Say on the privacy page that search stays on the phone, and why there is no index

An index is built from messages in readable form, so it is a second copy
of everything somebody has written — one that would need protecting as
carefully as the first and could be forgotten about. Not having one is a
decision worth stating rather than an absence.

Also: the query itself is never kept. What somebody searched for is
often more telling than what they found.

Refs paulhitt/flamenet-messenger-ios#25

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul Hitt
2026-09-02 19:51:22 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.8
parent 1119420bf1
commit d5c7007a9f
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@@ -75,6 +75,19 @@
anybody: it gets the conversation's own protection rather than being left somewhere
more convenient, it never leaves the device, and signing out removes it along with
everything else.
<h2>Searching your messages</h2>
<p>
Searching happens entirely on your device, over the messages already there.
Nothing you type into the search box is sent anywhere, and nothing is kept: the
words you searched for are often more telling than what you found, so they are not
written down, not even on your own phone.
</p>
<p>
There is also deliberately no search index. An index is built from your messages in
readable form, so it would be a second copy of everything you have ever written &mdash;
one that would have to be protected just as carefully as the first, and could be
forgotten about. The app searches what it already has instead.
</p>
<h2>Unencrypted conversations</h2>