ka

How Ka keeps your words

Your words

Everything you write here is yours. Once you have finished an entry, nothing in Ka changes a word of it. It is kept, as you wrote it, until you delete it.

You can download every entry from the archive at any time. Your reminders, your questions to plain and the lines you wrote for Ka's voice are not in that download.

Your words are stored in our database, run by Neon in Frankfurt. They are locked with Ka's own key before they get there, so the company that runs the database cannot read them.

What the lock does, and what it does not

Your reminders, your conversations with plain, Ka's notes and the lines Ka says to you are locked with the same key.

So a copy of the database is not enough to read them: not for the company that runs it, and not for anyone who takes one.

The lock does not keep us out. The key is on our own server, because Ka needs it to read your words when it thinks about them. So we, who run Ka, could read them, and so could someone who broke into that server.

Ka cannot be built so that only you can read your words, as some apps are with what is called end-to-end encryption. Ka thinks about your writing while you are away, so it has to be able to read it.

When we look into a problem for you

We, who make Ka, could read your words, as above, and we don't, but in two cases: when you ask us to look into a problem, and when the law requires it. Each time, it is written on your memory page and emailed to you; if a law forbids telling you, once it allows.

Only you can ask, signed in, at the foot of your memory page: “ask us to look into a problem”. You say what went wrong, and choose what we may open: one day's page, one of Ka's lines, one of Ka's notes, one conversation with plain. Nothing else is opened, and no one at Ka searches for more. The request lasts 14 days, or until you withdraw it.

Arto, who makes Ka, reads it, by eye, in a browser, after signing in again with a fresh code; never an AI. The AI tools we build Ka with never see your words, not even to fix a fault: we describe the fault to them in other words, without quoting you.

Before anything is shown, a record is written: when, who, what kind of thing and from which day, and why; never your words. You see it on your memory page, under “Opened by people at Ka”, and we email it to you at the same moment. The email is a copy we cannot take back. You can delete the record, one or all, and it goes with your account; the way we open cannot delete it.

If the law requires us to hand over your words, we give only what the demand names, and you are told the same way: who asked, from which country, and by what kind of demand. If a demand lawfully forbids telling you, the record is still written when we open, sealed; you see it, with its true date, and get its email, once the ban ends. We never write a false record, never delete a true one, and never hand over Ka's key.

Twice a year we publish here how many legal demands for anyone's words came, how many we answered, and how many forbade us to tell the person. The first, for July to December 2026, is published once that half-year ends.

What the record cannot show: someone with full control of our server, or with a copy of Ka's key, could read your words without it showing there, and so could code changed to keep or send your words while Ka thinks; with full control, someone could also remove or change a record, though not its email. Against those, today, we have practice, not proof: each change to Ka's code goes live only when its maker agrees to it.

To keep Ka running we read facts about your use that hold no words, such as when you wrote, how often Ka thought and what it cost, and the code of a failure; these are not recorded one by one. Our nightly backup check unlocks your entries by machine, to prove a restore would work, and shows no word to anyone.

If we ever restore Ka from a backup, a record made after that backup is gone from your page, and a legal demand from our count; if its email went, it is still in your inbox.

What Ka keeps of them

Ka keeps its own notes about what you write, and what it makes from them: the lines it says to you, the tensions and words it finds, the promises it notices.

Its notes fade. After 30 days in which you have neither written about a subject nor answered a line Ka said about it, its note shrinks to a phrase; after 60 days, to a word; after 90 days, to only that something mattered, and in which month. Each step destroys what it drops. What is left at the end stays until you delete it, or delete the entries it came from.

Once a note has shrunk, Ka can no longer reach your entries through it, so it does not go back to your words to rebuild what it has let fade. It keeps only a list of which entries the note came from, so that deleting one of them deletes the note too.

On the memory page you can read Ka's notes, under “Notes”, and what it made from them, with a record of each time it thought about your writing and how many entries and notes it sent, under “When Ka thought”. You can delete any of them there.

Deleting a note does not take back what Ka already said from it: those lines stay on your page until you delete them, which you can do on the memory page, under “When Ka thought”.

If what you write says that you may end your life or seriously hurt yourself, or that you are in danger now, Ka says nothing on that entry and never comes back to it, and a note from us with a crisis line appears under it. For that, we keep one mark: which entry, and when it was noticed; nothing else. The mark is never sent to a model, no one at Ka is told of it, and it is left out of our backups. Hide the note and the mark is deleted; it also goes with the entry, and with your account.

