Is Linky AI safe? What the app collects, and what it costs

Linky AI is safe in the ordinary sense: it is a real app from a real company, Skywork AI Pte. Ltd., and it is not malware. One fact changed the picture in 2026: its US App Store listing now returns a 404, so in the US it ships on Google Play and as a web chat at linke.ai. The risks are the ones this whole category carries, plus a few specific to Linky. Your conversations sit on its servers, the characters are user-made so the content is unpredictable, and age is self-declared rather than verified. The Linky-specific ones are money, data sharing and moderation: coins stack on top of the subscription, refunds go through Apple or Google rather than Linky, its privacy policy allows sharing behavioral data with advertising partners, and independent reviewers have found sexually explicit material in character descriptions on a store listing rated for teens. None of that makes the app dangerous. It does mean you should sign up deliberately.

Who actually makes Linky AI?

Linky is built by Skywork AI Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-registered company at 2 Science Park Drive, and shipped as "Linky AI: Chat, Play, Connect" on Google Play, where it shows 10M+ downloads. Its US App Store listing returned a 404 when we checked on 15 September 2026, and Apple's own lookup service no longer finds the app; the vendor's website now offers only "Download for Android" alongside a browser chat. It is a substantial product rather than a weekend project: a large roster of characters weighted toward anime personas, rendered in 2D, animated Live2D, pixel and 3D styles, with voice, roleplay and a character creator.

Knowing the publisher matters for a safety question because it tells you who holds your data and which jurisdiction you would be dealing with if something went wrong. A Singapore entity serving US users is normal and legal. It also means your recourse under state privacy laws is more theoretical than it would be with a US company, and slower.

What data does Linky AI collect?

Linky's privacy policy was last updated on December 29, 2025, and the disclosed collection covers your device identifier, your in-app activity and personal information you provide. Two passages deserve a slower read. It allows "sharing your behavioral data and profiling data with online advertising service providers", naming Firebase Analytics and AppsFlyer. And it says "Linky and Linky Real form a unified Platform", with account data and "User Content (including chat messages)" synchronized between them. Linky Real is a separate voice-party social app. Google Play's description, meanwhile, says "All conversations are confidential, encrypted, and never shared." Registration asks for an email address and a birthday. That is a fairly standard set for a consumer app, and it is more than people assume they are handing over when they install something to chat with an illustrated character.

The part worth sitting with is not the device ID. It is the conversations. Companion chats drift toward real detail faster than almost any other kind of app use. Within a few weeks most people have named their employer, their city, an ex, a diagnosis, a family member. Individually those are nothing. Collected in one transcript on a server you do not control, they are a reasonably complete profile of you. Treat everything you type as recorded, because it is.

If you have already been generous with details across a handful of apps, the aggregation problem is bigger than any one of them. Companion apps are rarely the first place your information landed, and an afternoon spent pulling your personal details back out of the data brokers does more for your exposure than deleting one chat history.

Is Linky AI safe to use?

Yes, with normal precautions, and with clearer eyes than the store rating gives you. There are four risks worth naming.

Unpredictable characters. Linky's roster includes user-made characters, so quality and content swing hard. Reviewers have reported characters turning aggressive during roleplay and pushing past a stated no. There is no editorial layer between whoever wrote that character and you.

Age is self-declared. Linky asks for a birthday rather than verifying one, and its own terms set different floors by device: "not for persons under the age of 16 on Android devices and not for those under the age of 18 on IOS devices". Australia's eSafety Commissioner reviewed the app and found sexually explicit content in character descriptions and in its social media promotion, which sits badly against a store rating that lets teenagers install it. That gap is the single most substantive criticism of the app.

Data concentration. Not a Linky-specific flaw, just physics. Intimate chat logs are unusually damaging in a breach because they are self-incriminating in a way an email dump is not.

Reliability. Users through 2026 report characters glitching mid-conversation, calling users by the wrong name regardless of profile settings, misgendering them, and garbling text. One third-party sentiment analysis of about 7,435 reviews put roughly two thirds of reported experiences in the negative column, and the JustUseApp safety score sits at 33 out of 100. Those are aggregated third-party numbers rather than audits, so read them as a signal about polish and complaint volume, not a verdict.

Is Linky AI safe for kids?

No. This is the clearest answer in the article. Linky hosts user-made romantic and mature characters, verifies age by asking, and has been documented by a national online-safety regulator carrying sexually explicit character descriptions. Whatever the store rating says, it functions as an adults-only product.

If you are a parent and the app is already installed, the useful move is a conversation rather than a hunt for parental controls, because meaningful controls are not there. The app has no content-level filter you can set on someone else's behalf.

Is Linky AI safe to spend money on?

This is a real question people search, and it deserves a direct answer: your card is not at unusual risk, but the pricing model makes it easy to spend more than you planned. Three things to know before you subscribe.

