Data privacy at Vcarddly

Your data is yours. We can't see it, and neither can hackers.

Every address book on Vcarddly is encrypted. You decide who holds the key: you alone, you with a recovery safety net, your own vault, or your whole organisation.

Choose your isolation mode See the cryptography

Address book locked

a91f3c07e2b8d54a6f19c0e87b3d2a4f90c1e65b8a7d3f02c94be1a05d7f3829ac61b0

Enter your password to decrypt on this device

Encrypted before it is stored

Contacts are never saved as readable text. Names, numbers, emails and notes are all ciphertext at rest.

You choose who holds the key

Four isolation modes, from fully managed to fully yours. Change the mode as your needs change.

Built for individuals and teams

Personal address books stay personal. Team books are locked to your organisation, with sharing only when the owner allows it.

Data isolation modes

Pick how private your address book needs to be

Select a mode to see exactly where the key lives, who can decrypt, and what happens if you lose access.

Where the key lives

If you forget your password

Best for

Side by side

All four modes at a glance.

	Standard	Explicit	Explicit + Recoverable	Your own vault
Who holds the key	Vcarddly managed key vault	Only you	You, plus a locked recovery copy	Your connected vault
Where decryption happens	On our server	On your phone or browser	On your phone or browser	Under your vault's policy
Vcarddly developers can read it	No	No	No	No
Forgot your password	Normal reset	Data cannot be recovered	Recoverable after identity checks	Recover through your vault
Available to	Everyone	Everyone	Everyone	Enterprise and Teams

For businesses and teams

A second layer: encryption at organisation level

Team address books are encrypted with an organisation key. Anyone who is a verified member of your team or domain sees the data decrypted. Everyone else sees only ciphertext.

Members see plain data

When a member of your team or verified domain opens the shared address book, it is decrypted for them automatically. No extra passwords to pass around.

Outsiders see ciphertext

Anyone outside the organisation, including a leaked database copy, gets unreadable bytes. Removing a member revokes their access to the organisation key.

Dual mode sharing

Each member's address book stays theirs, until they say otherwise

In team profiles, every member has a private address book by default. The owner of that book can choose to allow one team member to access it, and can switch that access off again at any time.

Sharing is granted person to person. It does not open the book to the whole team, and it does not give admins a hidden way in.

Private modeOnly the owner can open the book.

Shared modeOwner grants a chosen teammate access. Revocable.

Search engine visibility

Private means invisible on Google

Vcarddly already lets you control whether your profile can be found on Google. Set your profile to Private and it is not indexed, not listed, and cannot be discovered by searching for you.

Private does not mean unshareable. If you give your profile link to someone, that person can still open it. You decide who gets the link.

Public

Profile can appear in Google results.

Private

Hidden from Google and every other search engine. No one can find the profile by searching.

Private, then shared by you

Anyone you send the link to can view the profile. Nobody else can.

Encryption and hashing

The cryptography behind it

Standard, well-reviewed algorithms only. We do not invent our own cryptography.

Argon2id

Password to key

Your password is stretched into an encryption key with a memory-hard function, with a unique random salt per user. This makes guessing attacks slow and expensive.

AES-256-GCM

Encrypting the contacts

Authenticated encryption protects both secrecy and integrity, so tampered data is detected rather than silently accepted. A fresh nonce is used for every record.

Envelope encryption

A key hierarchy

Each address book has its own data key. That key is wrapped by a key that depends on your mode. Changing a password re-wraps one key, not every contact.

KMS / HSM

Key vault protection

In Standard and Recoverable modes, wrapping keys live inside a hardware-backed key management service. Keys are never exported in plain form.

SHA-256 and HMAC

Hashing

Hashes are used for integrity checks and keyed blind indexes, such as spotting duplicate contacts without storing the readable value.

X25519 and TLS 1.3

Sharing and transport

When an owner shares a book with a teammate, its data key is re-encrypted to that person's public key. Everything in transit travels over TLS 1.3 with HSTS.

What to know before you choose

Stronger privacy means more responsibility. We would rather you know the trade-offs now than discover them later.

Explicit mode has no recovery

Because we never store your password or key, we cannot reset it. If you forget it, your address book is gone for good. Choose Explicit + Recoverable if that risk is too high.

Standard mode is encrypted, not zero-knowledge

Data is encrypted and decrypted on our servers, with keys in a vault no developer can reach. For a mathematical guarantee, use an Explicit mode or your own vault.

Some features need your device unlocked

Search and duplicate detection in Explicit modes run locally after you enter your password, so they cannot work while the book is locked.