Why We Built Fidaro

From ExpressVPN to Fidaro

The team behind Fidaro has been thinking about privacy for a long time.

Fidaro was created by the co-founders and early employees of ExpressVPN, a group of people who spent years building privacy products for millions of users around the world. That experience shaped how we think about technology, and it shaped the way we approached AI from the beginning.

At ExpressVPN, we learned that people care deeply about privacy, but don’t want it to feel complicated. They don’t want to study technical settings, compare protocols, or become security experts just to use a product. They want something that works, feels simple, and gives them confidence that the hard parts are being handled properly.

We also learned that real privacy cannot depend only on what a company says in a policy. Policies matter, but they aren't enough. A policy is a promise about how a company intends to behave, while architecture determines what the company can and cannot do in the first place.

That distinction has always mattered. With AI, it matters even more.

Why AI Privacy Feels Different

AI isn’t like the other tools we use online.

A search engine knows what you look up. A social app knows who you talk to. A bank knows what you spend. Those are all sensitive in their own ways, but AI can become something more personal. It can start to hold a record of how you think.

People don’t just use AI for facts or quick answers. They use it to work through unfinished thoughts, private questions, personal decisions, and things they may not be ready to say out loud.

For example, someone might ask:

• “Do you think my partner is losing interest in me?”
• “These symptoms started three weeks ago. Should I be worried?”
• “How do I ask my boss for a raise?”
• “Am I making the wrong decision about my job?”
• “How should I talk to my child about something difficult?”

These aren’t normal search queries. They’re the kinds of questions people ask when they’re thinking through something real. That’s why AI is so useful, and exactly why the privacy problem matters so much.

The better AI gets, the more personal it becomes. The more it helps you think clearly, write honestly, or work through something difficult, the more likely you are to share things you wouldn’t want sitting around in someone else’s database.

Privacy by Design, Not by Policy

Today, most AI privacy still depends on trust.

Trust the company not to read your chats. Trust that your conversations won’t be used in ways you didn’t expect. Trust that deletion works the way you assume it does. Trust that the policy won’t change later.

Some companies may take those responsibilities seriously. But from our experience building privacy infrastructure, we know that promises aren’t the same as protection. A policy can change. A setting can be missed. A server can be breached. A company can be required to turn over data it has access to.

That is the core problem. If a company can read your conversations, then your privacy ultimately depends on that company choosing not to.

We wanted a different model.

Fidaro is built around privacy by design, not privacy by policy. That means the product is designed so we cannot see your conversations, even if we wanted to.

Not because we have made a promise not to look.

Because we simply don’t have access to the plain text of your conversations in the first place.

That’s  the kind of privacy model we think AI needs. So that’s what we set out to build.

What We Built

We built Fidaro around one basic idea: you should be able to use AI without handing over your private thoughts.

When you send a message on Fidaro, it is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves your browser. Our servers pass along encrypted data, but they can’t read what it says. When your message needs to be processed by AI, it is decrypted only inside a Trusted Execution Environment, or TEE.

A TEE is a hardware-isolated environment designed to keep data sealed off while it is being processed. In plain English, it gives the AI a protected place to work with your message without exposing that message to the rest of the system, including Fidaro.

The result is simple:

• Your message is encrypted before it leaves your device.
• Fidaro’s servers pass along encrypted data, but cannot read it.
• AI processing happens inside a protected hardware environment.
• Our team cannot log in and browse your conversations.
• Your conversations are not available to us in plain text.
• Fidaro is built so we cannot see your data, even if we wanted to.

You can read more on our How It Works page.  The important point is the design principle: privacy shouldn’t be something you have to find in settings or hope is enforced by policy. It should be built into the product from the beginning.

Opening Fidaro in Beta

Today, we’re opening Fidaro in beta.

It is still early. The product will improve, the models will get better, and the experience will become simpler. We are sharing it now because the core idea is already in place, and because we want to learn from people who care about using AI more privately.

During beta, we want to understand where Fidaro is already useful, where it still feels rough, and what people need before they can rely on private AI more often. The product will change quickly. The principle will not.

People shouldn’t have to choose between useful AI and private AI. They shouldn’t have to hold back from asking real questions because they are unsure where their words will end up. They shouldn’t need to become security experts just to feel comfortable using a tool that is supposed to help them think.

We started Fidaro because we saw AI becoming one of the most personal technologies people use, and because of our background, we couldn’t look at that and accept the usual privacy model.

We wanted AI that was useful enough to think with, but private enough to use honestly. AI for the real questions, not just the safe ones.

That is what we are building.

Try Fidaro now →