How withHer Keeps You Safe Learning From the Apps That Failed Women

Someone asked us a question this week that we think is the most important question anyone can ask us. She said she loved the idea of withHer, but she wanted to know how we would police it to make sure it is truly safe for women, and what happens if all that information ends up in the wrong hands.

She is right to ask. And she deserves a real answer, not a marketing one. So here it is.

We are a safety app. If we are not the safest app on your phone, we should not exist.

This is not a feature we plan to get to later. It is the entire reason withHer is being built.

An app that holds a woman's location, her trusted contacts and her voice, and then handles that carelessly, is not a safety app. It is a liability dressed up as one. So before we built anything, we studied the apps that failed women. Not to score points, but because their mistakes are a warning, and we refuse to repeat them.

What went wrong before, and why

Giggle

Giggle was an Australian women-only app. In 2020, security researchers found a flaw in it so basic it is genuinely hard to believe. By simply changing a number in a web request, anyone could pull up any other user's full record. Her name. Her email. Her phone number. Her exact GPS coordinates. And the selfie she had submitted to prove she was a woman.

There was no check to see whether the person asking was allowed to see it. The app just handed it over.

Women signed up to feel safer, and instead their locations and their faces were exposed to anyone who knew where to look. When the researchers reported it, they were threatened rather than thanked.

Tea

Tea was a women's safety app in the United States. In July 2025 it was breached. Around 72,000 images were accessed, including roughly 13,000 verification selfies and photos of government IDs. Days later a second breach exposed over a million private messages.

The most damning part is this. Tea's own privacy policy told women their verification photos were deleted after use. They were not. They were still sitting in an old system that nobody had cleaned up.

The app was pulled from the App Store.

The lesson we took from both

Neither of these was a sophisticated attack. Both were basic, preventable failures by apps that had promised women safety. And in both cases, the women who trusted them paid the price.

That is exactly what we are determined never to do.

How we have built the opposite

We do not collect what we do not need

The safest information is information that does not exist. You cannot leak what you never stored. So we collect as little as we possibly can. If we do not need it to keep you safe, we do not want it, and we do not keep it.

This one principle is what would have saved both Giggle and Tea.

We do not keep a history of where you have been

This is worth explaining properly, because there is an important difference between the two things people mean when they talk about location.

To show you deals near you, or to put nearby partner venues on the map, the app needs to know roughly where you are in that moment. That is it. It uses it, shows you what is around you, and forgets it. Your weather app does the same thing every time you open it.

What we never do is build a record of everywhere you have been. No trail of where you were on Monday, or Tuesday, or last month, sitting on a server. That history is exactly what gets leaked, sold, subpoenaed, or used against a woman, and we simply do not create it.

The same goes for your live location during an SOS. It exists only while you are actively sharing it with your Halo Circle, and then it is gone.

Our brand partners never see your location either

People assume that for a brand to offer you a local deal, they must know where you are. They do not.

A brand tells us where they are and what they are offering. A cafe in Fitzroy says here is our deal. The app then shows that deal to women near Fitzroy. The brand targets a place, never a person. They never see your location, they never receive your information, and they never know who saw their offer or where she was standing when she saw it.

The matching happens quietly inside the app. Your information never leaves it.

We do not keep your verification photo

This is the exact thing that hurt women at both Giggle and Tea. Verification confirms you are a woman, and then the photo is gone. We keep the answer, not the image.

Your location is never public

It is never visible to the community. It is never shown to other members. It is never shared with our brand partners. When you activate an SOS, it goes only to the small circle of people you personally choose, your Halo Circle, and no one else.

Everything sensitive is encrypted

Encryption means your information is scrambled so that only the people meant to see it can read it. We encrypt your data both when it travels between devices and when it is stored. Even if someone got hold of it, they could not read it.

The SOS is discreet, because it has to be

If you feel unsafe, you double click and hold the Action Button on your iPhone. That is it. You do not unlock your phone. You do not open the app. You do not look at your screen. Nobody standing near you knows you have done anything at all.

Your Halo Circle is alerted instantly, they get your live location, and the app records twenty seconds of audio in case the worst happens. We are working on ways to bring that same discreet, one-touch protection to every phone, not just the newest iPhones.

There are no private messages

This is deliberate. On most apps, harm reaches a woman through a private message. Someone finds her, messages her, and it escalates from there. withHer does not have private messaging at all. You have a profile so you can take part in the community, but no one can privately contact you, and your profile does not expose your location or your personal details.

We removed the door that bad actors usually walk through.

Every member is verified

withHer is a closed space. Every member is verified as a woman before she gets access. You always know who you are in here with.

We will never sell your data

Not to advertisers. Not to data brokers. Not to anyone. Some of the biggest safety apps in the world have made millions of dollars selling their users' location data. That is not a business model, it is a betrayal of the exact promise they made to the people who trusted them. We built withHer to be the opposite.

The laws we operate under

withHer is an Australian company and we are bound by Australian privacy law. That includes the Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, which govern how we collect, use, store and protect your information. It also includes the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, which means that if there is ever a breach likely to cause serious harm, we are legally required to tell you and to tell the regulator.

We take those obligations seriously, and we would tell you anyway.

How we are testing this before we let anyone in

We are not launching until we are certain.

We are having our security independently tested by people whose job is to break into apps, because we do not think you should have to take our word for it. If they find a problem, we fix it before anyone is at risk.

Then we are running three rounds of beta testing with the women on our waitlist. The first round with around 50 women. The second with 300. The third with 1,000. Each round stress tests the app harder than the last, under real conditions, with real people, so that by the time we open the doors we have already put it through everything we can think of.

And if anyone ever finds a flaw in withHer, we want to hear about it and fix it. We will never threaten someone for telling us we have a problem.

The honest bit

No app can promise perfection, and we will not insult you by pretending otherwise.

What we can promise is this. We will never be careless with your safety. We will never treat your information as a product to be sold. And we will always tell you the truth about what we do and what we do not do.

We are building withHer because we believe women deserve better than what is out there. That belief means nothing if we do not hold ourselves to it first.

If you have questions about any of this, ask us. We would rather answer them than have you wonder.