked letters, clinical photographs and exports checked before they go.
• Accountants and finance: invoices, receipts, reconciliations, cash forecasts and the year-end hand-off.
• Small IT and security teams: SOC 2 readiness, sensitive data, certificates, release signing and incident playbooks.

What you are not buying

Said plainly, so nobody finds out later:

• No SSO or SCIM, no central provisioning and no admin console: each person starts and holds a plan of their own.
• No support contract with a service level. Email to [email protected] is answered by a person, but there are no penalties if an answer is slow.
• No usage reporting. What anybody does with the tools never reaches a server, so there is nothing of it to log.
• No shared team vault. Files live with the person who made them.
• No SOC 2 report, no ISO 27001 certificate, and no penetration test summary.

If any of those is a hard requirement in your process, this is not going to clear it, and it is better to know now.

If you are in policing, fire, ambulance or defence, the same argument with the answers your assurance review will actually ask for is on the front line page.

Invoices and purchase orders

Each plan is bought at Stripe’s checkout. Stripe emails a receipt for every payment, and the Pro page links to Stripe’s billing page, which has every invoice and is where a plan is cancelled. A purchase order is not taken at the moment, because the yearly Business plan it was for is not offered. A business that bought one that way keeps it on the terms it was sold on.

A security questionnaire, already answered

The Cloud Security Alliance’s CAIQ v4, answered control by control: all 197 controls of its Cloud Controls Matrix, each Yes, No or not applicable, with a short reason and the page to check it on. It is our own answer, not an audit or a certification: where something is not in place, such as SOC 2, ISO 27001, SSO or an independent test, it says No. Beside it are the sub-processors, the incident response and breach notification policy and the business continuity statement.

A spreadsheet file, one control to a row, by its CAIQ control ID, with where each answer can be checked. For a question it does not cover, write to [email protected].

The questions your security team will ask