“We choose not to read it” is not the same as “we cannot”

When you switch encryption on, your browser generates a 24-character recovery key and shows it to you once. The key that actually encrypts your entries is derived from it, in your browser, using PBKDF2 - 210,000 iterations - and the entries are sealed with AES-GCM before anything is sent. We store a salt and a verifier hash: enough to tell you that you typed the wrong key, never enough to work out the right one.

• The ciphertext

  An opaque blob. Without your recovery key it is not a locked version of your diary; it is noise that happens to be the right length.

• A salt

  Public by design. It exists so the same recovery key produces a different content key for every account, which is what stops one cracked key being reusable.

• A verifier hash

  Separately salted, so it can confirm a typed key is correct without being a stepping stone to the key that decrypts anything.

• Not the key

  Not in the database, not in a log, not in a backup, not recoverable by support. There is no administrator override, because an override is just a second key.

Lose the recovery key and the entries are gone. Not locked pending a support ticket - gone. That is what end-to-end actually means, and any product that offers you a reset link is telling you it can read your data.

Encrypted entries also cannot be searched on our servers, cannot be summarised in your weekly email, and are not reachable by the calendar assistant. Those features are not being withheld; they are things a server does, and the server no longer has anything to do them with.

The date of an entry, your mood word, the weather, your habit ticks and which page template you used are stored in the clear. This is a decision, not an oversight: streaks, the photo album, the month recap and Life Progress all have to work on a device that has never held your key.

A date plus the word “low” is metadata. It is not the entry. Encrypting it would buy very little privacy and cost most of the product, so we would rather write that sentence down than quietly imply everything is sealed.

Encryption is opt-in, so most of what protects you day to day is the ordinary arrangement: database-level isolation, no bulk access to entries for anybody including administrators, statistics computed as totals that never surface the underlying text, and one narrow support exception that requires a typed reason and writes a permanent audit record before a single entry can be opened.

Your journal is never sent to an AI model, and never used to target anything. The exact detail is in the Privacy Policy.