Privacy Policy
The short version: we collect nothing. There is no account, no server and no analytics. Your photos never leave your device unless you personally send them somewhere.
That is unusual enough that it deserves explaining rather than asserting, so the rest of this page is the detail behind it. It is deliberately short. A privacy policy you cannot finish is not one you can rely on.
What we collect
Nothing. Not your photos, not their file names, not how many you have, not what you call your albums, not when you open the app, not which features you use, not your email address, not your device identifier.
We do not collect this data and then promise to look after it. We never receive it. The app makes no network requests of its own, so there is no connection over which any of it could be sent.
What leaves your device
Three things, and only three.
| Your subscription | iOS asks Apple whether your subscription is active. Apple knows you bought it, exactly as with any App Store purchase. We are told nothing about you — only the app on your device learns the answer, and it does not report back. |
|---|---|
| Anything you share | If you use the share sheet, save a photo to your camera roll or copy one to the clipboard, that photo goes where you sent it. That is the point of those features. Once a photo is handed to another app, what happens next is that app's business. |
| Syncing your own devices | If you pair a second device of your own, photos travel directly between the two over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. That traffic never touches the internet and never passes through us. |
What is stored, and how
Everything stays on your device, encrypted with AES-256-GCM: the photos, their thumbnails, your album names and your captions. Album names and captions are encrypted too, because they can be as revealing as the photos.
The encryption key is generated at random on your device and locked with a key derived from your passcode. Your passcode itself is never stored — only the locked result, which is useless without it.
Your vault is left out of iCloud and computer backups by default. You can turn that on in Settings ▸ Storage ▸ Backup if you would rather have the redundancy; it stays encrypted in the backup, but a copy does then exist off your device.
If something goes wrong
If the app crashes it writes a technical report to your device and leaves it there. Nothing is uploaded. You can read the whole report in Settings ▸ Diagnostics and share it with us if you want to help fix the problem — but that is your decision, made with the report in front of you.
Permissions the app asks for
| Face ID | To unlock your vault. Your passcode always works as well. |
|---|---|
| Camera | Only if you take a photo straight into the vault. Those photos are never added to your camera roll. |
| Photo library | Only if you ask the app to delete originals after importing them, or to export a photo back out. |
| Local network | Only for syncing with your own paired devices. Nothing is sent to the internet. |
Importing from your photo library uses Apple's picker, which runs outside the app and hands over only the photos you choose. The app never asks for access to your whole photo library to do it.
Children
Brass Key is not directed at children and collects no data from anyone, of any age.
Your rights
Laws such as the GDPR and the CCPA give you the right to see the data a company holds about you, to correct it, and to have it deleted. We hold none, so there is nothing to show you, correct or delete.
Your photos are already entirely under your control: deleting the app deletes the vault, and Settings ▸ Security ▸ Erase Vault removes every photo, album and key from the device immediately.
What this cannot protect against
Listing the limits matters more than sounding impressive. Encryption on your device does not help if:
- your device has been jailbroken or compromised at the system level;
- somebody compels you to unlock it;
- you take a screenshot, which is an ordinary photo in your camera roll;
- somebody is watching over your shoulder while the vault is open.
If this policy changes
Any change will be posted here with a new date at the top. If we ever started collecting anything — which would be a different product, not an update — we would say so plainly and in advance.
Contact
Questions about any of this: privacy@brasskey.app.
The app also has a Privacy Report built into it, at Settings ▸ Privacy Report, which says the same things item by item and reflects the settings you have actually chosen.