How intbox is built

The short version

• Channels connect through a bridge on our servers. It receives your messages and encrypts them as they arrive; they are never stored in readable form.
• Only your devices hold the key. Your device keeps a local, decrypted copy of your messages — that is what you read and search. We cannot decrypt your stored conversations.
• Before anything is sent for extraction, identifiable details are replaced with placeholders on your device — names, phone numbers, emails, addresses.
• Extraction runs on a third-party AI provider, called directly from your device, on that tokenised text.
• We don’t train on your conversations. We choose providers whose terms exclude your content from training wherever we can — but we can’t guarantee what a third-party API does with data sent to it.
• What we hold in readable form is the structured output — contacts, commitments and collections. That is what makes search and export work.

Connecting, and what runs where

intbox is built on the Matrix protocol. You link WhatsApp by scanning a QR code, registering intbox as a companion device the same way WhatsApp Web does. The bridge that does this runs on our servers.

Being precise about one thing: your messages do pass through our bridge, and it holds them in readable form for as long as it takes to encrypt them. They are never written to disk that way. After that point the key exists only on your devices, so neither we nor anyone who obtained our storage can read your conversations back.

Your archive lives with us because a backup that only exists on your phone does not survive a lost phone. One trade-off to know before relying on it: if you lose your key and all your devices, we cannot recover your archive — we do not have the key. Keep your recovery method somewhere safe.

AI processing

Extraction, summarisation and question answering over message content is performed by third-party AI model providers, called directly from your device. We describe them by category rather than naming a vendor, because we test and change models as the technology moves; organisations can request the current identities, and a data processing agreement, from us.

Identifiers are replaced with placeholder tokens before text leaves your device and mapped back locally when the result returns. That matching is pattern-based and may not catch everything — an identifying detail written in an unusual way can still get through. Retention at a provider is set by that provider; we prefer short or zero retention.

Other people in your chats

Everyone else in your groups and DMs never signed up for intbox. Their messages are decrypted on your device and processed on the same terms as yours, and anything derived from them is deleted when you delete the associated data.

Being direct about one thing: an agent on a group works silently — nothing is posted, no bot joins, nobody is notified. That keeps the group working as it always has, but it means the responsibility for having a lawful basis to process those messages sits with you, exactly as it would if you were reading and noting them yourself. Some jurisdictions and professions require you to disclose it; please check what applies before pointing an agent at a group.

Legal demands, export and deletion

If we receive a valid legal demand we will comply with it. What we can hand over is your account information, your archive as ciphertext we cannot decrypt, and the structured records — which we can read. We cannot produce your original messages, because we never store them in readable form and cannot decrypt them.

Your structured data is exportable from the app. Deleting your account removes your encrypted archive from our servers, and disconnecting a channel stops new capture immediately. See Support for how to do each.

Reporting a vulnerability

Email admin@intbox.ai. We would much rather hear from you directly than read about it elsewhere — please don’t file security issues in app store reviews, where they sit in public before we can fix them.