XaephyrComms Connect

Privacy & Security Notice

Plain-language notice, not a formal legal document. See the note at the bottom.

What this app is

XaephyrComms Connect gives you a persistent identity and encrypted messaging over the internet, via the public Nostr network. It's the internet-mode sibling to XaephyrComms (Off-Grid), built for when you have internet access and want messaging that isn't tied to a local network.

Read this before generating an identity

Your identity is a cryptographic key pair generated in your own browser. There is no account, no password reset, and no way to recover it if it's lost. Anyone who obtains your private key (nsec) can act as you. Back it up somewhere safe the moment it's generated — the app only shows it to you once.

What's stored, and where

Everything below is stored locally, in your own browser only:

Your identity (private key) — stays on this device unless you deliberately export/import it yourself.
Contacts — a local address book of public keys and the nicknames you gave them.
Language preference.
Conversation history — kept only for the current session; it clears on refresh or sign-out. It is not saved anywhere, including by us.

What the app's own server sees

Nothing about your messages. The server hosting this page only ever serves the static app itself — once loaded, your browser talks directly to Nostr relays. There's no database, no account system, and no message content ever passes through infrastructure we operate.

A real third party in this picture: Nostr relays

Unlike the off-grid app, this one does depend on infrastructure we don't operate: public Nostr relays (by default, a small set of well-known ones). Worth being direct about what that means:

Relays are dumb store-and-forward servers, run by others, not by us.
Message content is encrypted (NIP-17 gift-wrapped events + NIP-44 encryption) before it ever reaches a relay — relay operators only ever see ciphertext, not what you actually wrote.
Relays do see some metadata regardless of content encryption — that a wrapped event was published, roughly when, and (depending on relay logging practices, which we don't control) the connecting IP address.
You can point this app at a different set of relays, including a self-hosted one, if you want more control over that metadata exposure.

Encryption, stated plainly

All messages use NIP-17 (gift-wrapped) + NIP-44 encryption, via the audited nostr-tools library — not custom-built cryptography.
This is a real cryptographic guarantee: without the recipient's private key, message content cannot be read, including by relay operators, by us, or by anyone intercepting network traffic.
It does not include forward secrecy or sender-identity proof beyond "whoever holds this key sent this" — a shared-key-style guarantee, not a per-session one.

No warranty

This is provided as-is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied. In particular: there is no recovery mechanism for a lost key, no guaranteed message delivery, and no SLA on relay uptime, since relays are third-party infrastructure.

Who operates this

[Add your name/organization and a contact method here before publishing.]

A note on this document

This is a plain-language disclosure, not a lawyer-drafted legal document. It's meant to honestly describe what the app actually does, in the same spirit as the rest of its documentation. If this is ever deployed somewhere with real commercial stakes or a user base beyond a known team, it's worth having this reviewed by an actual lawyer rather than relying on this page alone.