Verke Editorial

Is my data private with AI therapy? Encryption explained without jargon

Verke Editorial · April 28, 2026

Is my data private with AI therapy? With Verke, your conversations are encrypted in transit and at rest, and if you set a passphrase, nobody at Verke can read your stored conversations. With other AI coaching products, the answer varies a lot. The honest version is that "your data is private" can mean five different things, and most products use the loosest definition. The article walks through what to look for in any product's privacy policy, what the technical terms actually mean, and the specific choices Verke made — explained in plain language rather than spec sheets.

The reason this matters: AI coaching gets shared with content most people would never tell a friend. Privacy isn't an abstract legal box on these conversations; it's the thing that lets you be fully honest in the first place. A conversation you're editing for an audience is a different conversation, and the technical posture of the product determines whether you're editing or not. Below: what "encrypted" actually means, how Verke handles your conversation specifically, what we still see, what to ask any AI coaching product, and the anonymity options that combine with encryption to give you a strong overall posture.

Encryption is the process of scrambling text so it can only be read with a specific key. Without the key, the encrypted version looks like random bytes — useless to anyone who happens across it. The interesting question is never "is it encrypted?" (almost everything is, somewhere). The interesting question is "who holds the key?" That single question separates the products where the company can read your messages from the products where they cannot.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) means the key lives on the user's device, not the server. The server only ever sees ciphertext — scrambled bytes — and has no way to decrypt them, because the key isn't there. Server-side or at-rest encryption (the more common flavor across SaaS products) means the company holds the key on their end. They've protected the data from outsiders, but the company itself can decrypt and read whenever it chooses to. Both are technically "encryption," but they answer the question of who-can-read very differently. E2EE is the harder thing to build and the stronger posture for the user.

Your conversation travels over an encrypted connection and is stored encrypted with AES-256-GCM, a strong symmetric cipher that's the standard choice for this kind of work. Symmetric means the same key encrypts and decrypts; the cipher is the algorithm that scrambles the bytes. AES-256-GCM is what banks, governments, and serious messaging apps use for the same job. It's well-studied, well-implemented, and not the place anyone breaks first.

Each conversation has its own key, and those keys are locked in turn with RSA-4096 — an asymmetric cipher with a public/private key pair. Asymmetric means encryption uses the public key (which can be shared) and decryption needs the private key. The 4096-bit key length is large by today's standards and gives generous headroom against future improvements in cryptanalysis.

The result, in plain terms: ciphertext lives in the database, and your choice decides who can unlock it. Set a passphrase and your account key is locked with it: Verke staff querying the database see scrambled bytes, not your conversation. Without a passphrase, the server holds the key. The background job that writes a conversation's session summary also holds its key briefly while it works. Either way, to write your coach's replies the server decrypts your messages and sends the text to the language models that generate them, from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. You can read the deeper detail in our privacy policy; the section above is the gist.

Encryption protects the message content. It does not protect everything about every interaction. Verke sees metadata — when you logged in, which coach you talked to, how long the session lasted, roughly how many messages were exchanged. We see crash logs (which contain stack traces, not message text — we've checked this carefully). We see aggregate counts across all users — how many sessions, how many users opened the app this week, how many chose Anna versus Judith. None of that requires reading any individual's conversation.

What a passphrase adds is protection for your stored conversations. With one set, a subpoena, an internal investigation or a curious engineer with database access gets scrambled bytes, because the key to read them is locked with your passphrase and opens only with it or the recovery code we email you. For stored conversations, that is a description of what we technically can't do, not only a promise about what we won't. Your messages are still decrypted on our servers while your coach writes a reply.

Whether or not you choose Verke, this is the checklist worth running against any AI coaching product before you trust it with conversation content. Most products will fail at least one of these questions, and the answers are usually buried in privacy policies rather than highlighted up front:

• Is content end-to-end encrypted, or only encrypted at rest? "Encrypted" alone usually means at-rest, which leaves the company able to read.
• Can company staff read user conversations? Look for a clear no, not a vague "we follow strict access controls."
• Is the conversation used to train models? "De-identified" or "aggregated" training data is still training on your content.
• Where is data stored geographically? Jurisdiction affects what governments can compel and what protections apply.
• Can I delete my account and have content erased? Look for an actual delete, not a 30-day soft-delete buried in a retention schedule.
• Is a data-processing agreement (DPA) available? Required for any serious privacy posture, especially under GDPR.

You can start Verke anonymously, with no email, no phone number and no payment detail. The technical reason is simple: the less identity is tied to the account, the less there is to leak even in the worst case. The product reason matters too: some of the people who most need this kind of conversation are the people most reluctant to attach a real-world identity to it. Asking for an email up front filters them out, and there's no good reason to ask.

When you want to keep going, a free account starts your 7-day free trial, no credit card. An account ties an identity to your conversations, so that is the moment a passphrase matters most: set one, and your stored conversations stay unreadable to us whoever you are on paper. If you later subscribe, that adds a payment identifier, but the encryption boundary doesn't move when the billing relationship starts.

Self-help and AI coaching can do a lot, but they have limits. If you're experiencing severe depression that hasn't lifted, panic attacks that interrupt daily life, thoughts of self-harm, active trauma processing, or substance dependence — those are signals to work with a licensed clinician, not signals to push harder on a coaching tool. You can find low-cost options at opencounseling.com or international helplines via findahelpline.com. There's no prize for waiting longer than you need to.