We hide you from people you know. We won't tell you who got hidden

The worry we hear most

When people talk about a service like this one, the first thing they raise is not fraud, and it is not a data breach.

It is running into someone they know.

A colleague. A friend's husband. Someone from university. Being seen is hard to undo, and that one worry is enough to keep a lot of people from ever starting.

We hide you and them from each other

The method is simple. Anyone in your contacts stops appearing to you, and you stop appearing to them.

Hiding one direction is pointless. If they can still see me while I can't see them, the exact thing I was worried about happens anyway. So we hide both directions.

There is a useful side effect. If the other person has your number saved and has this turned on, the two of you are hidden from each other even if you never hand us your contacts.

Your contacts never reach our servers

This is the part we were most careful about.

Your contact list is not your data. The people in it never agreed to anything here. Collecting their numbers on a server is the kind of asset you should not build in the first place, however well you guard it.

So the numbers are turned into unreadable values on your phone. There is no path by which a plain phone number arrives at our servers.

We compare those values, hide the matches, and throw the uploaded values away immediately. Nothing survives that says who has whom in their contacts. What is not kept cannot leak.

We read the numbers and nothing else. Names, photos and email addresses are never requested.

We won't tell you who got hidden

This part can be inconvenient, so here is the reasoning as it stands.

"Three people in your contacts are using this service."

It looks helpful. But that screen is a tool for finding out who you know is here. It tells you who uses the service, and that is the worst thing we could build.

So we don't show the count either. Give someone a number and they can delete contacts one at a time until they work out who it was.

There is no per-person exception. Without a list there is nothing to choose from, and building the list brings back the problem above. The only control is turning the whole thing off.

Where this doesn't help

If two people never saved each other's numbers, this method cannot tell. A coworker whose number you never had. A classmate who changed phones years ago.

We won't claim to block this completely. But the relationships people actually worry about are usually the ones where the number exists on both sides.

Turning it on is your call

The feature needs access to your contacts to work. If you don't grant it, everything else works as it did. If you turn it off later, the people who were hidden become visible again.