DoeAsk's private messaging is designed around end-to-end encryption and controls that put you in charge. Here's what that means — and where the boundaries are.
A personal message is different from a public listing. An encrypted backup is different from an AI-assisted rewrite. A bank-QR payment is different from a marketplace checkout. You should know which experience you're using.
End-to-end encrypted message content between you and your contact.
Content you choose to publish for discovery and sharing — meant to be seen.
Text or content you send for assistance may leave the encrypted conversation boundary.
Transaction and support information follow separate operational and legal policies.
Compare a safety code with your contact to confirm who you're really talking to.
Set messages to clear from the conversation after a time you choose.
Stop or quiet a contact on your own terms, whenever you decide.
Choose whether activity signals like online status are shared at all.
Decide what stays on your device and what you clear away.
Keep an encrypted backup so you can recover your account, with recovery you control.
Confirm current implementation and device support in the app before relying on a specific control.
Sharing a link to another platform doesn't give DoeAsk access to the private conversations inside that platform. DoeAsk does not need to read someone else's inbox to help you share what you've created.
Message content between you and your contact is designed to be end-to-end encrypted, so the relay server is built to handle data it cannot read as plaintext. The specific protocol and ciphers are documented in our engineering notes.
You can verify a contact's keys, and the app is designed to flag when a contact's key changes so you can re-check before carrying on. Exactly how and when these warnings appear is described in the engineering documentation.
Backups are designed to be encrypted so that recovery depends on a key or phrase you hold rather than on the server. The backup format and recovery flow are set out in our technical docs.
DoeAsk uses a username as the only identifier — no email or phone — but running any relay still involves some routing and delivery data. What is kept, and for how long, is detailed in the engineering documentation.
Encryption protects messages in transit, not a device someone else has already unlocked, and a recipient can generally screenshot or copy what they can see. Our docs describe the threat model these controls are and aren't built for.
A video meeting may hand off to a separate meeting tool with its own link and its own policies, which can differ from one-to-one chat. The current meeting provider and how links are generated are noted in the engineering docs.
Deleting a message or conversation is designed to remove it from your view and, where supported, from pending delivery, though copies a recipient already kept are outside our control. Retention and purge behavior is specified in our technical documentation.
If you use an optional AI feature, the text or content you send for it may leave the encrypted conversation to be processed, and such features are intended to be opt-in and clearly labeled. Which providers are used and what is sent are documented in the engineering notes.
Anything you choose to publish — listings, public profiles, shared pages — is meant to be seen and can be indexed by search engines and read by crawlers. What is public by default is described in our documentation.
Because private message content is designed to be end-to-end encrypted, the server is built to hold little of it, and lawful requests are handled under applicable law and our stated policies. How such requests are handled is set out in our policy and engineering documentation.
