About

RollGuard is made by one person.

That's me — David Smith, in South West Rocks.

I spent twenty-five years in finance, in Australia, London and Monaco, trusted with other people's money and confidential documents. Then I left it and spent the last ten years farming oysters on the NSW coast, which is about as far from a trading floor as you can get.

The idea came before a family trip to the US. I knew border officers can look through a phone, and I wanted to be able to say — honestly — that all our phones had been checked before we crossed. But I also didn't want to go through my teenage sons' photos myself; that's their privacy, and it should stay theirs — and a teenager's camera roll holds private things of every kind, not just documents.

What I wanted was for each of them to be able to run a check on their own phone, independently of me, and just show me the results screen — nothing flagged — without either of us looking at anything else.

So I looked through my own camera roll first, and found years of photos I'd taken to send to someone: a passport page for a booking, a licence for a rental, a card for a form.

That's when I realised the problem was much bigger than travel.

I tried to find a tool that would do that simple thing — look through your photos, on your phone, and tell you plainly what's there — without sending them anywhere or letting anyone else see them. There wasn't one. So I built it — not as a software developer, but with AI development tools, because I wanted this product to exist.

RollGuard is the result: a small, focused app, tested against thousands of real photos across a ten-year library and real specimen documents from 40 countries — coverage that's still growing. The scanning happens on your phone. Your photos aren't uploaded, and I don't see what RollGuard finds. Nothing leaves your phone, so I couldn't.

(The photos on this page went through RollGuard before they were published, naturally.)

The site also tells you plainly what RollGuard is good at and what it isn't, because that's the only kind of privacy app I'd trust myself.

— David