Frequently Asked Questions
The Modern Threat Landscape
Your digital privacy is under constant attack from sophisticated threats that render traditional security obsolete. Here’s what you’re up against:
- Man-in-the-Middle (MITM): Nefarious actors intercept internet traffic and spoof widely used certificates to gain access to your data.
- Hack Now, Decrypt Later (HNDL): Major actors are keeping copies of all internet traffic in order to decrypt it later when needed using evolving technologies.
- Quantum Computing: According to the Quantum Program Director at NIST, quantum computing has destroyed well-known and widely deployed encryption algorithms used by almost all messaging apps today.
Council's Quantum-Resilient Defense
Council defeats these threats by putting total data control into your hands. Effortlessly create powerful, quantum-resilient encryption keys for your Council chat groups that stay on your device. No one, not even us, has access to those keys.
We anticipate that your chat traffic is getting captured. But unlike most encrypted chat apps today which send a copy of the keys with the message data, your keys stay safely on your device. This exponentially exhausts the resources of even the most well-funded entities trying to steal and decrypt your messages.
What is Council?
Council is a new messaging platform built for total data sovereignty. It allows you to create temporary, end-to-end encrypted chat groups where you—not a corporation—create and control the encryption keys.
How is this different from Signal or Telegram?
The key difference is control. While other apps provide excellent encryption, they manage the keys for you. With Council, you generate a unique encryption key on your device for every group you create. This gives you the power to definitively "burn" a conversation, destroying the key and making the data permanently inaccessible to everyone, everywhere.
What does "burn them clean" mean?
Burning a group is an irreversible action that deletes the group's unique encryption key from all member devices. Once the key is gone, the messages associated with it become permanently unreadable cryptographic noise. There are no backups on a server because we can't read your messages in the first place.
Who is Council designed for?
Council is for anyone who needs absolute certainty about the privacy and lifespan of their conversations. This includes journalists protecting sources, teams discussing sensitive intellectual property, activists organizing securely, or simply friends who believe that their private conversations should stay that way.