Greetings from Estonia, Europe!
We have some big news.
After years of careful work, we're ready to share our most anticipated feature to date.
END-TO-END ENCRYPTED PHOTO SHARING
You can now share your encrypted photos and videos with others using a link.
All end-to-end encrypted, no AI scanning your photos, no compromises.
So why did this take so long? We had the code ready for years. But shipping it responsibly required a lot more than just writing code.
WHY WE TOOK OUR TIME
Early on, our legal team flagged that encrypted photo & video sharing could come with difficult, costly legal complications and scenarios. Those conversations led us down a path of asking some hard questions about what it means to build sharing tools responsibly.
We could have done what's fashionable in Silicon Valley, moved fast and broken things, and broken society slowly, all without thinking twice. You know, the way some companies release AI models that can generate virtually anything with zero safeguards, and then maybe bother with the consequences later. That's not how we do things.
Instead, we spent the last few years talking to advocacy groups, researchers, sociologists, and other experts across Europe, trying to understand their specific concerns around the spread of illegal visual materials, and what we could do to address them.
Not because anyone forced us to do any of these things, but because we think it matters.
This was especially important to us given the current political climate, where encryption itself is under attack by lobbyists and lawmakers around the world, often using the very same concerns as justification to strip everyone's privacy. We decided to prove that it's possible to build encrypted sharing tools thoughtfully, without backdoors, without scanning, and crucially without pretending the concerns don't exist.
THE PRACTICALITY SPECTRUM
Here's what we learned. The core concern among experts isn't about one person sending one file to one other person.
It's about mass spread. The keyword is "scale".
Think of it as a spectrum.
On one end, someone could physically mail a USB stick. Nearly impossible to detect, but wildly impractical at scale. On the other end, someone can upload content to a social platform and share it with millions in a single click. Maximum reach, with zero effort, and this is sadly the most common way people spread illegal content on the internet.
We wanted to build sharing that lives firmly on the impractical-for-abuse side of this spectrum, while still being sufficiently usable for real people with real needs. A family sharing vacation photos and videos. A war photographer getting sensitive footage to a journalist. A client reviewing a wedding album.
THE GUARDRAILS
After long discussions with experts, here's what we came up with to keep things safe, free of spam and sane :
- Sharing is only available to paid users
- You can only share an album with up to 5 people
- Invite links expire after 48 hours (you can always send new ones)
- Recipients confirm their email with a one-time token before accepting the invite / accessing the album
- You can revoke access to shared albums at any time
- Senders can always see the email addresses of recipients who accepted invites, so you know exactly who has access
- Senders can optionally share the encryption key separately from the invite link for an extra layer of control
All your photos, videos and albums remain end-to-end encrypted.
We cannot see their contents, and no one else can either.
There is no scanning.
There is no way for us or anyone to see what's inside unless you give them access.
We believe these limits still cover everything you'd actually want to do. Share with your family, your friends, your colleagues, your clients. One click, and it just works.
At the same time, these limits make it impractical for bad actors to spread illegal content or spam people at scale.
But if you run into a scenario we haven't thought of, we're all ears, shoot us a message.
WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
SENDING
All you have to do is tap the "share" button, and Cryptee will generate a sharing link for you.
Want more control? You can dial in the settings further. Share only your favorite photos from an album.
Or share only the preview-sized versions with your clients until they pay you for the originals.
RECEIVING
When recipients open the link, they'll see a clean welcome screen where they enter their email and confirm with a one-time password. That's it.
Once they have access, they can browse the album in our gallery, download photos individually, select a few, or download everything at once. They can even choose which size to download. So if you're a photographer and your clients only want the smaller JPG previews instead of your original RAW files, they can pick exactly what they need.
ADDITIONAL, SMALLER NEW FEATURES & IMPROVEMENTS
This update also comes with hundreds of tiny improvements across the board, including better compatibility with Apple's new controversial Liquid Glass design. But here are a couple of highlights :
MARKDOWN PASTE
We've heard from many of our users that they quite often paste text from large language models and AI chat tools into Cryptee, which sadly comes with potential security risks, like pasting untrusted markdown or text into the editor.
Until now Cryptee didn't support pasting markdown, but with this update, we've introduced the ability to paste markdown into our editor. Cryptee can now automatically convert your markdown formatted text into rich-styled text, while still making sure and sanitizing the contents of the text to ensure you can't accidentally paste insecure markdown or text into Cryptee Docs that could potentially compromise your data's integrity.
SMARTER CODE BLOCKS
With the introduction of markdown paste, we anticipate many of our software developer users and students to also paste large code blocks. And some of you have already been asking for ways to better manage large code blocks in Cryptee Docs. You can now :
- Fold/unfold code-blocks in Cryptee Docs
- Easily copy the contents of code-blocks with one click in Cryptee Docs
TONS OF BUG FIXES
This update also comes with hundreds of bug fixes, of which there are too many to list. If something felt like it was broken, we probably fixed it. For example, for years, pasting text out of Cryptee into a plaintext field like a Signal message input sometimes created extra new lines. This should be fixed now - finally.
If not, please reach out to our customer support or file an issue on our github following the bug report template, and we'll get things sorted out right away.
UPDATES TO OUR TERMS & PRIVACY POLICY
Oh and in case if you have a username-only account and don't have an email address we can use to reach out to you, we're legally obligated to let you know that we've updated our terms & conditions and privacy policy to cover how photo sharing works like :
• Your responsibilities when sharing content
(like: be cool, don't spam people)
• What kinds of data we process
(like: sending album invitations/access emails)
• A few other clarifications
(like: you own your content and we can't see it)
We're really proud of how this turned out, and we can't wait to hear what you think.
If you're enjoying Cryptee, please consider subscribing to one of our paid plans to support us. Help us defend your rights, privacy and security.
All the very best from Estonia, Europe,
— John Ozbay