Privacy policy
Effective 2026-10-04
Ryze is an app for letters that arrive later, private fears you check against reality, and a daily journal. This policy explains what we can see, what we can't, who helps us run the service, and how to delete everything.
"Ryze", "we" and "us" mean the people who run the app: Maitreya Tools. Contact: support@maitreyatools.com.
The short version. Your letters, their moods, your reflections, journal pages, fears and the questions in friends' polls are end-to-end encrypted on your phone. We store them, but we can't read them. We do see your email, your name and @handle, who your friends are, who writes to whom and when letters arrive. We have no ads, no analytics and no tracking, and we don't sell data.
1. What's end-to-end encrypted (we can't read it)
When you set up Ryze, your phone creates a private key. It stays in your phone's secure storage (the iOS Keychain or Android Keystore), readable only on that phone while it's unlocked, and is never uploaded in readable form. The following are encrypted on your phone with that key, or with keys only you and the people you write to hold, before they leave it:
- the words of every letter, and its mood;
- your reflections and reactions on letters that arrive;
- journal pages, including your answers to journal questions;
- fears: the worry, the outcomes you imagined, what you expected and what happened;
- poll questions, their answer choices and the reasons people give.
A letter to a friend is encrypted once, and its key is locked separately for each person it's addressed to, so only their phone can open it. The algorithms are standard and public: X25519, HKDF-SHA256 and XChaCha20-Poly1305.
Your recovery code. When you set up, Ryze shows a recovery code once. A copy of your key, locked with that code, is stored on our server so a new phone can unlock your account. We never see the code, so we can't open that copy. If you lose both your phone and your recovery code, nobody, including us, can read your letters, journal or fears.
2. What we collect and can read
| Data | Why |
|---|---|
| Email address | To sign you in (by a one-time email code, or through Apple or Google) and to reply if you write to us. |
| Name you show, and your @handle | Your name signs your letters and is shown to your friends and to anyone you have a pending friend request with. Anyone who types your exact @handle can find you to send a friend request; there's no list of users to browse. If you sign in with Apple or Google, the name from that account is suggested when you set up. |
| Account ID and your public key | To run your account. Your public key lets friends write to you. |
| Friends, friend requests and blocks | So letters and polls only go between people who have both said yes, and so blocking works. Only you can see who you've blocked. |
| Letter details other than the words: who wrote it, who it's for, when it was sealed, the arrival day or window, and whether it's been accepted, opened, shared back or let go | To deliver letters on the right day and keep them sealed until then. For a surprise letter, the server picks the moment and keeps it hidden from you. |
| Which days have journal pages, and when pages were written or changed | To show your calendar and sync your pages. Not what's on them. |
| The day you said you'd know about a fear, and whether you've looked back | To remind you on that day. Not the fear itself. |
| Who's in a poll, and each vote as an answer number | To count answers. The number means nothing without the encrypted answer choices. |
| Journal question sets you create | These are plain text. If you leave one public, any Ryze user can see its title and questions, shown as "by someone on Ryze" (or your name and @handle, to friends). Your answers are never part of it. |
| Reports you make | Who you reported, which letter or poll (by an internal ID only), the reason you picked, and any words you chose to type. Ryze never adds the text of a letter to a report; only what you type or paste yourself. |
| Your choices: theme, light or dark, notification settings and your time zone | To show Ryze the way you picked and to keep notifications out of the night (21:00 to 08:00 your time). |
| Push token | Only if you allow notifications. It lets us tell your phone a letter has arrived. |
| Technical logs, including IP address | Our hosting provider keeps short-lived request logs to run and secure the service. |
We don't collect your location, contacts, photos, microphone, health data or payment details. Ryze contains no advertising, no analytics and no crash-reporting tools, and we don't track you across other apps or websites.
Face ID or fingerprint. The optional app lock uses your phone's own Face ID, fingerprint or passcode check. Ryze only learns whether it succeeded; it never receives biometric data.
Exports. When you save your data from the app, the file is made on your phone and goes wherever you choose to share it. It doesn't pass through our servers.
3. Who helps us run Ryze
We use these service providers. They process data for us under their own terms and privacy policies, and we don't sell or share your data with anyone else.
- Supabase: database, sign-in and server functions. Our project is hosted in Sydney, Australia. Everything above is stored there, encrypted items as unreadable text.
- Expo push service, which passes notifications to Apple Push Notification service and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging. A notification contains a short message and a link, for example "A letter from Sam has arrived". It can include a friend's name, but never what a letter says.
- Apple (Sign in with Apple) and Google (Google Sign-In), only if you choose them to sign in.
- Email delivery for sign-in codes, through Supabase.
Because our host is in Australia, your data may be processed outside the country you live in. We rely on our providers' standard safeguards for these transfers.
We may disclose information if the law requires it. Encrypted content would be disclosed only as the unreadable text we hold.
4. How long we keep it
- Your account and everything in it: until you delete your account.
- A letter you let go unread, or one stopped by a block: your key to it is destroyed straight away, so it can never be opened on your side. Its words are deleted once nobody else can open them.
- Notifications waiting to send: removed 7 days after sending, and in any case within 14 days.
- Push tokens: removed when you sign out, when you delete your account, or when the push service tells us the phone no longer exists.
- Reports: kept until either account involved is deleted.
- Emails you send us: kept in our inbox as long as needed to help you.
- Backups and logs: our host keeps backups and logs for a limited period, after which deleted data is gone from them too.
5. Deleting your data
You can delete your account in the app at any time: Me → Delete my account. It takes two steps and happens at once. It removes everything you wrote (including letters still on their way to friends), letters friends sent you and your notes on them, polls you asked and your votes, your friendships, blocks and reports, your profile and @handle, and your key backup. Your phone also forgets your key. Friends aren't told; you simply disappear from their lists.
A letter a friend wrote to you is deleted from your account. If they also sent it to other people, their copies stay with them.
Can't get into the app? You can ask by email. See Delete your account.
You can delete single things too: journal pages and fears, your own polls, a letter that's arrived (let it go unread), friendships, and your journal question sets.
6. Your choices and rights
- See and take your data: Me → Take it with you saves your journal as Markdown, or everything (journal, fears, letters, polls, friends) as JSON.
- Correct it: you choose your name and @handle when you set up Ryze. To change them afterwards, email us and we'll update them.
- Delete it: as above.
- Notifications: each kind can be turned on or off in Me, and in your phone's settings.
Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR in Europe and the UK, or US state privacy laws), you may have further rights, such as to object to or restrict processing, or to complain to your data protection authority. Email us to use them. We use your data to provide the service you asked for (performing our contract with you), to keep it secure (our legitimate interest), and to send notifications you turned on (your consent, which you can withdraw).
7. Children
Ryze is for people aged 13 and older. We don't knowingly collect data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and we'll delete it.
8. Security
All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with HTTPS. The content listed in section 1 is end-to-end encrypted as described. Your key is stored in your phone's secure storage, and you can lock the app with Face ID, fingerprint or your passcode. No system is perfectly secure, but we've built Ryze so that even a breach of our servers wouldn't reveal what you wrote.
9. Changes
If we change this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page. For meaningful changes we'll also let you know, for example in the app, before they take effect.