What Stand holds, what we'll fight, and what we literally cannot hand over.
Civic advocacy sometimes draws subpoenas, warrants, and other legal demands. If you're organizing on Stand, you deserve to know what the platform actually knows about you and what happens when someone comes asking.
Scaffold — final legal review pending
What data Stand holds about you
We designed Stand to hold as little as possible. That is a product choice, not an accident. Less data means fewer questions we can be compelled to answer.
We do hold
- Your handle and whether an account exists under it
- Account creation date
- Last-seen date (coarse — no precise timestamps)
- Last-seen city-level location (derived from IP, truncated to a city radius, rotated every 24 hours)
- Encrypted ciphertext of undelivered messages, temporarily, until the recipient's device picks them up
- Public group membership for groups you opted to list publicly
We do not hold
- Your message content (plaintext) — ever
- Private group membership rosters
- Who you've been talking to (sealed sender)
- Your real name, unless you chose to put it in your profile
- Your phone number or email, unless you chose to provide one
- Location history beyond the current city-level last-seen
- Your reading history, typing events, or read receipts (unless you opted into those features, in which case they travel encrypted)
What we can produce under a lawful subpoena
In response to a valid US subpoena with proper jurisdiction, and after our counsel has reviewed it, we can typically produce the items in the left column above. That's it. If the subpoena asks for items in the right column, we will respond that we do not possess them.
The honest version
A subpoena asking "who is this organizer talking to?" returns a list of nobody. Not because we're being clever — because sealed sender means our servers never see who sends a message, only that one was delivered. The metadata isn't hidden from you; it doesn't exist on our side.
"Just decrypt it for us"
We cannot. End-to-end encrypted messages on Stand are encrypted on your device with keys that never leave your device. Our servers handle ciphertext only. There is no master key, no lawful-access key, no escrow, no "we can if you really need it."
If a court orders us to decrypt a user's messages, the technically honest response is: we do not have the capability, and building it would require us to ship a different product to that user without telling them. We will not do that. We believe the Lavabit precedent supports that position.
The only way to decrypt your messages is to have the keys, which live on your device(s). If you are compelled to unlock a device, see Messages → Settings for the panic-wipe and duress-password features. They are not magic, but they are tools you have.
What Stand does when served
Route to counsel
Every process request goes to outside counsel before anything else happens. No rank-and-file engineer receives or touches subpoenas.
Check validity and jurisdiction
We confirm the request is from a valid authority, signed, properly served, and within its jurisdictional reach. Improper requests get a written refusal.
Notify the user, where lawful
Unless a court order prohibits notification (see gag orders below), we tell the affected user before we produce. This gives the user a chance to hire their own lawyer and contest.
Produce the minimum
We read the request narrowly. If it asks for "all data associated with the account," we produce only the specific fields lawfully demanded — not a wholesale account dump.
Fight overreach
Fishing expeditions, gag orders we think are unconstitutional, and demands for content we don't hold all get pushed back through counsel.
Gag orders and the warrant canary
Some legal demands come with a non-disclosure order barring us from telling the affected user. We will challenge those where we have a plausible basis. Where we cannot notify the specific user, we publish a general warrant canary in our annual transparency report, so users can at least see an aggregate count.
Transparency report
We publish an annual summary of legal-process requests. The Scaffold here reflects the fact that Stand has not been served with any requests yet — we'll publish the first report with real numbers after our first full calendar year of operation.
| Category | 2026 H1 |
|---|---|
| Subpoenas received | — |
| Search warrants received | — |
| National security letters | — |
| Foreign government requests | — |
| Civil discovery demands | — |
| Accounts where data was produced | — |
| Requests challenged or refused | — |
Reporting period: January – June 2026. Next update: January 2027.
Questions or a journalist inquiry?
Email legal@voliaventures.com. For process service, send to that address for routing; we will confirm receipt but do not accept service by email alone.