Mars Interactive/Alcove - Vault for Everything/Data Collection Disclosure

Data Collection Disclosure

Effective Date: September 16, 2026

Alcove is committed to a privacy-first approach. We believe what you put in your vault — photos, videos, notes, and anything else — belongs to you, and no one else.

Data We Collect: None

• No servers
• No cloud sync
• No tracking
• No analytics

On-Device Only

Everything you create in Alcove — your photos, videos, albums, slideshow settings, any notes in the decoy vault, and any sites you bookmark — stays on your phone, encrypted with AES-256-GCM. The encryption key itself is never stored in plain form; it exists only as ciphertext, sealed behind whichever of Face ID, your PIN, or your master password you use to unlock the app.

One Local Exception: Crash Diagnostics

Alcove uses Apple's MetricKit to receive local crash, hang, and diagnostic reports from iOS. These reports are written only to your device's local storage and are never transmitted anywhere by the app — not to us, not to any third party. They exist so a future update can be informed by diagnostics you choose to share with us directly, not through automatic collection.

One Network Exception: Sites

Sites lets you add a URL and open it in an in-app browser instead of leaving Alcove. Loading that page sends a request to that site's own server — unavoidable for browsing to work at all, and no different from what happens when you open the same page in Safari — and that site, not Alcove, may set its own cookies. Alcove does not add tracking of its own on top of this and never sends your vault's contents or your Alcove usage to any site you visit. Each site's data is sandboxed from every other site, the same way separate tabs are isolated in a browser. This is the only network access anywhere in the app.

Optional Device Integrations

Alcove may request the following permissions:

• Face ID (optional, one of three unlock methods): Face ID processing happens entirely on-device via Apple's Secure Enclave — Alcove never sees or stores your biometric data itself.
• Photo Library, add-only (optional): requested only when you choose to save an item from Alcove back to your device's photo library. Importing media into Alcove does not require this or any other library-wide permission — it goes through Apple's picker interface, which hands Alcove only the specific items you select, without ever granting the app access to your full library.

These integrations process data locally and never transmit it to external servers.

No External APIs or Third-Party SDKs

• No social login
• No data brokers
• No usage metrics
• No third-party crash analytics (e.g. Firebase, Sentry) — see the MetricKit exception above for the one, fully local exception

Backups Are Yours to Make

Alcove has no automatic backup, and your vault is deliberately excluded from iCloud and device backups. You can create your own encrypted backup any time via Settings → Export Vault, and restore it via Import — Alcove never transmits that backup anywhere; where you store it afterward is entirely up to you. There is also no password-recovery mechanism beyond the single-use recovery codes you can generate yourself (Settings → Recovery Codes): if you forget your PIN and your master password, and have no recovery code left, your vault is permanently unrecoverable — there is no reset, no backend, and no way for us to help you regain access.

Data Deletion

To delete your data:

• Use Settings → Erase Vault for an immediate, in-app wipe, or
• Uninstall the app.

Either removes all data permanently from your device. If you want to keep a copy first, export it via Settings → Export Vault before you erase or uninstall.

Contact

If you have questions about privacy, contact us at: mars_interactive@proton.me