How Prickly Pair handles your words

Your conversations are encrypted before they are stored

Everything you say in your Private Space, everything in your Relationship Ledger, and everything in your Memory Library is encrypted with AES-256-GCM before it is written to our database. The encryption key is derived from your password and exists only for the duration of your session — it is never stored in the database, never written to logs, and we cannot recover it. If you forget your password, your encrypted history is unrecoverable. That is a deliberate trade-off, not a flaw.

What a database row actually looks like

This is the shape of a stored message (synthetic example — not a real row):

nY4kP2xR9wLqTzE1:kX8mQ3vN7cJ5tW2yB6hD4fG1sA9uZ0pL3eR8oI6…

Format: base64(iv):base64(ciphertext). Without your key, that is all anyone with database access can see — including us.

When your words are decrypted

To generate Loma's responses, your decrypted conversation is sent to Anthropic (the AI provider) at the moment of inference, over an encrypted connection. It is not used to train their models. Nothing decrypted is written back to our database or logs.

What is not encrypted

Operational metadata is stored unencrypted: token counts per AI call, call types, timestamps, and account details like your email and display name. None of it contains dialogue content.

Tell the Builders reports are readable by the team

Bug reports and ideas you submit through Tell the Builders — including any screenshot you choose to attach — are addressed to the team and stored unencrypted so the builders can act on them. The feedback agent has no access to your Private Space, Ledger, or Memory Library; a report contains only what you type into it and what you attach.

Your partner cannot read your Private Space

Privacy separation between partners is structural, not a setting. Nothing moves from your Private Space to the shared Relationship Ledger without your deliberate action.