The whole time I was building this app, one thing sat at the back of my mind. It keeps a record of someone’s sex life — maybe the last thing on their phone they’d want anyone else to see. What do I owe you, for holding something like that?
The market has a ready answer. Look through the App Store and nearly every app that touches private data reaches for the same impressive-sounding words. Military-grade. Zero-knowledge. End-to-end. They’re comforting to read, and they make the technology sound formidable. I’ll be honest — I thought about using them too. They’d probably make the numbers look better.
I left them off. The reason is simple: some of them just aren’t true for us, and writing them anyway would be lying to you.
I’d rather tell you something plainer. Do? keeps your records on your own phone. There’s no account, nothing to sign up for, and no server of mine sitting somewhere with your data on it. So it isn’t that I promise not to look at your entries — it’s that I have nothing of yours to look at. I can’t export it, can’t study it, can’t sell it, and if someone showed up one day with a court order, I’d have nothing to hand over.
That’s a different thing from “we promise to protect your privacy.” A promise can be broken. Not having the data in the first place can’t. I would rather be clear about the one line I can actually hold than borrow a pile of pretty words and ask you to trust something I can’t deliver.
Being honest doesn’t mean standing still, though. If you decide to turn on iCloud, or to share with a partner, your data does make a trip — but it goes through Apple, under your own account, not past me. Those are the places I still want to do better. Whenever I get there, I’ll tell you plainly what it protects and where it still falls short — the same as I’m doing now.
In the end, I don’t much trust the apps that claim the most. The one I’d actually want to use is the one that says less, and means all of it. I’m trying to make that one.