Your frame:

Your data

This page explains how Wallie handles your photos and account data. For the full legal terms, see our Privacy Policy.

What happens when you send a photo

The Wallie app prepares the photo on your phone — sizes and adjusts it for the e-ink display. Basic photo info (like capture date and orientation) may be read to display photos the right way up and to organize them by when they were taken.
It’s encrypted on your phone with a key only you and your frame share, before anything leaves your device.
The encrypted file goes to your frame in one of three ways, depending on how you set up:
- With Wi-Fi (cloud) — uploads to Wallie’s servers, then your frame downloads and decrypts it.
- Set Up Without Cloud (offline) — transfers directly from your phone to your frame over a private local connection. No internet, no Wallie servers involved at all.
- Self-hosted — stays entirely on your local network if you run your own Wallie server.
Your frame decrypts the photo on the frame itself before showing it.

Photos are encrypted on your phone before they’re uploaded, so what we store is encrypted data. The key that opens it is created and kept on your phone — with one exception, sharing with your household, described below.

What this means for cloud users

When you do use Wallie’s cloud:

Your photos are encrypted before they ever reach our servers. What we hold is encrypted data, and the key that opens it is created and kept on your phone. See The key that opens your photos for where it lives and the one time it travels through us.
Your photos are yours. Your account, your content.
We don’t use your photos for advertising or AI model training.

The key that opens your photos

That key is created on your phone and stays there, in your phone’s own protected storage. It is not sent to Wallie. Your frame holds its own copy, handed to it directly by your phone during setup rather than through us — that’s how it can show your photos.

Because the key starts out on a single phone, a new phone would have nothing to open your older albums with. Photo Key Backup (Profile → Photo Key Backup) prevents that. It’s on unless you turn it off, and it keeps two kinds of copy:

One held by your phone’s own maker — iCloud Keychain on iPhone and iPad, your Google account on Android. Both are end-to-end encrypted: Apple and Google can’t read it, and it doesn’t pass through Wallie.
A recovery code you keep yourself. The same screen shows it, to write down or save in a password manager. It’s the copy that survives losing the phone entirely. Anyone who has it can open your photos, so keep it somewhere private.

Turning backup off withdraws the copy held by Apple or Google. A recovery code you already saved is yours, and stays valid.

There’s one moment when your key does travel through us, and you choose it: inviting someone to your household. Not by default, not on a schedule, and never for anyone who doesn’t send an invitation.

Here is exactly what happens. When you invite someone, you’re deciding to let them see your photos, so their phone needs your key to open them. Your key is encrypted on your phone, passed through Wallie’s cloud, and delivered to the person you invited. The invitation link you send is what unlocks it — the link is the whole secret. Send it to the person you intend, and don’t share it more widely or leave it somewhere it will sit around.

We hold that locked package only until they accept the invitation, at which point it’s deleted. Invitations stop working after 24 hours whether or not anyone accepts.

→ See Switching to a new phone for what to do before you change phones.

What we collect, plainly

We collect what’s needed to run the product:

Account info you give us (email, name, payment).
Photos, encrypted on your device before they go anywhere. Cloud users: we hold encrypted data only. Offline users: photos never reach our servers at all.
Device info for your frame (device ID, firmware version, connectivity status — needed for the app to work).
App usage data like device type, operating system, and how features are used. This helps us troubleshoot, improve the product, and prevent abuse. It’s used in aggregate where possible.

For the full list and the legal basis for each, see the Privacy Policy.

We share the minimum needed to run the product and we don’t sell your data.

We use third-party service providers for things like storage hosting, payment processing, and email delivery. They process data on our behalf under data-protection agreements — and are contractually prohibited from using your data for their own purposes, including AI training and advertising. We may also disclose information when legally required, or in the event of a business transfer (e.g., acquisition).

We only use your data the way we say we do on this page.

For specifics, see the Privacy Policy.

Without internet, nothing ever leaves your home

Set Wallie up with Set Up Without Cloud (or the desktop app’s Copy photos onto the frame) and your photos travel directly from your phone or computer to your frame over a private local connection. No internet, no Wallie servers. Nothing ever leaves your home.

Households

When you invite someone to share a frame:

They can add photos to that frame
They can’t see your other frames or photos in other accounts
You can remove them anytime — access revokes immediately
Each photo shows who added it

Household members are the only people you’ve explicitly given access to your frames.

Deleting your account

In the app: Profile → Account Management → Delete Wallie Account. This:

Signs you out immediately (you can’t sign back into the deleted account)
Wipes your encrypted photos from our servers
Removes you from any households you were sharing
Unpairs your frames — they factory reset the next time they contact the server

Full deletion across our systems happens within 30 days per our Privacy Policy. We may keep a small amount of information that we’re legally required to retain (e.g., transaction records for tax compliance), but personal photos and account data are permanently removed.

Your own photo library is not affected. Anything you’ve added to Wallie comes from copies of photos you already had on your phone or computer — those originals stay where they were.

For the legally binding terms, see our full Privacy Policy. Questions: hello@wallieframe.com.