the only thing I can find out

I was on a call a few weeks ago, trying to explain how Mune's privacy works to someone who didn't believe me. Not because they thought I was lying. Because BetterHelp had used the same words, and "private" no longer means what it used to mean.

I said: "The only thing I can find out is their email if they use that to sign up."

That sentence kept coming back to me afterwards. Not because it sounded good. Because it was the truest thing I could say about what I built. And I had not said it in any of the marketing copy. I had said something cleaner. Something that read like marketing.

Let me say it the way I said it on the call.

If you sign up for Mune, here is what I can see, sitting where I sit, with full admin access to the database tomorrow morning:

Your email, if you gave us one. A row in a table that says you signed up, with a timestamp. A column of encrypted text, the size of however much you wrote, measured in bytes.

That is the list.

What I cannot see: what you wrote, what you asked, and what you were doing at 2 AM that made you open the app.

To read any of that, I would have to be a different person. Running a different architecture. With a different relationship to the people who use this. Mune was built so I cannot cross that line. Not won't. Cannot. Not because I'm noble. Because I knew myself, and I knew that if the data was readable, I or someone else would eventually read it. So I made it unreadable. To me. To Anthropic. To whoever buys Mune in ten years if I get hit by a bus.

There is a cost to this. If you forget your password and lose your recovery key, I cannot get your data back. Not for you. Not for anyone. The same architecture that makes me unable to read your conversations makes me unable to recover them. I have written that sentence many times, and every time I write it, I think a lying company would not write this. They would design a backdoor and call it customer service.

So when someone asks me what Mune protects, I am going to stop saying "your privacy" the way every other app does. I am going to say: an email, if you gave us one. A timestamp. A blob of bytes I cannot open.

And if I am wrong, you can even ask me to send you a copy of the database because it is meaningless to everyone not knowing your password and passphrase.

The only thing I can find out

I said: "The only thing I can find out is their email if they use that to sign up."

Let me say it the way I said it on the call.

If you sign up for Mune, here is what I can see. The founder, with the keys to everything, tomorrow morning:

Your email, if you gave us one. Your name on a list, with a timestamp. A blob of encrypted text, the size of however much you wrote.

That is the list.

What I cannot see: what you wrote, what you asked, and what you were doing at 2 AM that made you open the app.

To read any of that, I would have to be a different person. Running a different product. Or willing to lie about both.

Mune was built so I cannot cross that line. Not won't. Cannot. Not because I am noble. Because I knew myself, and I knew that if the data was readable, I would eventually read it. So I made it unreadable. To me. To Anthropic (the company that runs the AI Mune talks to). To whoever buys Mune in ten years if I get hit by a bus.

There is a cost. If you forget your password and lose the 24-word backup code Mune gave you, I cannot get your data back. Not for you. Not for anyone. The same structure that keeps me from reading your conversations keeps me from getting them back. I have written that sentence many times, and every time I write it, I think: a lying company would not write this. They would design a backdoor and call it customer service.