With social media surrounding our every move, it’s important to use one that keeps personal information protected and secure from harmful hacking. While most of us use Facebook and Twitter to post out to the world, sometimes you need a way to share with a closer knit group with information that is highly protected.

InnerGroup is a social media app that provides that service. You can use it with family, friends and for work. The key is to use with a focused group, one that you know you may be sharing sensitive information with. It supports end-to-end encryption of text messages, videos, photos and audio files, so you can send with piece of mind.

Many of these social media sites are set up with a business end-game in mind. They are looking to mine and extract data from posts and media files to learn more about you, your family, your friends, your coworkers and even your likes and dislikes. Every move you make is information to them. While they say their servers are secure, we all know given the several data breaches seen in the past few years, that nothing is secure unless it’s been wiped clean from a server or if the server itself has superb protection from hackers.

InnerGroup does not collect any information nor does it store it. This prevents information from being tracked, intercepted or monitored. Members, or Groupies as they are called in the app, do not have to provide phone numbers or email addresses to use the app and nothing gets saved in the cloud, either. Invites use a Join Code to allow for invitees to join a group.

As a user, you can only join a group if you are invited. As a creator of a group, you have the power to create your own group. Non members must request an invite to join a group. They cannot just join and not everyone can grant the access, either.

Messages are encrypted before being sent, and once they are received, they are deleted from the InnerGroup server. Only the device will have the message or file. If the creator of a group decides to delete the group, all messages are automatically deleted from the owner’s and each Groupie’s device. Nothing is kept, preventing any possibility of a data breach.

What is also nice is the ability to control who is in the group. If a Groupie needs to be removed, the owner of the group can do so, and then literally prevent that user from joining the group by assigning a new Join Code to that group.

While the app is free, which makes its claim to security questionable; there is a fee to create a new group, which is $1.99. So, that is how the app is able to support its ad-free and superb security controls. I think that should be explained better up front so people know this really is not a completely free app. The person who needs to create a group will need to make that in-app purchase.

Even at that price, InnerGroup is a refreshing break from the exposed social media sites, where you really are putting your personal information out there. I highly recommend this app if you want to set up a way to communicate and share information safely and securely.