How Preserve Handles Your Chats

When you open an export

You pick the TXT or ZIP file WhatsApp created. Your browser reads it and turns it into a conversation you can scroll. Nothing is sent to us at this point.

The same is true while you are searching the transcript and moving through it looking for the exchange you mean. All of that runs on your own device, on the file sitting in front of you.

When you choose a range

You mark a first message and a last message. That selection is the entire point of the product: it is how you decide what a recipient sees, and it is the difference between showing someone a disagreement and handing them a year of your life.

Take the time here. Narrowing a range before you share is far easier than explaining afterwards why the rest of it was in there.

When you create a link

This is the step where something leaves your device. The messages inside the range you selected are uploaded and stored, so that a browser on the other end can load the page. Messages outside the range are not uploaded. They travel over HTTPS and are encrypted at rest once stored.

The link itself is private: a long, unguessable address that is not listed publicly and is not indexed by search engines. There is no password on it, though, so anyone holding the URL can read that page, and anyone you send it to can forward it.

You also get a master link, which is the one that lets you manage and delete the share later. Keep that one to yourself and save it somewhere lasting. There are no accounts here, so it and the browser you shared from are the two things that give you control over the page afterwards.

What we can see

Shared chats are encrypted at rest, and access to the systems holding them is restricted. We hold the keys, which is the honest answer to the question people are actually asking: we are technically able to decrypt a shared conversation, in the same way as any hosted product that displays your content back to a browser. Preserve is not end-to-end encrypted, and we are not going to describe it as though it were.

What we do with that ability is nothing, as a matter of course. We do not read shared conversations, we do not use them to train machine learning models, and we do not sell them or use them for advertising. We open a specific shared chat only when we have to: a report of abuse, a lawful order, or a bug you have asked us to investigate.

What we do not do

We do not upload your export file, only the range you chose to share.
We do not sell your data or use your conversations for advertising.
We do not use shared chats to train machine learning models.
We do not claim a shared page is court-ready, tamper-proof, or an original record. Keep the export file for that.
We do not describe Preserve as end-to-end encrypted. Shared chats are encrypted at rest with keys we hold, which is the weaker and more accurate statement.

What you control

You choose which messages to publish, you choose who to send the link to, and you can delete the shared chat whenever you want, using its master link or the browser you shared from. Deleting it stops the link working and removes the stored messages from the live service. If you have lost both, we can still remove a page on request.

What you cannot control, and neither can we, is a copy someone made while the link was live. A screenshot, a saved page, or a forwarded URL is out of reach of any delete button. That is a reason to be deliberate at the moment you share, not afterwards.

Before you share a conversation

Read the selected range once as the recipient will read it, not as someone who already knows the story.
Check the edges. The message before the one you meant to start at often carries more than you remember.
Consider the other participants. Their phone numbers, addresses, and photographs are in there too, and they did not choose to publish them.
Send the link to the people who need it rather than into a group, and revoke it when it has done its job.

Compare the ways to share a conversation