Where Your Results Live: On Your Phone, Not in Our Database

Here’s a question worth asking about any app that touches your health data: where does it actually live?

For Protecht, your results live on your device. When you connect your provider through Apple Health, your verified test results are pulled down and encrypted on your phone using AES-256, with the key in your iPhone’s Keychain. There is no central database of test results, because we don’t keep one.

A deliberate architecture choice

That’s a deliberate architecture choice, not a marketing line. A lot of health apps promise “bank-level security” while still holding a copy of everything you’ve ever told them, sitting on a server, one misconfiguration away from exposure. We didn’t want to make that promise and hope we kept it. We wanted to make it much harder to break.

What happens when you share

When you share with someone who has Protecht open, the results travel from your phone to theirs over a direct, encrypted connection and never touch our servers. When you share by link with someone who doesn’t have the app, your results are encrypted on your phone first. When the link is opened, the encrypted result passes through our server for a moment while the page loads, and then it’s gone. It is never written to our database. We explain both paths in full in What Actually Happens When You Share a Result.

Less to protect, by design

Privacy shouldn’t depend on trusting a company to protect a pile of your data. We built it so there is no pile.