How Peachy keeps your messages private

Every private conversation on Peachy is end-to-end encrypted by default: sealed on your device, opened only on the devices in the chat, and held by us as bytes we have no key for. Nobody has to find a setting. Underneath is MLS (RFC 9420), the IETF’s messaging encryption standard.

What is sealed, and what isn’t

Sealed: a direct message and a private group chat alike, a community’s private room included — and not only the words. A photo, video, file or place sent inside one is encrypted on your device too.

Not sealed, by design — and we would rather name it than let you assume: Slices and the commons, public and organisation rooms, and your chat with Peachy itself, which has to be readable by the thing you are asking. Reactions ride outside the envelope too.

The lock is a claim about the next message

A conversation’s header shows a lock and the words End-to-end encrypted only where the next message really would seal, never merely because something in the thread once did. When it cannot, it says why — naming the people it is waiting on to update their app, or saying this device cannot seal yet when the fault is ours. A group seals only once everyone in it can be included.

Notifications

A notification for a sealed message leaves our servers with no words in it — a placeholder and the message’s id. Your own device fetches the row and decrypts it, so the words reach your screen having never been readable by us, Apple or Google.

Joining late, and being away too long

Someone added to a group reads what comes next, not what came before: their invitation carries the current keys and nothing older, and we hold no plaintext to hand over instead. The same ratchet cuts the other way — a device offline more than eight weeks cannot catch up. It rejoins at the current point, says so rather than drawing a lock, and what it missed stays unreadable there.

What this does not hide

We still hold the metadata: who talks to whom, when, and how often. Sizes are blurred, not hidden: a message is padded to the nearest 256 bytes, an attachment to a band about five per cent wide. And your device’s signing key is a value the app can read rather than one held in hardware: a real, narrow weakening we would rather write down than have somebody find. If you find something worse, we pay for it.

The AI half is How private AI works; you can check the enclaves yourself, and the Privacy Policy lists what we hold. Get started.