Who reads them

To think about what you write, Ka sends some of it, with its own notes, to a model company: a few minutes after you write, at night, and when you ask it for more.

It goes through one route we have checked: Vercel's AI Gateway, to GPT-6 Luna, a model made by OpenAI, run in the United States by Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (Bedrock) or OpenAI. Every request asks that nothing is kept and nothing is used for training, and the gateway sends it only to a company that has agreed to keep nothing. Your email address and your account are never sent with it.

Vercel's own pages say the gateway does not log what is sent or what comes back, and keeps none of it once the request is done; it records facts about each request, such as which company answered, its size, its cost and how long it took. On its way, a request may pass through Vercel's servers in any of the places Vercel runs.

One thing we have not been able to confirm: whether one of these companies may keep a request that its safety checks flag, for a person there to read.

Plain, the helper beside Ka, sends your questions to the same company by the same route, and, when you ask about your own writing, the few entries that match.

Sometimes Ka brings you a piece of thinking from elsewhere. To find it, Ka searches the web with a few general words it chose from its note. Before they leave, our code compares them with that note (for a tension, with the tension and both its notes) and with the entries it still links. It refuses them if they hold a digit, a name written there with a capital letter (common words such as “The” aside), or three words in a row from there.

The words go to Brave, a search company based in the United States, which keeps them for up to 90 days; its terms give it no right to use them for training. You can read them under what Ka brings, and on the memory page for 30 days.

Now and then, rarely, what Ka brings is a picture instead: a painting, photograph, print or drawing in the public domain, from The Met or the Cleveland Museum of Art. Ka chooses a few words for what it might show, from its note, and our code checks them as it checks the search words; but Ka searches its own copy of the two museums' catalogues for the picture, kept on our server, so those words go to no one. To choose, Ka sends the model company the facts of the pictures found and, for up to three of them, the pictures themselves, with the writing it sends anyway. You can read the words under the picture.

At night, or when you ask for one, our server fetches from the museum, by their numbers, the few pictures Ka is choosing between, once each: the museum learns only that our server asked for them, never who for. Your page shows the picture from our server, never from the museum; only a tap on the museum's name under it takes your browser there. Ka keeps the picture with its line, locked as your words are, and deletes it with the line, with any entry the line drew on, and with your account; our backups hold it as they hold the line.

When plain needs the web to answer you, it searches through Brave too, with a few words made from your question alone, never from your entries. Before they leave, our code refuses them if they hold an address, a long number, or a name from your entries. A name, here, is a word you write with a capital letter in the middle of a sentence, or at the start of one if you never write the same word in lower case in the same alphabet; days, months, languages and nationalities written in English are not names. The words are compared in Latin and Cyrillic letters and with the endings names take, so “Peter” is refused if you write “Петър”. A word counts as a place, and can be searched, only if you write it with a capital right after “in”, or “в”, “във”, “во” or “из”, in at least two different entries, and never with a capital anywhere else.

What this check cannot catch: writing that is all in lower case; a name that is also an ordinary word and that you write only at the start of a sentence or a line, as in “Mark called.”; a friend called after a month or a language, written in English, such as April, May, June or August; a spelling it does not know. It also refuses some ordinary words that resemble a name you write, and a city you write about in only one entry, or other than right after one of those words, as in “flew to Varna”. Refused words are not kept, and plain says it did not search. Plain shows the words it searched with under its reply; when a search was tried and did not work, it shows the words it tried.

Emails

We send four kinds of email: one to sign in, with a link and a code; one to say a reminder is due, with a link; if you applied to the beta, one to say you are in, with a link to sign in; and, each time anyone at Ka opens your words, one to say so: when, who, what kind of thing and from which day, and why. None holds any of your words, and a reminder's email does not say what the reminder is.

Resend, a company based in the United States, sends them for us from Ireland, and keeps them, with your address, in the United States. We have turned off its tracking of whether you open them or click in them, and its terms say it trains no model on them.

If you leave feedback, it comes to us as an email, through Resend too, and stays in our inbox; Ka keeps no copy. Unless you tick that we may write back to you, it carries nothing of who you are. Write to us to have it deleted.

The daily note

Ka can send a quiet note to your phone or computer, once a day at most. It is off unless you turn it on, on the memory page of Ka installed as an app, for each device. It comes at six in the evening on your clock, only on a day Ka wrote something after you turned it on that your page has not shown you yet, and it says only “Ka wrote something.”

