Awareness instead of blocking
Most privacy tools work by blocking — ad blockers, firewall rules, DNS blacklists. Blocking is a decision made in advance: someone decides what you should not see, and you stop seeing it. The problem is that you also stop knowing it was there. Awareness is the opposite. You see everything, and you decide what to do about it.
Why blocking fails
Blocklists go stale. Domains rotate. The thing you wanted to block shows up somewhere new. Worse, blocking hides the shape of the problem — you no longer know which devices are noisy, or what they are reaching for. You traded visibility for silence, and the silence is fake.
What local-first means
Local-first is not a marketing word here. It means the data never leaves the device. Heron does not upload your DNS log to a server, because there is no server to upload to. The log lives in volatile memory and an optional flash cache on the device you own. Clearing it is a button on the dashboard — not a request to a company.
No accounts, no cloud
If a product needs an account to work, the data is not yours — it is the company's, and you are borrowing it. Heron has no login, no email requirement, no cloud sync. The dashboard is a web page that talks to the device on your LAN. That is the whole surface.
The strongest privacy guarantee is the one that does not depend on a promise. Nothing phones home because there is nowhere to phone to.
Open source is the proof
Every claim above is verifiable. The firmware is open source under the MIT license. You can read exactly what is logged, where it is stored, and confirm that no outbound connection exists beyond DNS forwarding. A privacy claim without source is a press release. A privacy claim with source is a design.