HoundDog.ai
Ultra-Fast Code Scanner for Data Privacy
Details
- External ID
- 46857993
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- HoundDog.ai
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 2, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 16
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.6556603773584906
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I'm one of the creators of HoundDog.ai (https://github.com/hounddogai/hounddog). We currently handle privacy scanning for Replit's 45M+ creators.We built HoundDog because privacy compliance is usually a choice between manual spreadsheets or reactive runtime scanning. While runtime tools are useful for monitoring, they only catch leaks after the code is live and the data has already moved. They can also miss code paths that aren't actively triggered in production.HoundDog traces sensitive data in code during development and helps catch risky flows (e.g., PII leaking into logs or unapproved third-party SDKs) before the code is shipped.The core scanner is a standalone Rust binary. It doesn't use LLMs so it's local, deterministic, cheap, and fast. It can scan 1M+ lines of code in seconds on a standard laptop, and supports 80+ sensitive data types (PII, PHI, CHD) and hundreds of data sinks (logs, SDKs, APIs, ORMs etc.) out of the box.We use AI internally to expand and scale our rules, identifying new data sources and sinks, but the execution is pure static analysis.The scanner is free to use (no signups) so please try it out and send us feedback. I'll be around to answer any questions!
Enrichment
- Theme
- lightweight and on-device AI runtimes
- Vertical
- Security
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- B2B
- AI stance
- AI feature
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- code scanner for data privacy
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Building an ultra-fast static code scanner for data privacy requires deep compiler engineering, static analysis (AST parsing, data flow/taint analysis), and specialized privacy compliance expertise.
What it would actually take: A production-grade code scanner requires custom AST parsers (often leveraging Tree-sitter) paired with an interprocedural taint analysis engine written in Rust or Go to trace sensitive data sources to sinks. It requires sophisticated rule sets mapped to privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA) and must execute in seconds without false-positive storms to run seamlessly in enterprise CI/CD pipelines. This demands senior compiler engineers, program analysis researchers, and data privacy security specialists.
Discussion
6 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Traditional SAST tools, LLM-based code analysis, Stripe, Datadog, OpenAI (third-party services mentioned as data sinks)
Concerns raised: LLMs are slow, expensive, and nondeterministic for this use case, Accuracy of PII detection across different naming conventions and languages
Feature requests: Support for additional privacy frameworks beyond GDPR and US Privacy Laws, Integration with privacy notice generation tools
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 56 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #31 of 57 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 93 days after the earliest competitor.
- Sighthound · hn · 2026-07-09 · 19 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- PrivacyScanPDF · ph · 2026-09-15 · 4 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Rocky · hn · 2026-04-28 · 122 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- Pu.sh · hn · 2026-04-30 · 92 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Bloodhound · hn · 2025-12-09 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Local Privacy Firewall-blocks PII and secrets before ChatGPT sees them · hn · 2025-12-09 · 111 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- KeyLeak Detector · hn · 2025-11-01 · 30 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- PrivateClaw · hn · 2026-04-24 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.