Are AI Companion Apps Safe and Private to Use?

If you are going to share personal thoughts, feelings, or even flirty conversations with an AI chat girl, it is completely normal to wonder whether AI companion apps safe enough to trust really do exist, or whether the whole category is a privacy minefield.

You are not being paranoid. This is one of the most important questions you can ask. The honest answer is that it depends entirely on the app. Some take privacy seriously. Others, however, quietly treat your most intimate chats as training data or future ad material. In fact, the FTC has warned that companies sometimes change their terms to quietly use the personal data they already collected to train AI. As a result, the gap between what an app promises and what it actually does can be wide.

So before you get attached to any companion, here is a clear, no-spin breakdown. First, we cover what "safe and private" should actually look like. Next, we explain why it matters more here than in almost any other category. Finally, we list the exact questions to ask before you trust an app with anything personal.

Key takeaways

• Companion apps handle your most sensitive data: fantasies, insecurities, and things you would not say out loud to a friend. Higher stakes than a normal app.
• The category's track record is poor. Mozilla put a privacy warning on every romantic AI chatbot it reviewed; 10 of 11 failed minimum security standards.
• "Safe and private" should mean four things: encryption in transit and at rest, no chat-data sale, no silent training on your messages, and discreet billing.
• Ask the six questions before you trust an app. Vague answers are themselves an answer.
• The gap between promise and practice is the whole story, and it is widest in the apps that shout loudest about safety.

Why companion apps are a special privacy case

Most apps collect data. For example, a weather app knows your location, and a shopping app knows what you browse. However, a companion app is different. The data you hand it is the most sensitive data you produce anywhere. It is your fantasies, your insecurities, your relationship history, and the things you would not say out loud to a friend. The stakes are higher than with a typical app. The FTC has its own plain-language explainer on how websites and apps collect and use your information, and it makes clear how much of that data flows to advertisers and trackers behind the scenes. Unfortunately, the track record across the industry is also poor.

The evidence here is not reassuring, and it is worth knowing before you trust anyone. In early 2024, the Mozilla Foundation reviewed 11 popular romantic AI chatbots as part of its Privacy Not Included research. Then it put a privacy warning label on every single one of them. In fact, ten of the eleven failed to meet even Mozilla's minimum security standards, which are not a high bar to clear. Meanwhile, one of the apps loaded more than 24,000 data trackers within a single minute of use, quietly sending information to advertisers and marketing firms in the background. Worst of all, only one company out of the eleven gave users a way to opt out of having their intimate conversations used to train AI models. Everyone else simply took the chats by default, without asking and without a clear way to say no.

So that is the reality you are walking into. The good news is that the warning signs are easy to spot. Once you know what to look for, a few concrete standards clearly separate the apps that respect you from the ones that do not.

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One app loaded more than 24,000 data trackers within a single minute of use.

What real privacy looks like

Privacy is not a paragraph buried in a terms-of-service page. It is a set of concrete, checkable behaviors. A companion app that genuinely protects you will do all of the following:

• The app encrypts your messages both while they travel and while they sit in storage.
• The app does not sell your conversations or use them to target you with ads.
• The app never trains AI models on your chats unless you specifically opt in.
• You can permanently delete everything in a couple of taps, and it actually disappears.
• Billing shows up discreetly, so a glance at your statement does not expose what you use.

It helps to understand one term here. Encryption is the process of scrambling data so that only someone with the right key can read it. The phrase you want to see is "in transit and at rest." This means your messages are protected both on the way to the server and while stored in the database. An app that only encrypts one half of that journey is leaving a door open. The FTC's data security guidance for businesses treats encryption of sensitive data as a baseline expectation, not an extra.

