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Maple Album privacy

How your memories stay private

Maple Album is end-to-end encrypted. That means your photos and videos are scrambled on your own device and can only be unlocked by the people you share an album with. The keys never leave your family's devices in a form anyone else can read — so not even Maple Album's team can open your memories.

The short version: we store your media only as encrypted, unreadable data. We hold none of the keys that could turn it back into a photo or video.

What happens when you share a photo

  1. 1. Encrypted on your device

    Before anything is uploaded, your device encrypts the photo or video locally. What leaves your phone is already scrambled — the original never travels over the internet in the open.

  2. 2. Only your devices hold the keys

    Each device has its own keys, generated inside secure hardware (like the Secure Enclave on iPhone) and unlocked only by you. Private keys are never stored where they could be read or handed over.

  3. 3. Shared without ever exposing it

    To let a family member into an album, an existing member's device seals the album's key specifically for the new person's device. Maple Album only relays these sealed keys — it can't unseal them. Read more about secure key sharing .

  4. 4. We only store scrambled data

    On our servers your media sits as encrypted blobs. Without the keys — which only your family's devices hold — that data can't be turned back into anything viewable, by us or by anyone who might gain access to the servers.

The same idea as Signal — built for albums

Secure messengers like Signal proved that end-to-end encryption can be private by default and simple to use: only the people in a conversation can read it, and the service in the middle can't.

Maple Album applies that same principle to a different job. Where Signal secures your messages, we secure your shared family albums — the photos and videos of the people who matter most. It's the encryption approach you already trust for private conversations, purpose-built for the memories you want to keep in the family.

Ready for the future

Maple Album uses post-quantum encryption (ML-KEM) to protect album keys. Even a future quantum computer — the kind that could break much of today's encryption — is designed not to be able to unlock your memories.

Never used to train AI

Your memories are not AI training data. Because everything is end-to-end encrypted, we only ever hold unreadable data — there is simply nothing for us, or anyone else, to feed into an AI model, sell, or mine. We can't train on what we can't see, and we never will.

Screenshot & recording protection

Maple Album guards shared media against screenshots and screen recording, making album content harder to copy or leak. No app can prevent every capture on every device, so still share only with people you trust.

Tamper-proof by design

Every encrypted item is authenticated. If stored data were altered, corrupted, or truncated, your device detects it and refuses to show a tampered result.

What we can and can't see

Being honest about the limits matters. Here's the line.

We can't see

  • The contents of your photos and videos*
  • Who or what appears in them
  • The exact geo-location data of your media
  • The camera or device used to capture it
  • Faces, places, or objects in your media — we run no scanning or recognition
  • Anything that would let us reconstruct your media

We can see

  • That an album exists and which accounts belong to it
  • The size and timing of uploads
  • Whether an item is an image or a video
  • Comments and captions you write
  • The email address on your account

* The one exception: reporting abuse

The only time we can ever see a single image is when someone who already has access to it — a member of that album — reports it for abuse. Reporting hands our team the key to that one specific item, and nothing else: it can't unlock any other photo, video, or album. Once the report has been reviewed, that media and its key are securely discarded. This is what lets us act on genuinely harmful content without ever holding the keys to your family's memories.

Under the hood

For the technically curious, Maple Album's end-to-end encryption profile uses:

Content encryption
XChaCha20-Poly1305 (authenticated, streamed in fixed chunks for large media)
Key protection
ML-KEM-768 post-quantum key encapsulation, per member device
Key derivation
HKDF-SHA-256 with per-object salts
Device keys
Hardware-backed, re-derived per session, never stored in plaintext

Private by default, for the whole family.

Keep the moments that matter somewhere only your family can reach them.

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