Plain-English transparency
What can anyone actually see?
No server-based messenger is invisible. Signal, WhatsApp and Telegram all have servers that see some of what happens around your messages. The honest question is what's in that metadata, and who stands beside it. Here's Vardum's answer, in full.
Four parties
Exactly what each one gets
The person you're talking with
Can see: what you send them; your Vardum ID and the nickname you share (inside encryption, and also as the thread nickname on the session record); whether you're online in the thread while it's open.
Never sees: your sign-in details, your other conversations, contacts, notes or vaults.
The Vardum operator
Can see: relay metadata such as session tokens, timestamps, sizes, public keys and presence; your IP address as each request arrives, which is stored only as a one-way code that changes daily and is deleted within 48 hours; ciphertext of messages, notes, vaults and media; your sign-in label, which for new accounts is a random-looking value made from your 24 words; and the thread nickname, deleted with the thread.
Never sees: message, note or vault contents, because the operator holds no keys to them. Your contact list, because pins live only on your phone.
This website
Can see: the pages your browser asks for, as any website must, to send them back. It keeps daily totals of visits, referring websites and button clicks.
Never keeps: IP addresses, cookies, visitor logs or anything that follows a person. It runs on our own server and never sees app conversations or keys. How we count visits
Your network (ISP, Wi-Fi, employer)
Can see: that your phone connects to Vardum, when, and roughly how much data moves.
Never sees: what you send, because connections are encrypted in transit, or who you're talking to, because the connection is to Vardum's relay, not to the other person.
A VPN you set up yourself can change the address the relay sees, but it adds trust in the VPN provider. It's your choice, not a built-in way to hide your network address.
Never received in readable form
What stays on phones
Content is shared only with its intended recipients. A recipient can still keep a copy.
Every server sees metadata
The difference is what's in it
From each project's own published documentation, September 2026. Where a competitor does something well, we say so.
Signal
Accounts are registered to phone numbers. Sealed Sender and enclave-based contact discovery reduce, but don't eliminate, what the server learns, as Signal's own documentation says. Signal runs its own infrastructure, so no third party sits beside the metadata.
Runs on Meta's infrastructure. Accounts are phone numbers, and who-messages-whom is centrally visible. Content is end-to-end encrypted; the graph around it isn't.
Telegram
Cloud chats, the default, are stored on Telegram's servers and aren't end-to-end encrypted. Only Secret Chats are.
Vardum
No phone number, no email. Vardum owns and runs the relay. Routing metadata and network activity remain observable, and no-number sign-up isn't a claim of no logs. Expired records are swept every 2 minutes.
What you can do about the rest
Shrink what exists
Burn timers and quiet-chat limits keep records short-lived; ended threads are hard-deleted from the relay.
Hide your IP
A VPN or Tor you set up yourself changes the address the relay sees.
Leave nothing behind
Delete account removes every record your account owns and destroys the keys on your phone.
This page is a plain-English summary. The privacy policy governs, and the claims register tracks every claim. Vardum's cryptography is self-reviewed; an independent audit is planned for early 2027.