Enclayve Is a Drab Black Box for Your Private Group Chats

Enclayve is a private social service hosted on a physical device. Plug it in, connect to Wi-Fi, and the device acts like a central server for a social network that can accommodate up to a few hundred people. Only the person with the device and the people they invite can log in and see what is shared there.

The device is a little rectangular plastic box, smaller than a credit card. It costs $129, but only one person needs to own it, and they can invite others in. (They’ll also have to download the app.) Once allowed in, the app looks like a bare-bones social media site. People can post in groups to chat and share photos. All messages and media sent between people in a group are stored on the device, which comes with a 32-GB microSD card that can be swapped out as needed. There is no subscription cost, no ads, no in-app purchases, and no data tracking by Enclayve, the company says.

Enclayve is meant to be a rebuttal to social sites like Facebook and X. Instead of having to post everything publicly and tacitly allow a company to suck up all data about your interactions on its platform, Enclayve stores all that information on a physical device and encrypts everything. It is the latest in a lineage of privacy-focused devices that aim to help users control their own data, like security cameras that keep footage local or hardware firewalls that protect you online.

David Chura, CEO of Enclayve, is a former director at Northrop Grumman and father of two. He says he was inspired to build the product in 2020 after watching Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg make some unconvincing privacy promises in testimony to US Congress.

“They were so underpowered it made me believe that there's never going to be legislation that can actually address issues in social media,” Chura says. “Consumers need to be able to protect themselves.”

Chura says that while Enclayve’s focus is a private social media service, there were initially three distinct versions of the device: one designed to be a wallet for cryptocurrency and another for NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. As the crypto economy collapsed and the idea of paying real money for digital “art” lost popularity, those deals fell through, and Enclayve became marketed solely as a social device.

Enclayve launched in March. The company positions its product like a group app for families like Family Album. Enclayve wants to take that a step further and keep everything everyone sends on its platform safe in its physical box. Device owners can create separate groups and topics and choose who gets invited to what. It feels like a stripped-down version of WhatsApp’s Communities feature, or even a very simple Slack workspace.

The app’s user interface, where users will spend most of their time, has limited features. Users can’t directly message a person outside the group or share more than one photo at a time. There was a single reaction emoji when I tested it on Android—the Like button—though Chura says more emoji reactions have been added to the iOS version of the app.

Privacy aside, it may be a hard sell to get people on the platform. The first thing you have to do is the hardest: convince the people you love to download a new app. I hooked up an Enclayve and invited my family to join, but my parents struggled to get access because the share links I sent them didn’t work properly. (My Dad still hasn’t gotten in.) When I post something, my brother mostly just sends extremely close-up pictures of his face and tells me I need to snort my vitamins. Ultimately, we all just went back to the regular group chat, and everyone still texts me through their usual channels. Your mileage may vary depending on how many people you can talk into joining the service, but the interface does not feel very inviting.

Chura’s hope is for Enclayve to expand into a peer-to-peer network that supports much larger groups of people. I ask Chura about content restrictions—whether Enclayve can do anything to monitor the content people share. Does he worry about people using this product for illegal things? Chura cuts right to the chase; he’s gotten these questions before.

“People have asked me directly, ‘Isn't this a great thing for child pornography or human trafficking?’” Chura says. “Privacy is a pretty powerful technology when you really can enforce it. Every technology can be used inappropriately and appropriately. We can't control the intent of people.”

A section on the Enclayve website called Child Safety acknowledges the possibility for bad actors—creeps, weirdos, predators—to use the device. Chura says the company will do anything it needs to do to comply with law enforcement in such an investigation. But ultimately, he says that his company will never really know what’s on people’s devices.

“It's like asking a gun manufacturer, ‘Can you make sure no one shoots you with this?’ I mean, no, you can't,” Chura says. “It's like asking Mark Zuckerberg, ‘Can you make sure there's no child trafficking on Facebook?’ But we know those products have incredible positives too. So that's what we have to get to.”