Summary:
- Your documents are stored on your device and in encrypted form on Apple’s servers (iCloud)
- We do not send them to or store them on our servers
- During live collaboration, the changes you make are relayed to other participants via our server, but encrypted and therefore not readable
Document Storage
All documents in MindNode are stored locally on your device. If you are logged into your Apple Account, MindNode will also sync your documents via iCloud (unless you manually disabled iCloud for MindNode, of course). Specifically, MindNode uses CloudKit, which is part of Apple’s iCloud and allows developers like us to implement syncing of your data. This means that all your MindNode documents are stored first on your device and second on Apple’s servers. We do not operate servers to store your document contents, so we never have access to them, neither in encrypted nor in unencrypted form.
To learn more about how Apple stores your MindNode documents in iCloud, see Apple’s documentation: iCloud data security overview, specifically the sections titled “Sharing and collaboration” and “Third-party app data”.
Live Collaboration
When you open a document that is shared with others, MindNode will connect to our MindNode Live server to enable real-time collaboration with other participants. If there is at least one other participant online at the same time, MindNode will send the changes you make to our MindNode Live server, which will then relay them to the other online participants, but the server does not store this data. Also, this data is encrypted on your device and decrypted on the other participants’ devices with a per-document key that is shared via iCloud along with the document. Our server does not know this encryption key and therefore cannot decrypt the data that it relays. For additional security, the encryption key changes periodically and whenever someone stops participating in a document.
Document Links
When you create a link to a document (using “Copy Link to Document”), you will get a link with a URL pointing to our web server that will look like this: https://mindnode.com/document/3gQzJdUi4SI6GZxxwBYhcr#Summer.
This is a so-called “Universal Link” that will open MindNode directly if it is installed on the device. If MindNode is not installed, it will display a page on our website with instructions on how to install the app and open the document. Although it might seem that the link points to data on our website, our website only takes the last part of the URL and passes it on. At no time is the document stored on our website.
You can also freely share this link because it alone does not give anybody else access to your document. The link will only work for people who already have access to the document. To change who has access to a document, open it in MindNode and use the sharing settings.