This page explains, in plain terms, how Search the Home is designed to protect what you store. It describes how the service works today. It is not a promise or part of our terms, and it may change as the service develops.
End-to-end encryption
We endeavor to keep your home data end-to-end encrypted. What you record is encrypted on your device before it reaches our servers, and our servers store it encrypted. Lysander Ventures does not keep the credentials needed to decrypt it on its servers. Those credentials are generally kept on your devices, for example in your browser’s storage, and are derived from the passkeys or passwords you sign in with.
This design means that if someone breaks into our storage or demands data from us, generally only encrypted data, which we cannot read either, is possible to obtain.
Signing in, and what happens if you lose access
We prefer that you sign in with passkeys, which are tied to your devices and can’t be phished like passwords. It may also be possible to sign in with a password. Because we don’t hold your credentials, we generally can’t let you back in if you lose them all. To protect yourself, add more than one passkey, consider setting up a recovery code that can get you back in, or invite a trusted contact or household member who can help you recover your account.
What our servers can see
- Your email address, the public part of each passkey, and your subscription status.
- That encrypted records exist, how many there are, their size, and when they were created or changed.
- Which accounts have access to which homes.
- Certain analytics events, such as which days you used the app and which features you used.
- IP addresses and device information. We usually keep minimal server logs, but we may save extra logs when a software error occurs or you open a support request.
When your data is readable outside your devices
- AI features. Voice dictation, voice search and AI agents need your words or data in readable form. Only what each request needs is sent securely to our servers and processed with AI and speech models, which may be run by third-party cloud providers. It is usually deleted as soon as the request completes, but we can’t guarantee that.
- Connected AI apps. If you link a service such as ChatGPT or Claude through a connector like an MCP server, that service stores the credentials needed to decrypt your data, so its security becomes part of yours: if your account there is compromised, someone could reach your Search the Home data through it.
- Shared homes and recovery accounts. When you invite another account to a home or name it as a recovery account, keys that unlock your data may be decryptable with that account’s credentials, although the app generally doesn’t make them available to that person.
Tracking
Inside the app at app.searchthehome.com there are no third-party trackers. Our public website at searchthehome.com may use third-party analytics and advertising tools.
Reporting a security issue
If you think you’ve found a security problem, please email security@support.searchthehome.com. We appreciate responsible reports and will look into every one.