Safety

How Emberside protects the people in it

A small group shares a lot: prayer requests, photos from the weekend, messages late at night. Here is what Emberside does to keep that safe, in plain words.

Pictures

Every picture is checked, automatically

When someone shares a picture in a group, Emberside checks it within minutes. Two checks run on every picture, every time.

First, known child sexual abuse material. The picture is checked against a database of known abuse imagery kept by a child-protection organization. A match is removed at once, preserved as the law requires, and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Second, explicit content. An automated image classifier looks for sexually explicit pictures. Anything it flags is taken down at once, even from a chat that is open on someone’s phone, and a person on our staff reviews it.

Someone who keeps sharing pictures that get taken down loses the ability to share pictures, and our staff can lock them out of Emberside entirely.

Messages

You are never stuck with something you did not want to see

We do not read your messages or your prayer requests. A group writes about illness, marriages and grief, and reading that in bulk would be its own harm. Instead, every person has the tools to deal with something that is wrong.

Delete your own message at any time. Press and hold it.
Group leaders can remove a message posted to their group.
Report a message to Emberside. Press and hold it, then choose Report to Emberside. A person on our staff reads it. Your name is never shown to them, and the person you reported is not told who you are.
Urgent reports reach us straight away. If someone may be in danger, or it is about a child’s safety, our staff are alerted at once, not the next time someone checks.
Block someone. You stop seeing their messages and they cannot message you one to one. They are not told.

Privacy

Who can see what

Your group sees what you post to your group, and nobody else does. A side conversation is only for the people in it, not even the group’s leader.

Your church sees numbers about its groups, like how many people are in each one. It never sees a group’s prayer requests or chat. That is built into Emberside, not a setting someone can change.

Pictures are kept in private storage and shown through links that expire, so a picture cannot be passed around by copying its address.

Security

How we check our own work

The rules that decide who can read what are tested against a copy of the database every time anything changes, before it reaches you.

Every change to the code is scanned automatically for security problems and for passwords or keys left where they should not be.

We also put the code through red-team analysis: a review from an attacker’s point of view, asking how each part could be broken or misused. We do this with our own testing tool, Sentinel, alongside Aikido Security’s scanning.

Need to report something?

In the app, press and hold the message and choose Report to Emberside, or go to Settings → Report a safety concern. You can also read our child safety standards, which explain how to report without an account.

If anyone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency number first.