Website / app / relay metadata
Privacy by system boundary.
Ares does not create a global user account, but that does not mean metadata disappears. This page separates what the website, Android app, Onion Gateway, relay storage, and optional FCM can process.
01 / Website
No advertising stack or behavioral analytics.
- No advertising scripts, third-party analytics SDK, persistent marketing identifier, tag manager, tracking pixel, or external webfont.
- No signup form, newsletter profile, or marketing cookie.
- The
#invite=...fragment is not part of the HTTP request. The join page does not send it to the network or store it in localStorage, sessionStorage, or cookies.
Cloudflare Pages and normal web infrastructure may still process standard connection metadata such as IP address, request time, and User-Agent for delivery, abuse prevention, and security operations.
02 / Account and contacts
No phone number, email address, contact upload, or global profile.
Ares does not create a central account that joins every Channel into one public identity. Display names are scoped to their Channel. A local alias changes how another member appears on one device without changing that member’s own name.
03 / Relay data
Delivery infrastructure processes ciphertext and limited operating metadata.
The server boundary may contain ciphertext, opaque routing identifiers, server-received time, expiry time, delivery and deletion state, and limited tombstones required for idempotent retries.
Decryption keys, plaintext messages, plaintext attachments, and Signal private keys are designed to remain outside that boundary. Attachment name, MIME type, key, nonce, and digest are carried in the E2EE envelope.
04 / Retention and deletion
Relay ciphertext is removed after verified receipt or expiry.
After the receiving endpoint decrypts and durably commits local state, it sends a signed ACK bound to the recipient mailbox and ciphertext digest. Verification starts deletion of database and object ciphertext.
Undelivered ciphertext is configured to expire from server-received time after a maximum of 48 hours. The exact production configuration and code path have been verified; a 48-hour wall-clock wait has not been recorded for this release.
05 / Optional FCM
Push wakes the app; it does not transport the message.
When enabled, FCM sends a generic notification-only wake. The payload does not contain Channel ID, member ID, message ID, sender, preview, or attachment metadata. The app then synchronizes over Tor.
Google and push infrastructure can process an installation token and delivery metadata, which may link activity at the installation level. Users can disable FCM and rely more heavily on polling and Tor synchronization.
06 / Device storage
Conversation and cryptographic state remain Vault-scoped.
Flutter and native Signal state use SQLCipher databases excluded from backup and device-transfer paths. Primary and Secondary Vaults use separate databases and Android Keystore wrapping keys.
The Format Passcode clears application data, local Channels, records, files, encrypted databases, and keys. This action cannot be recovered.
07 / Infrastructure providers
Current production uses a small set of defined operators.
- Cloudflare Pages for this website
- Cloudflare Workers and R2 for public release delivery, encrypted attachments, and retention assistance
- Supabase for ciphertext, routing, and retention state
- Hetzner for the persistent v3 Onion Gateway
- Firebase Cloud Messaging for optional generic wake notifications
The current free-tier and single-server architecture does not provide a commercial availability SLA or the recovery guarantees of a paid multi-region system. Ares prefers explicit failure over an undisclosed fallback transport.
08 / Privacy limits
Privacy controls do not eliminate every observable signal.
- Some network or platform observers may identify use of Tor or installation of the application.
- A global observer may attempt timing and traffic-volume correlation.
- A recipient can copy, photograph, or retransmit plaintext after receiving it.
- A compromised endpoint can expose plaintext before encryption or after decryption.
- Direct APK downloads expose ordinary web-request metadata to the delivery infrastructure.
See the security model and limitations for implementation boundaries and current verification status.