Third-party services we use and what they see
Cloudflare for the website and DNS, Matomo for website statistics, spam blocklists for outgoing mail, Apple and Google for push. None touch your messages.
Private.Ki runs its email and chat service on its own servers. A small number of outside services are involved around the edges — delivering the public website, counting page views, checking outgoing mail against spam blocklists, and waking up your phone. This page lists each one, what it is used for, and exactly what passes through it.
No third party receives message content, keys, passphrases or account data. Where a third party sees anything at all, it is listed here.
Cloudflare — public website and DNS
Used for: delivering the public marketing website at private.ki as a content-delivery network, and DNS resolution for some of our domains.
Not used for: the application at app.privateki.net, the API, email delivery or storage, chat, sign-in, cryptography or key handling. The DNS records for the mail and application hosts are plain records that point straight at our own servers — Cloudflare's proxy is deliberately not enabled for them, so application traffic never passes through Cloudflare.
What Cloudflare sees: when you open the public website, Cloudflare terminates the TLS connection for that site. That means Cloudflare can see your IP address, the pages you request on the website and — as with any CDN acting as a TLS endpoint — the content of those public pages in transit. It sees nothing from the app, because the app does not go through it.
How to avoid it: open the app directly at app.privateki.net, or reach the website over our Tor hidden service — see Using Private.Ki over Tor.
Matomo — website statistics
Used for: privacy-friendly page-view statistics on our public website (private.ki) and on this help center (private.ki/help), so we can tell which pages are useful and keep documentation accurate. Matomo is a privacy-centred analytics tool; we do not use Google Analytics, advertising trackers or any other analytics platform on these sites.
Not used for: the application itself (app.privateki.net) or our Tor hidden service. Your mail, chats and account data are never processed by Matomo. Help-center search runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type is sent to a server.
How to avoid it: use the app directly, use the Tor hidden service, or block the analytics script in your browser — the help center works without it.
Realtime Blackhole Lists — outgoing external mail
Used for: stopping spam, phishing and malware before it leaves our network, as described in the anti-spam policy. Only email addressed to recipients outside Private.Ki is checked.
What is checked: for each outgoing external message, the recipient domains, and any domains, links and IP addresses found in the subject line and — if the body is not PGP-encrypted — in the body. These are looked up against DNS-based blocklists. If a match is found, the send is refused with the error Sending refused and nothing leaves our network.
What is not checked: messages between Private.Ki users, chat messages, and the bodies of PGP-encrypted emails (ciphertext holds nothing to look up, and we do not attempt to inspect it). Subject and recipient addresses of an encrypted external mail are still checked, because SMTP carries them in the clear anyway.
What the blocklist providers see: a DNS lookup of a domain or IP address that appeared in your outgoing mail — not your address, not the message, not who it is going to. We do not publish which blocklist providers are queried, because doing so would help spammers route around them.
Apple and Google — push notifications
Used for: waking the iPhone or Android app when a message arrives while you are not connected.
What Apple and Google see: your device's push token and a notification that says "New email" or "New chat message". No sender, no subject, no content. See Push notifications.
Help-center platform — none
The previous help center ran on a hosted third-party support platform (Zendesk), which applied its own analytics and received support-form submissions. It has been replaced. This help center is a set of static pages hosted by us; there is no third-party platform behind it and no ticketing system receiving your data. How to reach support, and what support can and cannot see, is described in Contact support.
What our server sees
Cannot see
- Anything a third party could pass back to us about your messages — none of them handle messages
Can see
- Public website and help-center page views, in aggregate, via Matomo
- Domains and IP addresses inside outgoing external mail, checked against blocklists at send time
Common questions
Does using Cloudflare for the website weaken the app's encryption?
No. The app never touches Cloudflare, and message encryption happens on your device regardless of the network path. The only thing Cloudflare can observe is your visit to the public website.
Why check the subject of an encrypted email?
Because the subject line of an email is never encrypted by PGP — it travels in the clear to the recipient's provider — so a spam link in a subject would leave our network readable. The body of an encrypted mail is not inspected.
Do you use any AI service on my data?
No. See How Private.Ki uses AI.