Yo – Privacy

Last updated: November 13, 2026

Yo is built to know as little about you as possible. Today you sign up with just a name; Yo does not ask for your phone number, e‑mail address or address book. Messages are end-to-end encrypted on your iPhone; our server cannot read them.

Who runs Yo

Yo is Or Arbel's creation, first published in 2014 by Life Before Us, LLC. Its ownership is unchanged: the Yo name, its look and the justyo.co domain are property of Or Arbel.

Christopher Eller (YoAgain, a private project) only operates the app and its server, with Or's blessing, and takes care of your data under this policy.

Who is responsible

Christopher Eller, c/o Online-Impressum 12856, Europaring 90, 53757 Sankt Augustin, Germany. Contact: privacy@justyo.app.

What our server keeps

• Your name (the username you choose) and a random user id, so friends can find you.
• Public keys of your account and your iPhone, so friends can encrypt for you and the server can check that requests come from your device.
• Messages waiting for delivery, end-to-end encrypted. The server cannot read them and deletes them once your iPhone has received them, at the latest after 30 days.
• Photos and videos waiting to be fetched, end-to-end encrypted with a key only you and your friend have, along with a random id, your user id, the size, how many devices still have to fetch it and when it came. It is deleted as soon as the last device has fetched it, at the latest after 30 days, and when you delete your account. It is not in our backups. We see neither the picture nor who receives it.
• Feedback you send from the app: its text, your user id, the app version and when. This is not end-to-end encrypted: we read it, to make Yo better. It is kept until we have dealt with it or you delete your account.
• A daily count of the photos and videos you send and their size, to keep the server from filling up; kept for two days.
• An encrypted backup of your account, if you secure it with a passkey or recovery key. It is locked with keys only you have; we cannot open it.
• A push token of your iPhone, so Apple can wake Yo when a Yo arrives.
• Your IP address, briefly, to limit abuse (for example how many accounts one address may create per hour). It is kept in memory only and not stored.

A name that is not secured is deleted, with its account, after 365 days without using Yo.

We keep this data to run Yo for you (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and, for IP addresses, to protect Yo against abuse (our legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).

What we cannot see

• The content of your Yos and of the photos and videos that come with them.
• Your passkey, your recovery key, or anything that opens your backup.

On your iPhone

Your friends list, your account's keys and your recovery key stay on your iPhone, in its protected storage. Signing out removes them from the iPhone. A photo or video you receive can be seen once and is then deleted from your iPhone; until then it is kept out of backups.

So that you get your account back after reinstalling Yo or on a new iPhone with the same Apple Account, Yo also keeps your username, user id, account key and, if you set one up, your recovery key in your iCloud Keychain, end-to-end encrypted by Apple. Neither we nor our server receive it. With iCloud Keychain off, it stays on that iPhone. Signing out and deleting your account remove it.

Services we use

• Hetzner (Germany) hosts the server.
• Cloudflare carries the connection to the server and protects it against attacks; it sees IP addresses and encrypted traffic.
• Apple delivers push notifications, TestFlight builds and the App Store, under Apple's own privacy policy.

Yo currently uses no advertising, analytics or tracking, and we do not sell your data.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you may ask what we store about you, have it corrected or deleted, restrict or object to its processing, and take it with you. Write to privacy@justyo.app. You may also complain to a data protection authority.

Changes

If Yo starts to keep something new, this page says so before it does.