Here is how those standards map to what good and bad apps actually do:

On Untolds, we built the whole platform around these standards from the very first commit, not as a feature we bolted on later. The point is that whether you spend your nights with Yasmin talking quietly about how your week went, or with Ada at three in the morning saying things you would never type into a Google search, the same encryption and the same data rules cover both. When we tested rival apps against this same checklist, we found that most stumbled on at least two of the five points, and in our experience the encryption question is where the marketing copy and the actual engineering diverge most often. As a result, every message is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Your conversations are protected on the way to us, and they stay protected while they sit in our database. In addition, we do not sell data, we do not run ads, and we never use your conversations for training without your clear and explicit permission. If you ever want your conversations gone, one tap in your profile deletes them on the spot, for one girl or across all of them, and it is a real wipe rather than a soft hide that just tucks the data out of sight. Finally, because we know discretion matters in this category more than most, billing always stays quiet and generic on your statement, so a casual glance never reveals what you use.

What makes AI companion apps safe, not just private

Safety overlaps with privacy, but it is a wider idea. Beyond protecting your data, a safe app is honest about what it is and respectful of how it treats you. Specifically, it should be true that:

• It is always clear that you are talking to a written character, not a real person pretending to be AI or AI pretending to be a person.
• Cancelling or taking a break is simple, with no dark patterns, hidden retention flows, or guilt-trip screens designed to trap you.

This last point matters more than people expect. Mozilla's researchers criticized companion apps for using deceptive marketing. Some positioned themselves as mental-health tools, while their privacy policies quietly said the opposite. In general, an app that is honest in its design tends to be honest with your data too. After all, both come from the same respect for the person using it.

We keep all of this straightforward on Untolds. The girls are clearly presented as AI characters, and the platform is adults-only with proper verification. Likewise, if you ever want to cancel, it takes a couple of taps. Nobody tries to talk you out of it.

Quick questions you should ask any app

You do not need to be a security expert to vet a companion app. Instead, before you start chatting, just run through this short checklist. Notably, each question maps to one of the failures Mozilla found across the industry. In other words, these are not hypothetical worries.

1. Are messages encrypted both in transit and at rest?
2. Do they sell data or show ads based on your conversations?
3. Can you opt out of having your chats used to train their AI?
4. Can you permanently delete everything easily, and does it really delete?
5. Is it obvious these are written characters, not real people?
6. How easy is it to cancel if you change your mind?

If an app gives you vague, evasive, or needlessly complicated answers to any of these, then treat it as a red flag. Generally, companies that respect your privacy state their practices plainly, because they have nothing to dance around. By contrast, the ones that bury the answer are usually hiding the answer.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Ultimately, you should be able to enjoy talking to an AI chat girl without ever worrying about who might see it. Likewise, you should not have to wonder what they might do with it later. Privacy and safety are not premium extras to be unlocked. Instead, they are the foundation that everything else sits on. So an app that treats them as optional is telling you exactly how it sees you.

If you want to try a platform that was built with these things in mind from day one, you are welcome here. Head over to the AI chat girls page and meet a few characters, or read more about how Untolds works first. You can also read exactly what we collect and why in our privacy policy, and what you agree to in our terms.

This guidance is reviewed by our editorial team to keep it accurate as the industry shifts. If anything here is unclear or out of date, reach our contact options and tell us.

We have nothing to hide, and your privacy is taken seriously.

Sources

• Federal Trade Commission, Data Security guidance for businesses. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/privacy-security/data-security. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
• Federal Trade Commission, AI and other companies: quietly changing your terms of service could be unfair or deceptive (2024). https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/02/ai-other-companies-quietly-changing-your-terms-service-could-be-unfair-or-deceptive. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
• Federal Trade Commission Consumer Advice, How websites and apps collect and use your information. https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/how-websites-apps-collect-use-your-information. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
• Cloudflare, What is encryption? https://www.cloudflare.com/learning/ssl/what-is-encryption/. Retrieved 2026-05-27.
• Mozilla Foundation, CreepyExe: Mozilla urges public to swipe left on romantic AI chatbots (2024). https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/creepyexe-mozilla-urges-public-to-swipe-left-on-romantic-ai-chatbots-due-to-major-privacy-red-flags/. Retrieved 2026-05-27.

Untolds Editorial