There are zillion commercial services offering proprietary (non-Open Source) device location tracking systems out there to help you get your stolen/lost laptop back.

Most offer little to no privacy guarantees, and the rest force a user to entrust privacy to the company involved.

But Adeona is the first Open Source system for tracking the location of your lost or stolen laptop that does not rely on a proprietary, central service.

This means that you can install Adeona on your laptop and go — there’s no need to rely on a single third party. What’s more, Adeona addresses a critical privacy goal different from existing commercial offerings. It is privacy-preserving.

This means that no one besides the owner (or an agent of the owner’s choosing) can use Adeona to track a laptop. Unlike other systems, users of Adeona can rest assured that no one can abuse the system in order to track where they use their laptop.

You can download the OS X version here.