Can Singer Intelligent Homes read my data?

Your backups, no — we hold ciphertext, not the key. Much of the rest passes through us, and there we protect it by policy, not cryptography. Here is where, place by place.

Short answer, broken down by the places your data goes. Only the first is protected by cryptography; the rest rely on our policy or your box’s software.

Home backups: no. They’re encrypted inside your house before they ever leave it, with a key only you hold. Our servers store ciphertext — we can hand it back, we can’t open it.

Chat, when it uses our cloud AI provider: the provider sees your question, in order to answer it, and is contractually barred from training on it. It may hold a request for a limited time under its own policy, measured in weeks, not forever. We send your request without your account, so what the provider holds is a request, not a customer record. Anything the request carries goes along, though — a passage from a record Charyl looks up to answer you, say — and that can include a name or address.

Floor plans you import: the page is sent to Charyl Cloud and read by our AI provider on those same terms, and we keep it there for up to 30 days. Floor plans usually print the owner’s name and street address in the title block, and we don’t remove it yet, so that goes along to be read too. After 30 days we delete our copy of the page — your box keeps its own — and what was read from it, mainly the room layout, stays with your import in Charyl Cloud, along with the file’s name. A plan you save to the Charyl Cloud plan library stays there until it’s deleted. You can ask us to delete what we hold.

Charyl Cloud itself: when Charyl’s thinking happens in Charyl Cloud — as it does when you chat from the mobile app — what she looks up in your home to answer you passes through us. Charyl Cloud can also keep looking things up as you while your sign-in is valid, without a conversation going on. Keeping that to your conversations is our policy, not something your box enforces.

The mobile app: your phone reaches your home only through our relay, at home or away. Traffic is encrypted in transit, but our relay sees your phone’s sign-in and the contents of most requests, and it could make requests of its own as you — cameras included — and see the answers. It’s a convenience, not a confidentiality guarantee.

Records you mark private: your box keeps their contents from Charyl, unless you open one up yourself; she can see that one exists. That doesn’t stop our relay opening one as you, the way your phone would.

Reports you send with /bug: you see exactly what’s included before anything is sent. Our support team reads them. An AI service we use reads them too — everything except your chat with Charyl — to help sort them and suggest fixes.

Your box’s hourly health report, from a box connected to Charyl Cloud: software versions, whether each service and integration is running, storage and memory headroom, and the results of recent updates and backups — none of your home’s content. It’s on by default, and an admin can turn it off.

Updates we publish, and a box sent back to us for repair, can reach everything on it. For those, and every other way we can reach your box, see can Singer Intelligent Homes get into my Charyl box?.

One honest line

Where we can’t make a claim in cryptography, we make it in writing instead — and we say which is which.

Every change Charyl makes to your home also lands in an audit trail you can read — see is there a record of what Charyl changed?