Is my family photo app end-to-end encrypted?
In short
Famileze end-to-end encrypts the family archive: photos, videos, calendar, notes, health records, lists and letters are scrambled on your phone before they leave it, and Famileze holds no key. Three things can't work that way, because someone outside your family is at the other end: email sent in, newsletters sent out, and pages you choose to publish.
What "end-to-end encrypted" actually means
Many apps encrypt your photos "in transit" and "at rest". That sounds reassuring, but it often means the company holds the key, so their staff, or anyone who breaks into their systems, could unlock what you stored.
End-to-end encryption moves the key. The lock is applied on your own device, and only your family's devices hold what opens it. The company in the middle stores and passes along something it cannot read.
A simple way to picture it: you post a locked box. The courier carries it and the warehouse stores it, but neither of them was ever given the key.
How Famileze does it
When you start your family, the app creates your family's key on your phone. That key is never sent to Famileze.
From then on, your photos, videos, notes, calendar and records are encrypted on your phone (with AES-256-GCM, a standard, widely used method) before they are uploaded. The three exceptions are below. What reaches the cloud is scrambled text. If anyone tampers with it, it simply fails to unlock rather than turning into something else.
That covers the timeline, folders, calendar, health records, lists, keepsake letters and your children's names and details.
Your other devices, and a co-parent, get the key through a pairing or invite step. The invite itself is locked with a short code that you hand over separately, and that code never reaches our servers.
So you can get back in if you lose your phone, the iPhone app also saves your family's details to your own iCloud Keychain, on your Apple Account. That copy sits with Apple, under your account. It is not with us.
What that means in real life
- We can't look at your photos. Not out of politeness. We hold no key.
- We can't hand them over. If a court or anyone else asked, we could only give them scrambled text.
- We can't use them to train AI. Famileze uses no cloud AI and no language model, and your family's content is never used to train any model. We couldn't, even if we changed our minds, because we cannot read it.
- We can't reset it for you. There is no master key and no back door. That is the trade: nobody else can open it, so nobody else can rescue it if every device and every saved copy of the key is gone.
We can see a little: how many encrypted items an account holds, how big they are and when they were written. We use that to manage storage and keep sync working. It tells us nothing about what is inside.
The three places it doesn't apply, and why
End-to-end encryption works because only your family needs to read what's inside. Once someone outside the family is at the other end, there is no shared key to lock it with. Famileze has three such places, and we'd rather say so than let you assume.
1. Email sent to your family address. Each family has an email address so you can forward a school notice or a doctor's letter straight into the archive. That email arrives from the outside world as ordinary email, so it waits on our relay in readable form until one of your devices collects it. It is deleted after 30 days at the latest. Once your phone files it, it becomes encrypted family content like everything else. You can limit the address to senders you nominate, and if you'd rather not use it at all, nothing else depends on it.
2. Newsletters you send out. A newsletter to the grandparents is an ordinary email to people outside the family. Its words, photos and the recipients' addresses pass through our relay and our email provider in readable form so it can be delivered. Recipient addresses aren't kept as any kind of list.
3. Pages you choose to publish. Share a recipe as a link and Famileze publishes that one page, with its photo, at a long random web address. Anyone with the link can open it, so it has to be stored unencrypted. It is deleted automatically after about a year, and you can take it down any time from Settings › 🔗 Links you've published. Sharing a photo or video is different: 📤 Share hands the file to your phone's own share sheet, and it goes wherever you send it. We don't publish it or keep a copy.
None of these happens unless you choose it.
One more thing leaves your phone, and it isn't ours: when you dictate with 🎙 on iPhone, Apple's speech recognition may send that audio to Apple to turn into text. We never receive the audio. Type instead if you'd rather nothing left the phone.
What it doesn't do
- It doesn't encrypt email coming in, newsletters going out, or published recipe pages end to end. Those three can't be.
- It can't protect a photo after you've shared the file elsewhere. From then on, whatever app you sent it to protects it.
- It can't recover your archive if every family device is gone and no saved copy of the key survives. We hold no key and there is no reset.
- It doesn't hide the size, number and timing of stored items, only what is in them.
Questions parents ask
- Can Famileze staff see my family photos?
No. Photos are encrypted on your phone before they upload, and Famileze never holds the key. What we store is scrambled text.
- Is my family newsletter encrypted?
Not end to end, and it can't be. It's ordinary email to people outside your family, so it passes through our email provider in readable form to be delivered.
- Is the family calendar encrypted?
Yes. Calendar entries are part of the encrypted archive. The one exception is an email you forward in, which is readable on our relay until your device collects it, and is deleted after 30 days at the latest.
- Is my family's content used to train AI?
No. Famileze uses no cloud AI and no language model, and your content is never used to train any model. We couldn't, because we can't read it.
- If Famileze can't read my archive, how do I get it back on a new phone?
Your family's key is saved to your own iCloud Keychain and to your family's other devices, never to us. See what happens to my family photos if I lose my phone.
Related
- What happens to my family photos if I lose my phone?
- Is there a family app that doesn't use AI on our photos?
- Sending the grandparents your news without social media
- How Famileze protects your family
Famileze is coming to iPhone. Join the waitlist.