Privacy

The short version

Without an account, the app keeps everything on your phone. It asks this website for the library of ideas, and — if you use Ask — sends your question, and sometimes passages you chose, to be answered. That is all.

With an account (Sign in with Apple), three things are stored under it so they follow you to your next phone: the cards you save, your settings, and — if you connect a Kindle — your highlights. You can delete the account from inside the app, and everything under it goes at once.

No analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, no marketing SDKs, on the app or on this site. Nothing is sold or shared. The rest of this page is the long version, because “we collect almost nothing” is easy to say and worth showing your working for.

The iPhone app, without an account

What stays on your phone

The cards you save, the deck you were reading, your settings, the time of your daily reminder, and any Kindle highlights you bring in: all in the app’s own storage on your device. The reminder is scheduled by your phone; there is no push server, so no notification tells us anything. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

What leaves your phone

The library of ideas. On launch the app asks this website for its library, so new books reach you without an app update. That is an ordinary web request for a public file, the same file everyone gets. It carries no identifier and nothing about what you have read or saved. Offline, the app uses the copy it already has.

Ask. See its own section below.

Like any web request, these reach our host (Vercel) with your IP address and a browser-style user agent, which appear in standard server logs. We don’t analyse those logs, build profiles from them, or connect them to anything.

The account

Signing in

The only way to make an account is Sign in with Apple. Apple gives us a stable, random identifier for you and, if you allow it, your email address — or, if you choose “Hide My Email”, a relay address that forwards to you. We never see your Apple password. There is no other sign-up, no username, no profile.

What is stored under it

• The cards you save, and when you saved or removed them.
• Your settings (the reminder time, which sources Ask uses, and the like).
• If you connect a Kindle: your highlights, your notes on them, and the titles and authors of the books they come from. Alongside each highlight we keep a list of numbers made from its text (an “embedding”), which is what lets Ask find the highlights that bear on a question.
• A record of the questions you have asked, counted, so the quota can be kept.

This lives in a database run by Supabase, our database host, under access rules that let each reader reach only their own rows. We hold no payment information — there is nothing to pay for.

What is not stored under it

Your Amazon session (see Kindle, below). The text of your Ask questions, or the answers. Anything about how you use the app: which cards you read, how long, how often.

Removing it

Delete account, in the app’s settings, removes every row under your account and the account itself, immediately and for good. There is no retention period and nothing to request from us. Sign out of Kindle removes your highlights and their books from the account and from the phone, while keeping the account and your saved cards.

Your Kindle highlights

You can choose to bring your Kindle highlights into the app. This is optional, and nothing here happens unless you turn it on.

To connect, you sign in to Amazon on Amazon’s own page, shown inside the app. Your email and password go to Amazon and only to Amazon; the app never sees them. What the app keeps is the signed-in session Amazon hands back — the same cookie a browser would hold — stored on your phone and nowhere else.

With that session, your phone asks Amazon for your own notebook of highlights (the page at read.amazon.com/notebook) each time you open the app, and keeps a copy on your device. Those requests go from your phone to Amazon directly; we are not in the middle. Amazon sees them the way it sees any use of your Kindle account, under Amazon’s privacy notice.

If you have an account, the highlights are then stored under it, as described above, so they are on your next phone too. Without an account they stay on this one. Either way, Sign out of Kindle removes them, and the Amazon session, from wherever they are.

Ask

Ask puts a question to your books and writes an answer. Writing an answer needs a language model, which runs on a server, not on your phone. This is the one feature where something of yours leaves the phone.

What is sent. The question you picked. If you have chosen to answer from your own library, also the passages your phone judges to bear on it — up to fifty of your highlights. If you answer from the antilibrary alone, only which question it was.

Where it goes. To this website, and from there to a language model run by a third party — through OpenRouter, to OpenAI (and, for choosing passages, Anthropic). They receive the text for the duration of the request, under their own terms, which do not permit training on it. We send them no identifier for you. The antilibrary’s own questions were all answered once, in advance, and are served from a table without any model at all — so asking one of the shelf alone reaches no language model and sends nothing of yours.

What is kept. The answer, on your phone. The server keeps neither the question, the passages, nor the answer.

The count. Questions that need a model — the ones answered from your own library — are limited to ten a day and fifty a month per reader. Questions answered from the antilibrary alone are pre-written, so they are not counted and not limited. To count the rest, the app identifies itself with a random token it makes up on first use; with an account, the count is kept against the account instead. The server keeps the token and the counts, and nothing else about the questions.

Your highlights, for Ask. To find the highlights that bear on a question, their text is turned once into embeddings. The text goes to OpenAI (through OpenRouter) for that, comes back as numbers, and is not stored by them. Without an account the numbers live on your phone; with one, beside the highlights under your account.

Links to Amazon

Each card offers a “Buy on Amazon” link. Tapping it opens Amazon — in your browser or the Amazon app — at that book’s page. The link carries the book’s ISBN and nothing else: no identifier for you, and no record of which card you came from. Once you’re on Amazon you are on Amazon, and their privacy policy applies rather than ours. We receive nothing back and earn no commission.

TestFlight

If you installed the app through TestFlight, Apple collects the standard TestFlight information — crash logs and basic usage — under Apple’s privacy policy. That goes to Apple, not to us.

This website

The site has no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts. It sets no cookies of its own, and there is nothing to log into. Fonts are served from this site rather than fetched from Google, so loading a page here doesn’t announce your visit to anyone else. As with the app, our host receives the ordinary server-log information — IP address, user agent, which page was requested — that any web server receives. It isn’t analysed or linked to anything.

Who else touches your data

• Apple — Sign in with Apple; TestFlight.
• Vercel — hosts this website and the app’s server.
• Supabase — holds the account database.
• OpenRouter, OpenAI, Anthropic — the language models behind Ask, for the duration of a request.
• Amazon — your Kindle notebook, which your phone reads directly, if you connect it.

Each acts as a processor for us or, in Amazon’s case, on your own account with them. None receives anything to advertise with.

What we never do

• Sell, rent, or share your information.
• Show advertising, or allow anyone to advertise to you through us.
• Embed analytics, attribution, or marketing SDKs of any kind.
• Ask for your name, contacts, location, photos, or microphone.
• See, store, or transmit your Amazon password.
• Keep the text of what you ask, or the answer.
• Track you across apps or websites.

Children

The app is suitable for all ages. It has no chat between readers, no user-generated content anyone else can see, and no way for one reader to reach another.

Your data, and removing it

Without an account: deleting the app removes everything. With one: delete the account from the app’s settings, and everything under it goes at once; or write to us and we will do it. To see what we hold, write to us; there is little, and we will send it.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. A change that affected what we collect is described here plainly rather than folded into a longer document. This revision removed the microphone, because the app no longer has a field to speak into, and says which questions meet the quota.

Contact

Questions about any of this: bk2022@gmail.com.