Encrypted sharing

Share a cruise without sharing your data.

CruiseBuddy lets you send a magic link to your travel companions so they can see the cruise plan you choose to share. The interesting part is what doesn’t happen: nobody at Owl Media ever sees your trip details, not even us.

How a CruiseBuddy share link works

A short walkthrough of what happens between tapping “share” and your friend opening the cruise.

  1. Your device makes the key

    When you choose to share a cruise, CruiseBuddy generates a fresh strong encryption key on your device. That key is used to encrypt the cruise bundle locally before anything leaves your phone or browser.

  2. Only ciphertext reaches our server

    The encrypted bundle, a nonce and a message authentication code are uploaded to cruise-buddy.app. We can’t read it, the key never leaves your device. Each share has an expiry date, after which the record is deleted.

  3. The magic link carries the key

    Your share link looks like cruise-buddy.app/share/… with the decryption key tucked into the URL fragment after the #. Browsers don’t send fragments to the server, so only people you give the link to can decrypt the cruise plan.

What sharing does and doesn’t do.

A plain-English summary of what shared cruises actually involve.

End-to-end encrypted

Your device encrypts the cruise bundle with AES-256-GCM before upload. Owl Media has no way to read the contents.

Links auto-expire

Every share has an expiry date, at most 30 days away. Links made in the web app last seven days. After that, the encrypted record is deleted from our server and the link stops working.

Two kinds of link

A traveller link carries the plan: itinerary, excursions, lists, notes, reminders, money and travel bookings. A follower link is a read-only overview and itinerary for someone at home. Documents, photos, people and medical details are never included in either.

Nothing to pay for recipients

People you send the link to open it in CruiseBuddy on any device, and the cruise is decrypted on their own device. They do not need Plus, and a follower link does not use up one of their free cruises.

Send it to the right people

Anyone with the full link can open the cruise until the link expires, so send it only to the people it is for. If plans change, send a fresh link.

No tracking pixels

Shared pages don’t embed advertising trackers. We log only what we need to keep the service running.

Try sharing in CruiseBuddy.

Encrypted sharing works in CruiseBuddy on any device: phone, tablet or computer.

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