Your life is not a product. So we built a messaging and social media platform that doesn't treat it like one.
Every other app promises privacy, then quietly does the opposite — reading your messages, mapping your friendships, following you across the internet, and selling what it learns. Badger is the answer to all of it. Private by design. Yours by default. Here's what we believe — and what we've actually built to back it up.
Most apps guard your data from hackers and then help themselves to all of it. That isn't privacy. That's a locked front door with the landlord holding a spare key.
Badger is built the opposite way. We can't read your messages, open your photos, or see where you are — not because we promise not to, but because it's impossible for us. Your words and pictures are scrambled on your phone before they ever leave it, and they stay scrambled everywhere else. We store your data on Google's cloud — and Google can't read it either. The only people who ever hold the key are you and the friends you're talking to.
Every message, photo and post is end-to-end encrypted on your device with a per-conversation key (AES-GCM). That key is sealed individually to each friend's device using their own public key (X25519); we never keep a copy. What reaches our database — hosted on Google Cloud — is nothing but ciphertext: unreadable to us, to Google, and to anyone who breached either. No master key, no plaintext backup, no lawful-access backdoor. None can exist, by design.
Want the unvarnished version — including where we're not bulletproof? We wrote it all down: How secure is Badger really? →
On Badger, sharing is a series of deliberate choices, made by you. The starting point is simple: you decide what to share.
Want a friends group where you post photos with friends but keep your location to yourself? Done. Don't want anyone seeing your mood, or whether you're out for a run or stuck in traffic? Turn it off. You decide what each part of your life is worth sharing — and you can change your mind any time. And, if you turn on Ghost Mode, nobody can know where you are. You're literally invisible to your friends, us, Google and anybody else.
Every photo, video, file that you upload is encrypted. Even when we search to see if any of your contacts are on Badger, your contacts remain on your phone — we send only a scrambled version of their addresses, and the addresses themselves never leave your phone.
Location, mood and activity are all switchable. Some conversations put everyone on a shared map; others are chat-only — you choose which, and you can hide your location entirely at any moment. Nothing about you is broadcast if you don't want it to be, and switching it off stops the sharing at the source. Contact searching is done by using a cryptographically secure hash function to hash your contacts' emails. We then use the same hash on the emails of the existing Badger users to find the ones that you know. We don't keep your contacts, and we don't want them.
Some lines we will never cross — because crossing them is the entire business model everywhere else.
Just the people you actually know, sharing posts and messages, in a place that stays yours. Using your existing real-world social network to build a friendly and safe social network.
WhatsApp encrypts the content of your messages, then hands its parent company Meta the metadata — who you talk to, when, and how often — which helps target ads on Facebook and Instagram. Ireland's regulator fined WhatsApp €225 million (2021) and a further €5.5 million (2023) over how it handled your data and forced you to consent. Meta was separately fined €91 million (2024) for storing user passwords in plain text, and an EU court found it targeting a user with ads that inferred his sexual orientation from data he never provided (2024). Instagram and Facebook now feed Meta's AI on your public photos, captions and posts — some going back to 2007 — through an opt-out most people never find (June 2024 policy; pushed through in Europe from May 2025). X (Twitter) pours every public post, plus your interactions with its Grok AI, into training by default — a switch buried in the settings — and its terms let it use your content for "any purpose"; delete a post and it's already baked into the model (November 2024 terms). Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses route what they capture to contractors for AI labelling — reviewers reported seeing people undressing and credit-card details — and since April 2025 you can't opt out of having your voice recordings stored (EFF, 2026); they're now the subject of a class action calling them "a surveillance nightmare disguised as fashion." And to be fair: Signal is genuinely excellent — the gold standard for private messaging, and we admire it for providing military-grade encryption to everybody. But it's a bare messenger — let's face it, you're not going to use Signal to have a group of old friends sharing videos of cats and funny memes on a feed group. Badger gives you Signal-grade privacy and an app you'd want to live in.
We will never add "AI" features to Badger.
Sometimes, do you feel like this?
We do too. But why is everybody stuffing AI into their platforms? Well, it's so that they can mine more of your data and sell more adverts. Every time you press that "Ask Meta" button or use an AI filter on Instagram, more of your data is being uploaded to Meta alongside what they already get from WhatsApp (who you know, how often you chat to them). You are the product. Badger will never add AI. Ever.
The AI features in WhatsApp, Facebook, "X" and Instagram are effectively ways around any privacy claims they might make. If you've just "Asked Meta" about the best brand of dishwasher, guess what you're going to be getting adverts about on every site you visit. They claim they don't train their AI on your question — but they never claim they don't use it for targeting. Meta is bad, but "X" is even worse: all the same issues Meta has, plus training its AI on all your posts, images and links, then selling that to the highest bidder. We will never do that.
Good things aren't free. Storing your data — and the 200 photos of your dog you've sent your friends — costs us money. So Badger shows ads. But we do it the only honest way there is.
You pick three or more things you're interested in — broad categories if you want, or things you're actually interested in. When it's time to show an ad, those interests — and nothing else — go to Google. Not your name. Not your identity. Not your contacts. Not one word you've said to anyone, or indeed who you talk to. Your ads are chosen by what you like, never by who you are or what you're talking about.
Only the interest tags you explicitly chose are sent to the ad network to fetch a relevant ad. Your identity, your friend graph, and your (encrypted, unreadable) conversations are never part of ad selection and never leave your control. That's the exact opposite of surveillance advertising, where everything you do is the product being sold.
Setting custom long-term interests (cycling, gardening, jazz, dogs) should make some of the adverts more relevant to you, and you can also set short-term interests ("garden sheds", if you're buying a garden shed, say) — so the ads you're fed are a bit more relevant. If you're going to see ads, why shouldn't they be relevant to you, without leaking your identity to the gruesome world of ad optimisation?
(One asterisk, for honesty: fetching an ad also carries your phone's IP address, like every web request does — that tells Google roughly which city you're in, but never your identity, your contacts, or a word you've said.)
The full, honest breakdown lives here: How do the ads work — are they spying on me? →
Here's the part no one else will offer: the industrial-strength privacy is free. For everyone. Forever. You never pay for the right not to be spied on.
And if the ads bug you, switch them off for $2.99 a month — less than a single coffee — and Badger goes completely silent and completely private. Same encryption, same control, zero ads. No "premium privacy," no tiers of protection: everyone gets the vault, the $2.99 just takes down the posters on the wall. Bargain, right?
No surveillance. No strangers shouting abuse. No creepy glasses, no AI feeding on your life, no ads built from your secrets. Just the people you know, in a place that's genuinely yours.
Badger. Private by design. Yours by default.
Badger