Nothing comes to us.

What we collect

Nothing about you. baud has no analytics, no ads, no tracking and no crash reporting to us. We never receive your messages, photos, files, calls, contacts, name, phone number, email or location. baud never asks for a phone number or an email.

Waking your iPhone

iOS puts baud to sleep in the background, and only Apple can wake an iPhone. So when a friend’s message or call can’t reach your sleeping iPhone, their device asks Apple to wake it, through a small relay Rubric Labs runs at wake.baud.rubric.sh. Your phone then fetches the message straight from them.

• What the relay gets: a ticket your iPhone sealed so only the relay can open it, holding your iPhone’s push address. Your friends can’t read it.
• What it sends Apple: the same empty wake every time. No message, name or sender ever passes through it.
• What it keeps: nothing. It has no accounts, no database and no logs of who asked. Its rate limits live in memory and are gone within the hour.
• What it and Apple can see: that your phone was woken, and when. The relay also sees the internet address of the device that asked, as any server does.

What stays on your devices

• Your keys. Each device makes its own. Private keys are kept in the device’s keychain and never leave it.
• Your conversations and files. They’re stored on your devices and on the devices of the people in each conversation.
• Your name and photo. You choose them, and only the people you talk to see them.

Deleting baud from a device deletes what it held. Copies on other people’s devices stay with them, as with any message you send.

What others can see

• Friends see your chosen name and photo, what you send them, and the network addresses of your devices, so their devices can reach yours.
• People in a group with you see your chosen name and what you send to the group.
• People in a chat where you share your location see where you are until the share ends or you stop it: an hour, the end of the day, or until you stop, as you choose. It goes straight from your device to theirs, sealed like a message, and is never kept in the chat’s history or passed through anyone else’s device.
• A device that relays or holds a message for you (one of yours, or a friend’s that you both trust) sees that sealed bytes pass, their size and when. It can’t read them.
• Any device you connect to sees your IP address, as with any direct connection on the internet.

Permissions

• Camera: for video calls and for scanning a friend’s or your own device’s code.
• Microphone: for your voice on calls, only during a call.
• Local network: to reach your own devices on the same Wi-Fi. baud may also ask your router to open a port so your devices can be reached directly.
• Photos: only the ones you pick to send.
• Location: only while you’re sharing it in a chat, and only to the people in that chat. On iPhone, “Always” lets a share keep going while baud is in the background. Maps of shared places come from Apple Maps on Apple devices, which sees the area being looked at, not whose location it is.

Where baud does talk to a server

• Updates on the Mac. baud for Mac checks this website for a newer version and downloads it from here. The website’s host may keep standard logs of that request, such as your IP address and the time.
• TestFlight. If you test baud through Apple’s TestFlight, Apple shares the basics it shares with every developer, such as install and session counts, crash reports, and any feedback or screenshots you choose to send. Apple’s own privacy policy covers that.
• This website. It sets no cookies and loads nothing from anyone else. Its host may keep standard server logs.

Questions

baud is made by Rubric Labs Inc. Reach us through rubriclab.com. If this policy changes, this page will say so, with a new date.