How Yaavi keeps your journal private and you safe

A journal only works if you can write anything in it. These are the rules Yaavi is built around. They are part of how the code works, not settings someone can switch off.

What is encrypted

Everything you put in Yaavi is encrypted before it is stored: notes, voice transcripts, photos, recordings you choose to keep, what Yaavi learns (including people's names), check-ins, conversations with Yaavi and your friends, and your friends' names and descriptions.

Each account has its own key (AES-256-GCM). That key is itself locked by Google Cloud's key service, and is never written down unlocked. Your data is stored on Google Cloud in Mumbai.

Your email address is kept apart from your journal, encrypted under a separate key, so we can sign you in and reach you about your account without that key ever touching what you wrote. We use it for sign-in, invites, account and safety notices, support, and the occasional note to testers, and never for marketing without asking.

Who can read it

• Not other people. Nothing you write is shared, sold, or shown to anyone else, and there are no ads.
• Not the Yaavi team. Yaavi's own pages show who signed up and when they were last active, and counts, such as how many notes were written this week, never words. Nobody reads testers' journals. Check-in quality may be scored automatically; only the score is kept.
• Not in logs. Logs, error reports, and background jobs carry ids, never what you wrote. You choose whether a notification shows its text on your lock screen.

The AI

Yaavi's AI runs on Gemini through Google Cloud's Vertex AI, which does not use customer data to train models. A few small decisions, such as which message is worth sending and how to order search results, go through OpenRouter, only to providers that keep no data and collect nothing. Your notes are never used to train any model, by Yaavi or anyone else.

To search your notes by meaning, Yaavi keeps a list of numbers for each note (an "embedding"). These can't be encrypted and still be searched, so they hold no words or names, only your account can search them, and they are deleted with the note. Notes you keep out of memory have none.

You're in control of what it knows

• The You tab shows everything Yaavi has learned. Edit or delete anything; deleting a note also undoes what it taught.
• "Keep out of memory" on any note: Yaavi keeps the note but learns nothing from it and never brings it up.
• Tell Yaavi what not to bring up, or when ("nothing on weekends"), and turn off friends messaging you first.
• On your phone, lock Yaavi with Face ID, your fingerprint, or your passcode.

Leaving

Export everything you've written as a download whenever you like. Deleting your account signs you out everywhere and stops every message at once. Three days later its key is destroyed, which makes everything unreadable for good, and then the data itself is deleted. Signing in during those three days keeps your account. Backups are kept for at most seven days.

On hard days

There is no keyword filter and no fixed crisis screen. The same model that reads your note with the context of your life decides how a friend would answer: say nothing, say one line, gently ask, or, if you might be in danger, say clearly that you should talk to someone now.

When it sounds like you might be in danger, the reply always includes the helpline number for your country, with a button to call. In India that's Tele-MANAS on 14416 and 112 for emergencies. You pick your country when you start, and can change it in Settings.

Afterwards nothing goes quiet: Yaavi may check in gently the next day, the way a friend would. Your friends in the circle hold back the jokes until you're clearly okay.

Who can use Yaavi

Yaavi is for people 18 and older. It asks right after you sign in, before anything is saved.

Questions about privacy? Write to hello@yaavi.app.