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Privacy · 2 min read
Metadata: what stays visible even when chat is encrypted
Encryption protects what you say. It does not hide every fact about the conversation, and honest services tell you which.
Metadata is data about data. For a letter, the message is inside and the envelope is the metadata: who it is addressed to, who sent it, the postmark.
What metadata can include in chat
- Your account name and the email you signed up with.
- Which chats you belong to, and who else is in them.
- When messages were sent, and roughly how large they were.
- Which devices are signed in, and the internet addresses they connected from.
What it does not include
In an end-to-end encrypted chat, the words, photos and calls themselves are not readable by the service. That is the part encryption protects.
Why honesty about this matters
A service that claims to know nothing about you is almost certainly overselling. We would rather be exact: our servers must know enough to deliver messages, and nothing more than that. Our privacy policy lists what we keep and for how long.
Reducing your own metadata
- Use fewer accounts and fewer apps.
- Share your phone number only where needed.
- Keep contact lists and permissions tidy.
- Delete old chats and files you no longer need.