Privacy Policy
Last Updated: March 2026
1. Introduction
AlwaysThere is built on the fundamental principle that privacy is a human right. Our architecture is explicitly designed to protect your digital legacy without ever compromising your identity or sensitive credentials. This policy outlines how we minimize data collection while maintaining the protocol's integrity and liveness.
Zero-Knowledge Guarantee
The protocol's architecture ensures even the creators of the protocol cannot access your encrypted seeds, documents, or private keys. The backend logic only orchestrates the heartbeat timers and handles encrypted blobs; the decryption relies entirely on cryptographic proofs occurring client-side or within isolated smart contract environments upon valid release.
2. Data We Process
We actively avoid collecting Personally Identifiable Information (PII) such as your name, physical address, or IP address logs. The AlwaysThere only interacts with the following technical data:
- Public Wallet AddressesUsed exclusively to map ownership of vaults to your cryptographic identity, allowing the smart contract to verify heartbeat signatures.
- Encrypted Payload Blobs (IPFS CIDs)The content ID referencing your encrypted assets stored on decentralized networks. We cannot read the contents of these blobs.
- On-Chain Activity MetadataTimestamps of your heartbeat transactions and the configured expiration interval to accurately trigger the Dead Man's Switch.
3. Cryptography Standards
All data stored via the AlwaysThere UI is secured using AES-256-GCM encryption in the browser prior to transmission. Secrets are sharded using Shamir's Secret Sharing (SSS) before they are sent to the relayer network. Because the decryption keys are never transmitted whole, even a complete database compromise of an indexing node yields no actionable intelligence to an attacker.
4. Third-Party Interactions
By interacting with our interface, your browser must communicate with external decentralized infrastructure to function correctly. This is inherent to Web3 architecture:
RPC Providers
Our frontend queries blockchain data (like contract state) via RPC providers (e.g., Alchemy, Infura, or public endpoints). These providers may log your IP address temporarily for DDoS protection, subject to their own respective privacy policies.
IPFS Pinning Services
Your encrypted blobs are pinned using decentralized storage providers (such as Storacha or Web3.Storage). While the encrypted bytes reside on public networks, they remain indecipherable without the threshold of key shards held by the smart contract.