Most apps treat your privacy as something to manage in a settings menu after the fact. We tried to build Aura the other way around — so that the private version is the default, and we never have to ask you to trust us with things we don't actually need.
Here's how that works, in plain words. No jargon, no hand-waving, and we'll be honest about the limits too.
Your chats are end-to-end encrypted
When you message someone on Aura, the message is scrambled on your phone before it leaves, and it's only unscrambled on the other person's phone. The keys that do the scrambling live on the devices, not on our servers. The one exception is if you turn on chat backup: that uploads a copy of your key locked with your recovery code, which we can't open — it's what lets you get your history back after a reinstall.
In practice that means the contents of your conversations — your address, your schedule, what you agreed to pay, your kid's name — stay between you and the person you're talking to. Not because we promise to be good, but because the system is built so we can't read them in the first place. That's the difference between "we won't look" and "we can't look," and it's the one that actually counts.
Our server is a blind router
So how do messages get from your phone to theirs? Through our server — but the server's only job is to pass the sealed envelope along. It moves the encrypted bundle from one device to the other and never holds the key to open it.
Think of it like the postal service handling a locked box. They carry it, they deliver it, but they can't open it. The contents are yours and the recipient's alone.
We call this a blind router on purpose. The server is plumbing, not an audience. It can see that a message went between two devices so it can deliver it; it can't see what the message said.
Where your twin actually thinks
Let's be straight about this one, because it's the part people assume wrong: your twin's thinking happens on our servers, not on your phone. We send your prompt to an AI provider to do the reasoning, which means we can see it and so can they. That is not covered by the encryption above — that protects your chats with other people, not your conversations with the AI.
Two things make that liveable.
First, when two twins negotiate a job, the AI is handed a short, fixed list of public facts about you — your name, your general suburb, your skills, what you're available for — and nothing else. That list is hard-coded; there's no path for anything else to slip into it. And the negotiation transcript is wiped afterwards; we keep the outcome, not the back-and-forth.
Second, you can cut us out. Add your own AI provider key, or point the app at your own Ollama server, and your prompts go straight from your phone to that provider without passing through us at all.
Running the model on the phone itself is on our roadmap. It isn't built yet, and we'd rather say so than let you assume it.
We don't sell your data
Plainly: we don't sell your personal information, and we don't trade it to advertisers. That's not a business model we're interested in. Aura makes its money from the app's own token system (AURA) for matching and in-app actions — not from packaging you up and selling you on. Your data isn't the product here.
And because Aura is a matching layer, not a payment service — you pay or get paid directly (cash, PayID, bank transfer), and Aura never touches gig money — we're not sitting on a pile of your financial transactions either. There's simply less of your sensitive information in our hands by design.
You can delete your account — and your data goes with it
Privacy isn't real if you can't leave. You can delete your account from inside the app, and when you do, we remove your personal data — not just deactivate the login. We've also built the back end to clean up after itself over time: precise location data is short-lived, old message records are pruned on a schedule rather than kept forever, and account deletion cascades through the related data and the files you uploaded.
If you want the formal version of all of this — what we collect, how long we keep it, and how to exercise your rights — it's laid out in our privacy policy, including a dedicated section on deleting your account.
The honest limits
We'd rather you trust us because we're straight with you, so here's the fine print stated like a human:
- Encryption protects the message, not your memory of it. If the other person screenshots a chat or copies your number into their own phone, that's out of our hands — the same as any conversation. Share contact details only when you're ready.
- We still need some operational data to run the service — enough to deliver messages, match jobs near you, and keep accounts secure. We aim to collect the minimum for that, and the privacy policy spells out exactly what.
- No system is unbreakable. We use well-established encryption, and your key is held in your phone's encrypted storage, and we keep raising the bar, but anyone who tells you a piece of software is 100% guaranteed forever is selling something. What we can promise is that we've designed Aura so that the easy, lazy ways to leak your data simply aren't there.
The short version
Your conversations are encrypted on your phone. Our server carries them sealed and can't read them. The AI runs on our servers — and when it negotiates for you it gets a short list of public facts, nothing more. We don't sell your data, we don't hold your gig money, and you can take everything with you when you leave. Privacy here isn't a feature you switch on — it's the way the thing is built.