What happens to it

When we first built peek, as a personal project, we lost $10k our first month

We were baffled, how is that possible?

Turns out, storing that much audio is super expensive

So we decided to keep all the data on-device and just be continuously deleting it throughout the day

Luckily, that turned out to be the best user-safety decision we ever made

By keeping all your data on your device:

It can never be hacked/leaked/accessed by anyone. Not us, not you, not the us government if they wanted

It can never be sold

People use Peek freely

Why

The microphone is what makes Peek, Peek. Without it, we’d be a typical social app. With it, Peek can understand moments and generate live, lightweight statuses for the people you care about.

What happens to my audio? Who can hear it?

• Your audio can never be played or heard by anyone else—not even you.
• How Peek uses audio:

1. Peek runs in the background to notice when something new is happening.
2. It listens to ambient context (e.g., “I want a coffee” at Starbucks) to infer activity quickly.
3. Think “is there something new?” checks, similar to a wake-word model.
4. When Peek detects a new moment, it converts audio to text locally and creates your status from the text.
5. Frequency varies by your day; on average, a new moment happens every 1–2 hours.

After Peek creates your status:

1. Peek creates the narrative you see in your story.
2. Deletes the audio.
3. Deletes the intermediate text.
4. Sends you a notification that your status updated.

After the notification:

• Only the one-liner status remains (e.g., “Walking dogs at Central Park”).
• Statuses self-delete after 24 hours unless you delete earlier.

How do I know Peek is on?

Apple shows an orange microphone indicator while any app uses the mic. If you see it, Peek is on.

How can I turn Peek off?

Force close (swipe it all the way up in app previews) the app or toggle it off inside Peek. The orange mic indicator will disappear and your status will stop updating.

Is any audio stored or accessible later?

No. Audio and intermediate text are deleted once a status is created. We can’t retrieve or play back your audio.

Why location?

Place gives context. “I want a coffee” at home vs. at a café leads to different statuses and faster, more accurate updates.

Why fitness/motion?

To save battery. Many apps poll GPS continuously. Peek doesn’t. We use motion sensors (e.g., gyroscope) to detect when your state changes (STATIONARY, WALKING, DRIVING) and only then request a precise location. Peek was made to be on all day, this helps us do that whilst also not taking up battery

Nothing. Everything is deleted immediately. Statuses and stories are ephemeral by default and auto-expire after 24 hours.

One of our team members feels very passionately about this and asked us to put his "rant" here. It's actually very insightful into how data works nowadays (since there is a lot of misinformation out there):

• The whole “selling your data” conception is based on the wrong hypothesis to begin with. Edward Snowden (or the incorrect telling of his story) and the whole Cambridge Analytica of 2016 created this notion to users that your data is somehow “valuable” or that someone wants to “buy it”. To put things into perspective, no one, and believe me when I say NO ONE, wants to buy your data. The only reason you ever see anyone online wanting to track your behavior, use cookies, use location, etc is for one thing and one thing only: Ads. The internet is built around ads. Facebook is a $1.3T company based on ads. That’s what your data is used for on the internet. The only reason Instagram wants you to allow app tracking or The New Yorker wants you to share cookies is to answer the one question that has become the foundation of our modern society: What new pair of shoes are you interested in buying? That’s what all the fuzz is about. Crazy right? Did you think the NSA was tapping into your camera to see what you did in your free time or that Facebook wanted to get your data to sell it to some online deepstate hacking group that wants to steal your 2007 Toyota Corolla? No, in fact all that is so Facebook can show you the shoes you want to buy, you click on them (Facebook gets $0.30c) and you buy them on discount.
• Now, how does that tie into Peek? Well Facebook, Apple and Google, the companies that actually DO track you, actually need very little to identify who you are and the shoes you are looking for. In fact, it’s most of the time free for them. Look at anyone's “following” on Instagram and you can decipher the exact person they are in a matter of seconds. Funny tidbit: I’ve had people tell me “well Google listens in on me anyway to show me Ads” because there’s this conspiracy theory that Google/Apple or god-knows-who has your mic turned on because “I swear I talked about these headphones yesterday and I got an Ad for them today” - the funny thing about this is people would rather believe Google would transcribe all their conversations (for a grand-whopping, per my napkin math, of $1 trillion dollars a year for all users, to show them ads) than conceive the notion that they in fact are not that unique; and that most people that follow Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, Taylor Swift and Emma Chamberlain want the new pair of Adidas Sambas as summer time approaches. And Google/FB/Apple didn’t need to spend $1 trillion dollars deciphering that, you provided them that data for free by following who you follow (which is fine! I personally always allow all ads/cookies/tracking because I actually want to see ads that I like. Otherwise I get random ads I don’t wanna even see).
• So, Peek is not going to sell your data. Not because we’re good samaritans (which we are!) but because literally no one wants it or even wants to buy it and it costs us much much more to give you a cool story to share than it would give us to (if a person existed) sell your data. Peek is built to be fun. That’s it, there’s no more around it. To share fun parts of your day with your friends.

We’re experimenting and may offer optional premium features in the future. The core experience should feel fun and lightweight for everyone.

Our north star is trust. Doing anything shady would undermine the product and the company we’re trying to build. Luckily, our investors understand that and we have plenty of time to figure it out! For example, Facebook only generated revenue after their IPO, Instagram was acquired for $1B without making a single dollar! So that does not concern us right now. When it does, you'll know and we'll offer some pretty cool features with it!