Is Replika Safe? What the Research Found

Replika is a legitimate app from a real US company, but it is not a private one. Mozilla gave it a Privacy Not Included warning in February 2024, and Italy's data protection authority fined its maker 5 million euro in May 2025 over GDPR failures. Assume your conversations are stored, and share accordingly.

That is the honest short answer, and it is more nuanced than either side of this argument usually allows. Replika is not malware and it will not empty your bank account. It is a well funded product that has handled personal data badly enough to lose a regulatory case, in a category where every app reviewed by independent researchers failed the same test. Below is what has actually been documented, with dates and sources, and what you can reasonably do about it.

Is Replika safe to use?

Safe from fraud, yes. Safe in the sense of private, no. Those are two different questions and people asking "is Replika safe" are usually asking both at once without separating them.

On the first: Luka Inc. has run Replika since 2017, it has tens of millions of registered accounts, it is distributed through the App Store and Google Play, and subscriptions cancel through the normal store mechanisms. There is no evidence of the app doing anything malicious to your device. On the second: the app records what you type, and the independent assessments of how that data is handled have been consistently poor. The distinction matters because the risk here is not that someone steals your credit card. It is that months of unusually personal conversation exist on a server, tied to an account, at a company whose data practices regulators have already sanctioned.

What did Mozilla find about Replika?

In February 2024 the Mozilla Foundation published a review of 11 romantic AI chatbots under its Privacy Not Included project. Every single one of the 11 earned the warning label, which Mozilla described as putting them among the worst product categories it had ever reviewed. Ten of the eleven failed Mozilla's minimum security standards, which are not a high bar: things like requiring a strong password and publishing a way to report a security vulnerability.

Replika was named specifically. Mozilla's researchers found that the app records the text, photos and videos users post, that behavioral data is shared and possibly sold to advertisers, and that accounts could be created with weak passwords. Across the whole set, more than half of the apps would not let users delete their data at all, and 73 percent had published nothing about how they manage security vulnerabilities.

Why was Replika fined 5 million euro?

On 19 May 2025, Italy's Garante per la protezione dei dati personali issued a 5 million euro penalty against Luka Inc. The decision cited three failures: age verification weak enough that minors could sign up, privacy disclosures that did not adequately explain what was happening to user data, and processing personal data without a valid legal basis under GDPR.

It is worth understanding what that last point means, because it is the most serious of the three. A valid legal basis is the foundational requirement of European data law. A regulator finding that a company processed personal data without one is not a paperwork complaint about a badly worded policy. It is a finding that the company should not have been handling the data the way it was at all.

Italy had already forced a temporary block on Replika in early 2023 over similar concerns, so this was not a first contact between the company and the regulator. If you are weighing whether to invest months of conversation in a service, a repeat regulatory finding is a more useful signal than any app store rating.

Is Replika safe for teenagers?

The regulators have effectively answered this one, and the answer is no. The Italian fine turned specifically on the fact that age verification was weak enough to let minors create accounts on a product built around romantic and emotional companionship. California SB 243, in force since 1 January 2026, now requires operators in this category to provide crisis protocols and break reminders for minors, which tells you what legislators concluded about the risk.

If you are a parent looking at this app on a teenager's phone, the useful facts are that the free tier is unrestricted text chat with no meaningful age gate, that romantic relationship status is a paid feature but the emotional attachment does not wait for a payment, and that conversations are retained. The 2026 disclosure requirements help, but they are notices rather than barriers.

What can you do to use Replika more safely?

Four things, in order of how much difference they make. First, decide before you start that the chat log is not private and behave accordingly: no full name, no employer, no address, no financial details, nothing about other people that they would not want stored. This costs you almost nothing in conversation quality and removes most of the actual exposure.

Second, use a unique strong password and an email address you do not use elsewhere, because weak password acceptance was one of the specific findings against the app. Third, if you are in a jurisdiction with data rights, exercise them: you can request a copy of what a company holds on you and ask for deletion, and it is genuinely worth doing at least once so you can see the size of the file. Anyone who has tried this across several services knows the hard part is working out where a person's data actually lives before you can ask for any of it back.

Fourth, do not pay for a year up front until you have decided you trust the company. This is the same advice we would give about any subscription in this category, including our own, and it applies with extra force where a regulator has already intervened twice.

Is Replika legit, or is it a scam?

It is legitimate. Replika is a real product from a real company with a support organization, and the subscription behaves normally. The scam framing shows up in search results mostly because people conflate two very different complaints: privacy failures, which are documented and serious, and disappointment about the February 2023 removal of erotic roleplay, which is a product decision rather than a fraud.

Legitimate does not mean careful, though. The Garante decision and the Mozilla assessment both describe a real company handling data badly, which is its own category of problem. If you want the full picture on what the app is like now, including what each tier costs and who it actually suits, we wrote a longer Replika AI review that covers the 2026 rebuild, and a breakdown of what Replika costs across every tier, since the company publishes no prices on its website.

Are other AI companion apps any safer?

Mostly not, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest given who is writing this. Mozilla's finding was that all 11 apps it reviewed earned the warning label, so this is a category norm rather than one company behaving unusually. Candy AI and CrushOn AI were flagged in the same review for collecting large amounts of personal data and sharing it with third parties. One app in the set, Romantic AI, was found to have fired off more than 24,000 data trackers within a minute of use.

There are a few things worth checking that do separate services in practice. Does the company make its money from subscriptions or from something less visible, because free products in this category fund themselves through ads, metered tokens or data. Does it publish a price before you install. Can you actually delete your account and history. And is it large enough to still exist in two years, which matters because when one of these shuts down the chat history usually goes with it, as people found when Soulmate AI closed in 2023 with about a week of notice. We covered that failure mode in more detail in what happens when an AI companion app shuts down, and the broader category question in are AI girlfriend apps safe.

So should you use Replika?

If you want the strongest long term memory in the category and you are disciplined about what you type, Replika is a reasonable choice and one of the few companies here large enough to still be around in 2028. If the privacy record is a dealbreaker, it should be, and no feature list offsets it.

The thing to avoid is the middle position, where you decide the risk is acceptable and then talk as though it is not there. Personal detail typed into any of these products is stored somewhere you do not control. That is true of Replika, it is true of us, and the only real protection is deciding in advance what you are willing to have on a server. If you are already looking for something different, there is a comparison of the closest options in our guide to Replika alternatives, and the companion in the demo at the top of this page runs without an account so you can try one before handing over anything at all. The same questions are worth running on the largest platform in the category, which we did in our look at Character AI age verification and what happens to your ID.