First, the subscription is not the whole bill, and Linky publishes no price for either. Its terms describe Pro as including "30 free coins daily, access to more daily card draws" and faster responses, renewing on "monthly, quarterly or annually" periods, and on the web chat "One message consumes one" coin. Google Play prices in-app items at "$0.49 - $269.99 per item". The $17 a month figure repeated in reviews has no vendor source we could find; our Linky AI review lays out what can and cannot be verified. Any product that sells a currency alongside a subscription has a variable monthly cost by design, and gacha-style draws are engineered to feel worth one more try.

Second, Linky does not handle refunds itself. Its terms say to cancel in the App Store or Google Play "at leaset 24 hours prior to the expiration of the current period" (the typo is theirs), that for a refund "you must contact Apple or Google directly", and that Linky "will have no liability to you whatsoever for any refunds in connection with subscriptions, except when required by the applicable law." Cancel a day early, not on the renewal date.

Third, and this applies to every app in the category: check how the charge appears on your statement before you subscribe, not after. If you are the sort of person who discovers subscriptions two months late, putting an alert on new recurring charges is a five-minute setup that pays for itself the first time a $17 renewal you forgot about shows up.

One more note that is about value rather than safety. Several reviewers report that the paid tier filters more aggressively than the free one. If you subscribed expecting fewer restrictions, test that in the first days, because any refund is Google's decision, not Linky's.

Is Linky AI chat private?

Private from other users, yes. Private in the way an encrypted messenger is, no. Your chats are stored on Linky's infrastructure, tied to the account you created them with, and covered by a privacy policy the company can revise. Nothing is published, and nothing is ephemeral either.

The practical consequence is that anonymity is a thing you construct, not a thing you are given. If you signed up with your main email address, the trail from a transcript back to you is one step long.

How to use Linky AI safely

Six habits cover most of the exposure and take about ten minutes to set up once.

Register with a dedicated email address that is not tied to your name, your work or your main accounts, and do not reuse a password. Give a birthday that satisfies the 18+ gate without being your actual date of birth, which is a credential elsewhere. Keep real identifiers out of the chat entirely: no full name, employer, street, school, or the names of other people in your life. Turn off notification previews on your lock screen, which has caused more awkward moments than any breach. Decide your monthly ceiling before you buy the first coin pack rather than during. And find the account-deletion route while you are calm, not during a panic.

Safer alternatives, and what safer actually means

"Safer" splits into two things people run together. One is data safety: how your conversations are stored, whether they train models, whether you can delete them. On that axis, no companion app is meaningfully private, and the realistic goal is knowing exactly what you hand over and keeping the identifying parts out of it.

The other is content safety, which is where apps genuinely differ. A platform with a stated editorial line behaves predictably because somebody decided in advance what it will and will not do. An open library of user-made characters cannot make that promise, because the promise would have to be made by thousands of strangers. That is the whole reason a character can ignore a no.

That predictability is the model we chose for Aroused: adults only, romantic and flirtatious, never explicit, and one companion you design rather than a catalog of other people's characters. It runs fully in a browser, including the companion builder, whereas Linky's own web version does not let you create or customize a character. If that shape appeals, the Linky AI alternative comparison puts it side by side with Linky, Character.AI, Talkie, PolyBuzz and Nomi on price, memory, coin packs and content rules. The broader privacy guide to AI companion apps goes deeper on what to check in any of them, and why companion memory works the way it does explains the twelve-turn problem properly.

Frequently asked questions

Is Linky AI safe to use?

Yes, with normal precautions. Linky is a legitimate app from Skywork AI Pte. Ltd. and is not malicious. The real risks are stored conversations, user-made characters that behave unpredictably, age verification that is self-declared, and a coin-pack model that makes spending variable. Use a dedicated email, keep real identifiers out of chats, and set a spending ceiling.

Does Linky AI store your conversations?

Yes. Chats live on Linky's servers rather than only on your device, tied to your account. Its privacy policy, last updated December 29, 2025, also discloses collection of your device identifier and in-app activity, says some data "will be kept for the life of your account", and synchronizes chat messages with a separate app, Linky Real. You can delete messages in the message list and the account from Settings.

Is Linky AI free, and does free mean less private?

Linky is free to install and chat with, subject to ads after nearly every response, memory that fades after roughly twelve turns, and a daily cap of about ten to twenty regenerations. Paying removes those limits, not the data collection. Free and paid accounts are stored and handled the same way, so subscribing changes how much you can talk, not what happens to what you say.

Why does Linky AI keep forgetting me?

Because its memory is short by design rather than broken. Reviewers testing in 2026 report characters losing the thread after around a dozen exchanges on the free tier, and users describe resets interrupting longer roleplay. Persistent memory across sessions is a separate engineering problem, and it is the feature to shop for specifically if continuity is what you actually want.

Can Linky AI conversations be traced back to you?

They are tied to the account you made them with. If that account uses your main email address or a phone number, the trail is short. A dedicated email plus no real identifiers in the chat does not make you anonymous, but it does mean an exposed transcript is not automatically an exposed person.