Aspects of the subject technology provide for privacy-preserving electronic publication and subscription. A publisher device may establish a publication channel with a publication server and receive a channel identifier and a channel ownership token for the channel. The publisher device may provide the channel identifier and a key for the publication channel to a subscriber device. The publisher device may publish data encrypted using the key to the publication server, the subscriber device may obtain the encrypted published data from the server using the channel identifier, and may decrypt the published data using the key obtained from the publisher device. The published data may include status information for a user of the publisher device, in some examples.