FAQs
What is Cacti?
Cacti is an AI-Powered Photo Vault
What can I do with Cacti?
Cacti is primarily a secure vault for your private photos. But it’s not just that, it has a very powerful AI that lives and works right on your device to suggest possibly-intimate and private photos for you to add to your vault. It’s just there to make your life easier.
How secure is Cacti?
Cacti is quite secure. Of course, nothing is a 100% secure and there are smart people trying to break into secure systems all the time. Given that, we believe Cacti is secure enough because of the following reasons.
We do not have a cloud component or a remote server for Cacti. This was by design, and it means that your photo data never leaves your phones because of Cacti.
Even the photos stored inside the Cacti Vault are encrypted using the industry-standard 256-bit AES. The key used for this encryption is derived from your passphrase. Cacti never stores this passphrase anywhere. This means that your photos cannot be decrypted without your passphrase being entered. This also means that you lose your photos if you forget your passphrase. More on that later.
We do not have a mechanism to create accounts on Cacti. This means that we do not know who you are. And, this is a great thing for privacy.
Do I lose my data if I lose my passphrase?
If you are trying to be very secure, yes. This is by design, to protect your data. If Cacti provided a way to recover your encrypted data without your passphrase, it means that we can, on some level, access your personal photos, and this also means anyone who is sophisticated enough could access your data, as no data is ever a 100% secure on the cloud.
We wanted Cacti to be as secure as it can be. And your data will be accessible only by you no, matter what. But, read on.
I don’t trust my memory, and I want to be able to recover my data if I forgot my passphrase. What do I do?
Well, if you are that concerned about forgetting your passphrase and do not mind the security compromise that it comes with, we have an option for you. This is the second-best thing we could do, in terms of security.
Apple’s iOS provides something called a Keychain. This is an encrypted storage that is accessible only within the app after your device has been unlocked. The data stored here, in ideal conditions, would not be accessible by anybody other than the Cacti app running on your device. We will optionally store your Cacti Vault passphrase in this Keychain (which is available only on your device and your iCloud, if you have chosen to sync your Keychain on your iCloud). Every time you want to unlock your vault, we ask iOS to authenticate you using Face ID or Touch ID, after which we access your passphrase from the Keychain to unlock your vault and give you access to your data.
Now, this is better in terms of your forgetful memory because the passphrase is remembered on your Keychain. It would be available as long as your Keychain is available for Cacti to access this data from. This would be unavailable if you ever clear your Keychain or log out of your Apple ID from your device which makes iOS delete the Keychain. Then, you will have to enter your passphrase to unlock your vault.
We still strongly recommend you use the passphrase every time you want to unlock your vault, and continue to remember your passphrase. After all, it is your most private and intimate data.
What are Cacti Suggestions?
Cacti comes with it’s own AI in the box. While real-AI is yet to be attained, what we call an AI is actually a Machine Learning model that we have meticulously trained with millions of images. We have taught the model how to distinguish between intimate and non-intimate images. Now, if you have images that contain a good amount of nudity, be sure that our model will catch it. But since the definition of intimacy is subjective, and because our model is still young, it would make mistakes.
We have adjusted the model to err on the side of caution. This means that you might be suggested photos that show a lot of skin even if there’s no nudity being suggested to you. You may not consider that intimate but some other people may. Apart from this, our model sometimes mistakes dogs to be intimate (after all they usually don’t wear clothes).
We will eventually provide you a control over what Cacti suggests so your workflow becomes more efficient.
For now, use Cacti Suggestions as your starting point to move images to the vault. Browse through the rest of your library to find only the photos that our suggestions may have left out. This will make you efficient.
Will Cacti work Offline?
The Cacti app itself does not require an internet connection to work. All the core features of the app works right on your device, without ever contacting a cloud server. But, if you use iCloud Photos Library and have enabled Optimize Photos on your iPhone, your device may not always have the full-resolution photos stored locally. When you do not have an active internet connection, Cacti would not be able to request the full resolution image from iCloud and moving to vault may fail due to this.
Even the ML Model on Cacti requires a certain minimum resolution image in order to accurately analyze your image and determine if it is intimate or not. Without a network connection, this may not work optimally if you’ve enabled iCloud Photos.
That being said, be sure that if you do not have iCloud Photos, Cacti will work a 100% without an internet connection.
You may optionally choose to disable Mobile Data access to the Cacti Vault app to be extra-sure.
Do you collect any data?
Yes, we do collect non-personally-identifiable basic data. We collect very basic usage and app-crash information. This helps us know how much a certain feature is being used, and helps us optimize that in future releases. The crash information helps us know when something unexpected happens on your app so we can quickly release a fix.
The data we send out of your device over to us is anonymized and is statistical in nature.
We strive to be compliant to GDPR and various other privacy laws. In fact, we are way more strict about your data than these laws require us to be. This means, even if you consented to share these anonymized data initially, you can always turn that off, and have us delete any data that has been previously collected from Settings.
Do you have any pro tips?
Oh yes, we do! We’re glad you asked.
Add to Cacti Vault from any App: Use the iOS share option which brings up the share sheet (also called Activity View) on an image from any other app on your device. It could be from the Photos app, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Photos, Files, etc. Find the Cacti Vault app icon in the horizontally scrollable list and tap on it. If you can’t find it, tap on More in the very end and look for Cacti Vault in the list. The resulting view would easily allow you to add up to 20 photos at a time to the vault.
Add to Cacti Vault from Clipboard: Copy a photo from absolutely any app on your device (usually long pressing an image, clicking on options, or sharing will show a copy option). Open the Cacti Vault app, navigate to the Smart Manager (Left button tab on the tab bar). and scroll down to the Clipboard section. The button in that section would highlight if you have copied 1 or more image(s). Tap on it to quickly add to your vault.
Add to Cacti Vault from your Mac: Yes, you can add photos to your Cacti vault on iOS from your Mac. Make sure you have Universal Clipboard enabled. Just copy a photo on your Mac, when you’re in the vicinity of your Mac, open the Cacti Vault app on your iOS device, navigate to the Smart Manager and scroll down to the Clipboard section. Tap on the highlighted button, and voila! you can see the your photo copied on your Mac. Quickly add this to the vault for safekeeping.