The note holds none of your words, nor any of Ka's: we send it empty, and those three words are written into Ka's own small program on your device (a service worker), which shows the note and opens your page when you tap it. That program keeps and stores nothing of yours, and every page still comes from our server.

It reaches your device through the push service of the company behind your browser or phone: Apple, Google, Microsoft or Mozilla, each based in the United States. That company learns that a note went to that device, and when; it never receives a word.

For it we keep your device's address at that push service, the day the last note went, and the time of the newest line of Ka's you have seen, on your page or already said when you turned it on; the memory page shows which company, the day and the time. Turning it off on a device removes that device's address at once, and so do signing out of that device and deleting your account; when a sign-in runs out, its device's address goes then. If we ever stop sending the note, every device's address is removed. Once it is off on every device, the time goes at once and the day within a day. None of it is in our backups.

Deleting

When you delete an entry, it is removed from Ka at once, together with every note, line and record of Ka's that drew on it, even one that drew on other entries too. Any answer plain gave from it goes as well. When you delete something on the memory page, it is gone from Ka at once.

Counts that hold none of your words stay: how your page has moved, how often Ka thought and spoke, and what it spent.

The rings on the page are drawn each time from how many entries you finished each day, the lines you said “that is it” to, and the notes Ka let fade; they are never stored, so deleting writing removes its mark.

Some things remain for a while: the backups made before you deleted it, for up to 30 days; the short history our database company keeps, for a day; and a note that something was deleted or forgotten, and when, for 30 days. The note never holds any of the words. It exists so that if we ever restore Ka from a backup, your deletion is repeated rather than undone.

Words already sent to the search company stay with it for up to 90 days. We cannot delete them there.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at the foot of the memory page. It deletes at once your writing, everything Ka keeps about it, your reminders, your conversations with plain, and your sign-in. If you want to keep your writing, download it from the archive first.

Copies in our backups stay for up to 30 days. If we ever restore one, the deletion is repeated from our notes. Only if we restore because something went wrong, and the deletion was made while it was going wrong, is it not repeated by itself, since it may have been part of what went wrong: we check it by hand first. The short history our database company keeps holds it for a day. We keep a note that your account was deleted, and when, for 30 days, so that a restore repeats it; it holds nothing else. The notes of what you deleted before stay their 30 days too.

Emails we already sent you, to sign in or to say a reminder is due, stay in your inbox and with Resend, the company that sends them; we do not delete them there. They hold your address, never your words. Words already sent to the search company stay with it for up to 90 days.

So that no one can ask for sign-in emails too often, sign-in keeps a scrambled code made from your address and where the request came from, with a count and a time. It does not hold your address, and it is removed within a day of the short time it counts requests in.

Our server's log records what our code does and when: the random label of an entry or a note, and counts, but never your words, your address or which account it was. It keeps each line for up to 30 days.

If you sign in again later with the same address, you start with an empty Ka.

Backups

Every night we make a backup of your words and of Ka's memory, so that one broken server cannot lose them. The backup is locked before it leaves our server, and the key to unlock it is not kept on any of our servers.

It is stored with two companies, Cloudflare and Backblaze, in the EU, and neither of them can read it. Each backup is deleted after 30 days at most, and a daily check warns us if one is not. Until then, what you deleted and what Ka let fade are still in the backups made before.

If we ever restore from a backup

Your words come back as the backup held them. Then we delete again everything our notes show you deleted after it was made. Anything you wrote, or told Ka, after it was made is lost.

That includes a quiet: if after that date you told Ka “that is not me” and it went quiet on a subject, the quiet is lost, so Ka may speak on that subject again.

Ka's memory comes back as the backup held it, and then forgets again what it had forgotten since, from the same kind of notes. When our notes cover everything since the backup, Ka may forget more than before, but it does not remember more. When they do not, the memory page says what may be back. If they cannot be read at all, we may empty Ka's memory instead, and the memory page says so.

We tell you on your page the date the backup was made, and that anything you deleted after it may need deleting again.

To be exact

The database frees a deleted entry's space without wiping it, so locked fragments of it can stay in the database's files until they are written over, sometimes for longer than 30 days. No one can read them without Ka's key.

Our daily check asks us to replace that key once a year. Once we have replaced it and destroyed the old one, fragments locked with the old key cannot be read at all.

What you can open yourself

Once you are signed in, each of these is yours to read and to delete from, at any time: