When you post a video, it usually ends up in three places: your phone, the platform's servers and the phones of people who watched it. Privacy is mostly about the second place — how long the platform keeps your video and what it does with it.
Questions worth asking any app
- How long are my videos kept on the servers? "Until you delete them" and "for a fixed time" are very different answers.
- What happens when I delete something? Is it removed from the servers, hidden, or kept for a while?
- Can I download everything I posted? A real export is a sign you own your content.
- Can I delete my account completely?
- Who can message me, and can strangers send me files or links?
How Circlr answers them
Circlr was designed so that your phone is the main archive and the servers keep as little as possible for as short as possible:
- Posts and replies stay on the servers for 30 days on the free plan, then live on your phone.
- Stories stay for 24 hours.
- Direct-message circles are deleted from the servers within 48 hours — long enough to reach all of your devices.
- With Premium, your posts and replies stay in the cloud for as long as you keep it.
When a post has left the servers, others can still watch it directly from your phone while you are online. Their app checks the video's fingerprint, recorded when you uploaded it, so it plays exactly what you published.
In the app you can download all your data, download your whole video archive as a ZIP, make your account private, block people and delete your account.
Privacy is not the absence of safety
Everything published on Circlr still passes through the servers on upload, for moderation and automatic checks against known illegal content. Keeping less, for less time, is compatible with keeping people safe — and it means there is simply less of your life sitting on a server.