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What companion apps do with intimate data — and what KeepAir can see

A factual comparison for couples and therapists: documented data practices at AI companion apps, and the guarantees KeepAir's architecture can and cannot make. No app is attacked; every claim is sourced and dated.

Sources checked: September 2026

What companion apps do with conversations

Companion apps are built on conversation data. These are documented incidents and findings about what can happen to that data — each with its source and date.

People can read your chats

Many AI services have responses rated by external contract workers. Reporting from August 2025 documents that reviewers saw intimate chats — including therapy-like conversations and romantic exchanges — and that some chats arrived together with names, phone numbers or Instagram handles. The provider said it limits what contractors see; its AI terms state that interactions may be reviewed by people.

Business Insider: contract workers reviewing Meta AI chats, 6 August 2025

Share links can end up in search results

A chat is only as private as the link that opens it. In August 2025, hundreds of thousands of conversations from one AI chatbot were found in Google search results after people used its share button. The transcripts included medical questions, relationship problems and suicide-related content.

BBC News: Grok conversations found in search results, 21 August 2025

Chat logs can become court evidence

Conversations stored in readable form can be requested in legal proceedings. In a copyright case, a US court ordered an AI provider to hand over 20 million de-identified chat logs and to keep them under legal hold — by the provider's own account, whole conversations rather than single messages.

Ars Technica: court order for 20 million ChatGPT logs, 12 November 2025

Conversations feed profiling and advertising

One review of five companion apps found that four collected identifiers such as user or device IDs, which can be combined with other data to build advertising profiles. Privacy policies were often unclear about whether conversations are used for training, and several apps offered no way to opt out. Mozilla's 2024 review of eleven relationship chatbots found similar gaps.

MIT Technology Review: companion-app privacy, 24 November 2025 · Mozilla *Privacy Not Included: review of relationship chatbots, 14 February 2024

Deletion is hard to verify

What is stored and for how long is often unclear. A 2026 study of romantic-AI users lists persistence and irreversibility among their recurring concerns, and the US Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry on companion chatbots in 2025 that includes how their data is used and shared.

arXiv: privacy concerns across the romantic-AI lifecycle, 22 March 2026 · US Federal Trade Commission: inquiry on companion chatbots, September 2025

What KeepAir can and cannot see

These statements are not advertising: each one follows from how the app is built. They apply to every entry in the product, including the AI-use check-in.

The server stores only encrypted envelopes

Entries are encrypted on your device before they are sent. The server accepts and stores only an envelope made of a format version, a nonce and ciphertext — a write that is not such an envelope is rejected. There is no plaintext column, file or log line for your content to land in.

Your keys stay on your device

Encryption and decryption happen in the browser. The server keeps public keys for addressing and verification, never the private key that opens your entries.

Sharing is per item and revocable

Your partner or therapist sees nothing until you share that specific entry. Sharing wraps the entry key for the recipient, so access can be withdrawn again — the server cannot grant it on its own.

No training on your content

There is no model in KeepAir that reads your entries, and no training pipeline that could use them: the content is unreadable to the server, and the product ships no AI service that processes it.

Human review is not possible

Nobody at KeepAir can read your entries — neither support nor administrators. Without the client-side key, a stored envelope stays opaque; reading it is not a policy choice but a technical impossibility.

The honest limits

Encryption hides content, not everything. This stays visible, and here is where KeepAir's guarantees end.

  • The server sees metadata

    Timestamps, entry types, sizes and the identifiers of the channels an entry belongs to are stored in readable form so the app can list and sync entries. Metadata can show that something was written and when, even while its content stays unreadable.

  • Deletion and backups

    Deleting an entry removes it from the server for everyone it was shared with. Two limits remain: a recipient who already opened an entry may have a copy on their own device, and an operator's encrypted backups are pruned only after the configured retention window.

  • Your device is part of the boundary

    Encryption protects data at rest on the server. It does not protect an unlocked device, a shared screen or a screenshot — and it does not hide who you are connected to.

Sources

Every companion-app claim above is drawn from one of these references. The dates are the publication dates.

KeepAir is not a crisis service. This is a guided reflection — not therapy, not a diagnosis and not a substitute for talking to a person. If you are in acute distress, please talk to a human being: the support services under “Support” are free and available around the clock.

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