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Privacy and security

Share links and QR codes

Send one item as an encrypted link that expires, or show a QR code that never leaves your device. How to make one and what the person you send it to sees.

· Every platform

Opening Share

Sharing sends one item to one person. Hover an item row and press the share button in the row's actions, or right-click the row and choose Share. On a phone, open the row's menu with the … button and choose Share. Opening an item to edit it and pressing the share icon in the footer does the same thing.

The dialog is headed Share and has two halves, which do very different things.

The Share dialog. The top half is headed Scan directly, offline and shows a QR code with the words Encodes the text itself. Nothing leaves this device. The bottom half is headed Send a link, with a line about the key travelling inside the link, an Expires row offering 1 hour, 1 day and 7 days with 1 day chosen, a One-time view switch turned on, and Cancel and Create link buttons. The Share dialog, with a one-day link and One-time view turned on.

Scan directly, offline

The top half is for handing a short piece of text to somebody sitting next to you. Relic draws the text itself as a QR code on your screen and they point their camera at it. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is created, so this works with no internet and without signing in.

It only appears for text items, and only when the text is short enough to scan reliably, which is about a thousand characters. Longer than that and the dialog says so:

The bottom half makes a web address you can send to anyone. Relic seals the item on your device first, uploads only the sealed bytes, and puts the key inside the link itself. The dialog says exactly this:

You need to be signed in for this half, because the sealed copy has to live somewhere until it is picked up. If you are not signed in, the dialog says Sign in to create encrypted share links. Recipients just open a web page. No account needed on their side.

  1. Pick how long it lives
    The EXPIRES row offers 1 hour, 1 day and 7 days. One day is the starting choice. When it expires the link stops working for good.
  2. Decide whether it dies after one look
    One-time view is a switch beside the expiry. Turn it on and the line next to it reads The link dies after the first reveal. Leave it off and it reads Anyone with the link can view until it expires.
  3. Press Create link
    The button reads Encrypting… while it works, then the dialog swaps to the finished link in a recessed box with a Copy button, and a QR code of the link under it.
  4. Read the line under the QR code
    It repeats what you chose, so you can check before you send: something like One-time view · expires Jun 14, 18:03. Without one-time view it is just the expiry.

What the other person sees

They open the link in an ordinary browser and get a small Relic page with the item on it. They do not need an account, an app, or an invitation. The unsealing happens in their browser using the key that came in the link, so the server hands out sealed bytes and never sees the content either.

A one-time link is spent by the moment they reveal the item, and stops working from then on. Opening the page by itself does not spend it, so a preview in a chat app will not burn the link before they get there.

Whoever holds the link can read that item, and can forward it to somebody else who can also read it. Send it the way you would send the thing itself. Sharing one item never exposes anything else in your vault.
It expires
At the hour, day or week you picked. Nothing to do.
It is viewed
A one-time link ends the moment the item is revealed.

Both are one-way. Once a link has ended, opening it shows nothing, and the sealed copy is cleared off the server on its own. Deleting the item from your vault does not reach back into a link you already sent, so when a link matters, choose a short expiry or turn on one-time view when you make it.

Secrets, and how many links you get

When the item is a masked secret, Relic asks first. The dialog reads Share this secret? with the line Anyone with the link or QR can read it. One-time view is recommended. and a Continue button. Secrets also start with One-time view already switched on, so you have to turn it off deliberately.

Two limits sit on the paid side of the product, and both are stated by the app when you hit them:

  • How many live links you can have at once. Expired and used-up links do not count. When you reach the number, Relic says Share limit reached. Old links expire on their own.
  • How big one shared item can be. A file past that size gets Too large to share on your plan. The offline QR is unaffected by either limit.

Both numbers go up on the paid plans. See what a share link exposes for the privacy side of this, and how encryption works for the sealing itself.

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