About Siren
Siren is a messaging app for women, with the safety features underneath the part you use every day. It exists because the two things a woman needs most in a bad moment are the people who would come for her and something that reaches them without a word said out loud.
Why it is called Siren
In the Odyssey the sirens are women whose voices carry across water, and the sailors' answer is wax in the ears and rope around the mast: do not listen, and tie yourself down in case you do. The story has been handed on for three thousand years as a warning about women. Read again, it is a story about men deciding that a woman's voice is a danger to be restrained against.
Siren gives the voice back its purpose. Here it is the thing that reaches your people: hold the button and speak, in your own voice, the way you would to someone sitting beside you. The same voice can raise an alarm with nothing showing on the screen, which is the version of the song the myth never imagined.
The other siren is the one on the ambulance: a sound built to cross a city, understood by everyone without being explained, and meaning that somebody is on the way. That is the one in the mark, sound leaving a woman's head in waves. Siren is trying to be both at once: the voice they wanted quiet, and the alarm nobody can mistake.
It has to be the app you already open
A safety app you install and forget is not on the screen when it matters, and it is not something you would open in front of anyone. So the front of Siren is a conversation with your women, and the SOS sits one gesture underneath it. Everything expires by default, because a message that survives is a message someone can read off your phone later.
Nobody walks in
Anyone can download Siren. Almost nobody gets past the door. Getting in takes a member who will vouch for you, or three members who listen to a recording and agree. Every account traces back to whoever let it in, which means there is somebody with something to lose behind every woman here.
What Siren refuses to do
- No profiles of men, no browsing, no searching by name. A report attaches to a phone number, and only a woman who already has that number ever sees it.
- No reading your messages. They are encrypted to your devices, and the server holds ciphertext it has no key for. That is not a promise about our intentions; it is a description of what we could hand over if we were made to.
- No advertising, no data sold, no analytics service watching you use the app. Traffic is counted as a number per day, with nothing attached that could say it was you.
- No claims we cannot keep. Where a feature only works on some phones, the app says so on the screen where you would otherwise rely on it.
How it is paid for
Everything in the app is free for every woman, with no paid tier and nothing held back for one. What pays for Siren is institutions that carry a duty of care to women: universities, employers with late shifts and travel, NGOs working on domestic violence.
The first sirens
Three women build Siren, and they answer to Ligeia, Molpe and Aglaope. The myth never agreed on how many sirens there were, and those are the three whose names are the voice itself: clear-toned, song, and splendid sounding. They took them the way you take a callsign, and call themselves the first sirens.
Not their own names, and that is the argument rather than a shyness about it. Siren is built so that a woman can say what happened to her without it costing her anything, and the three people who built a network for women hiding from someone are not going to be the exception who put their faces on the homepage. It also keeps the product from being a personality. If this only works while three particular women are interesting, it does not work.
What cannot be a pseudonym is who answers in law. A woman who wants her data corrected, or who wants to complain to a regulator, needs a real name and a real address to act against, and a company is what carries that. That name belongs on the Terms page. It is not there yet, and until it is, Siren stays closed to everyone except the women testing it — because a page about trust with nobody accountable on it is the wrong page, whatever else is written above.
Reaching us
Siren is made by Athalanta. For press, for anything you want to ask before you join, or for anything else — a person reads it. Institutions can also start a conversation on their own page. Legal notice has its own address, on the Terms page, which is not filled in yet.