GuidesPrivacy & controlPrivate Sync: end-to-end encryption
Intermediate7 min read

Private Sync: end-to-end encryption

Turn on client-side encryption for synced content, save your recovery key, and understand exactly which fields it does and does not cover.

Private Sync encrypts your synced content on your own machine before it is uploaded, using a key the server never sees. It is available on every plan — it is not a Pro feature.

Private Sync builds on Cloud Sync, so you need Cloud Sync switched on first. Cloud Sync itself is off by default.

What it encrypts — and what it does not

This is the most important section on the page. Private Sync protects content, not the labels around it:

FieldEncrypted?
Workspace entry contentYes
Your personal context and custom vocabulary blobYes
Voice command action parametersYes
App favourite aliasesYes
Workspace names and tagsNo — plain text
Workspace entry titlesNo — plain text
Hands-Free spoken phrases, vocabulary words, app identifiersNo — plain text

Names, tags, and titles stay readable because the website renders them in your account area and the server matches on them. Hands-Free phrases are a subtler case: entries are addressed by an unkeyed hash of the phrase itself, so encrypting a short, guessable phrase like "open chrome" would not actually hide it from anyone holding a wordlist. Rather than imply protection that a dictionary attack defeats, we leave it plainly readable and tell you so.

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Practical consequence: do not put secrets in a workspace name or an entry title. Put them in the entry body, which is encrypted.

Turning it on

SettingsAccountPrivate Sync
  1. 01
    Start the conversion
    InkSpoke generates an encryption key and a recovery key locally. Nothing is uploaded yet.
  2. 02
    Save the recovery key
    It looks like INKS-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. It is displayed once and stored nowhere else. Put it in a password manager before you click past this dialog.
  3. 03
    Let it re-encrypt
    Existing synced content is re-encrypted locally, then the wrapped key is escrowed and the account flips to encrypted mode.
Closing the recovery-key dialog without confirming safely abandons the whole operation — the local key is discarded and nothing changes. If you are not ready to store the key, backing out is the correct move.

Unlocking your other devices

Each additional device asks for the recovery key once. Paste it and that device can read your encrypted content from then on. A wrong or malformed key is rejected with a specific message rather than silently failing.

If you lose the recovery key

We cannot recover it. That is the point of the design — the key never reaches our servers, so there is no copy for support to look up.

The escape hatch is Reset Private Sync, which you run from the website while signed in. It clears the escrowed key and purges the synced rows that hold unreadable ciphertext, returning the account to a usable state.

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Reset destroys the server-side copy of your encrypted content. Data on a device that can still read it is untouched — so run the reset from a machine that already has your data, then let it re-upload.

It fails closed

If InkSpoke cannot confirm whether your account is in encrypted mode — a flaky network, an ambiguous server response — it holds the affected changes rather than uploading them unencrypted. Sync may show as pending; it will not quietly downgrade your protection. The server independently rejects a plaintext value on a field that should be encrypted.

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