How private is an on-device AI conversation?
There are two ways an AI assistant can work. It can send your words to a company's servers to be answered, and often logged, or it can run on your phone and answer there. That difference is the whole privacy story. Here is where Ask Escape sits, and the honest limits of what anyone can promise you.
Cloud AI versus on-device AI
With cloud AI, your message leaves your phone, travels to a server, and is processed there. It can be stored, reviewed by people, and in many products used to improve future models. With on-device AI, the model runs on your phone's own chip, and your words are processed on the device. Nothing has to leave for you to get an answer. For a casual question that gap barely matters. For a recovery question you would never say out loud, it matters a lot.
How Ask Escape works
Ask Escape is our recovery assistant, and we built it to run on Apple's on-device AI rather than a cloud model. When you ask it something, your question is answered on your phone instead of being shipped off to a company's servers the way most AI assistants work. That was a deliberate design decision, not the easy one. Piping your words to a cloud AI would have been simpler to build. We chose the harder path because your conversation is exactly the kind of thing that should never leave your phone. On our side there is no Escape account and no Escape server behind it, and we never receive or store what you ask.
The honest limit
Here is the part a lot of pages skip, and we would rather be straight with you. The AI engine underneath is Apple's on-device intelligence, and it runs under Apple's privacy terms, not ours. We can speak for our own side with full confidence. Your conversation never reaches us, we run no server for it, and we do not log or store it. What Apple's on-device system does with what runs through it is Apple's to answer, so for that layer we point you to Apple's terms rather than make a promise that is not ours to make. Drawing that line honestly is the point, not a gap in the product.
Built so the core stands on its own
Ask Escape and the on-device recovery summary need a device that supports Apple Intelligence, and are absent where it is not available. That is by design. We deliberately built the heart of Escape, the Safari blocker with its curated 40,000-site list, the 90-second urge tool, the panic button, Deep Block, and the 27 courses, to need no AI at all and to work fully on any supported iPhone. Your recovery never hinges on owning the latest phone. The AI is a genuine extra for the devices that can run it, layered on top of a product that already stands on its own. If you want to see the summary side of this, the piece on a recovery summary made on your phone covers it.
Escape blocks porn in Safari for free, extends to every browser with Deep Block, and adds a 90-second urge ritual, practice games that retrain how you meet an urge, and 27 short courses on identity and the long arc of recovery. No account, no personal tracking.
More on this topic in Privacy in recovery apps, or go deeper with the Who you became in private course.