Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

Journologue is operated by Void Deck Technologies LLP, Singapore (Journologue, we, us or our). We are responsible for deciding how information is used to operate the Journologue app, its cloud features, and journologue.com.

For privacy questions, requests or complaints, contact support@journologue.com.

This policy covers information we process through these services and support communications. It does not replace the privacy notices of services you use separately, such as your sign-in provider, Apple, or a destination you choose when exporting a journal. Our Terms of Use explain the conditions for using Journologue.

Reading this policy is not a waiver of your privacy rights or blanket permission for every use of your information. Where a feature requires your permission, that permission must be obtained separately.

2. The essentials

We do not sell your personal information, serve advertising in Journologue, or use your journals for targeted advertising. We do not operate a public journal feed.

Voice transcription uses Microsoft cloud processing. It is not performed only on your iPhone. Google Firebase and Google Cloud support accounts and cloud storage. Journal content stored in our cloud service is held in the United States.

Writing a local draft and saving a journal to your cloud account are different actions. Audio sent for transcription leaves the device even if you have not created an account or saved the journal yet.

We use security protections, but the service is not end-to-end encrypted. Our systems and service providers need to process readable information to provide the features you choose. No connected service can guarantee absolute security or permanent recovery.

3. Information we process

Information comes from you, the device and app you use, your chosen sign-in provider, our service providers, and records generated when the service operates. The categories depend on the features you use.

Account and profile: email address where provided, verified sign-in provider identifiers, username, optional profile photo, account creation date, a permanent account or Support ID, and account status. Your sign-in provider may supply a name, email or profile image according to your choices and its settings. Sign in with Apple may use a private relay address instead of your personal email address.
Journal content: text you write, audio you record and submit, machine-generated transcripts, your edited text, titles, selected photos, feelings, journal dates, and optional place names, addresses and coordinates. A saved journal may retain both its original transcript and your edited version.
Library and preferences: journal dates, photo previews, journal and photo counts, storage usage, earned bookmarks, and your search and memory-suggestion preferences.
Account access and security: sign-in and session information, device identifiers, account-verification information, and records used to prevent unauthorised access or misuse. Some security information is needed when you use cloud features before creating an account.
Plan and transactions: trial dates, subscription and renewal status, purchase identifiers, and purchase, refund or cancellation information. Apple handles App Store payment details. Journologue does not receive your full payment-card number.
Device and service information: IP address, device or browser type, operating system and app version, language, relevant time zone settings, feature usage, recording duration, and error or performance information. Sign-in providers may also process account and service information, including phone numbers, identifiers, approximate location and usage information. Journologue does not ask for your phone number.
Support: contact details, messages, attachments and diagnostics you send us, together with our replies. Please do not send passwords, sign-in links or private journal content that is not needed to explain your issue.

4. Personal content, permissions and other people

A journal may reveal highly personal information, including health, relationships, beliefs, sexuality or difficult experiences. We do not require you to include these details. Only include information you are comfortable having processed as described here. Where a special form of permission or another legal condition is required, ordinary account creation does not replace it.

Feelings are labels you choose. We do not treat them as a diagnosis. Voice recordings are used for transcription and playback, not to build a biometric voice-identification system. Profile photos are used for display, not facial recognition.

Microphone access is needed to record audio. Photo selection lets you choose the images to attach. Optional current-location access helps you select a place; you can instead search for or pin a place. We do not continuously track your location in the background. Apple Maps may process your searches, map interactions and relevant location information under Apple's privacy practices.

Journologue receives the photos you select, not an automatic copy of your whole photo library. We may resize photos and remove unnecessary embedded metadata for storage and display. The picture itself and any place you add can still reveal personal information.

You can change device permissions in iPhone Settings. Turning off a permission stops future access through that permission but does not remove information already saved. Do not secretly record or upload other people's private information. Obtain any permission required from them, including for voices and photographs.

5. How and why we use information

We process information to provide the service you request: create and authenticate accounts, transcribe recordings, save and retrieve journals, show photographs and playback, search your library, generate exports, and carry out deletion requests.

We also use information to manage trials, subscriptions, storage and usage limits; maintain account statistics and earned bookmarks; protect the service against misuse; investigate faults; respond to support requests; and meet legal obligations or establish, exercise or defend legal claims. Sign-in providers may use service information to understand and improve how their services work. This is separate from advertising tracking.

Where local law requires a legal basis, the basis depends on the purpose. This may be performing our agreement with you or steps you request before entering it, your consent where required, compliance with a legal obligation, or legitimate interests in maintaining a secure, reliable service and managing our business where those interests are not overridden by your rights. We do not rely on accepting the Terms as blanket consent to unrelated processing.

You can decline optional content or features. If information is necessary to authenticate you, process a recording or save a cloud journal, withholding it may prevent that particular feature from working. We do not use journal content for our own general-purpose AI model training.

6. Voice transcription

When you finish a recording, Journologue sends it for cloud transcription by Microsoft, subject to any permission required for that feature. Transcription can begin automatically and may take place before you create an account or save a journal.

Microsoft processes the recording to create your transcript. This includes any personal information you choose to speak. Its processing is subject to the service terms and privacy commitments applicable to our use of the service. See Microsoft's speech data practices.

Transcription alone does not create an account, save a journal to your library or start your trial. Recordings and transcripts used only for temporary processing are retained as needed to complete the request and handle failures, then removed through our cleanup process, subject to the limited exceptions in section 10.

7. Search, memories and bookmarks

Search uses the text, titles, place information and filters in your saved library to help you find your journals. Your library is not searchable by other users.

Suggested memories use journal dates, photos or audio, feelings you select, and your preferences. Journals with positive feelings can receive priority, and journals without feelings can also appear. Journals tagged with difficult feelings, including a mix of positive and difficult feelings, are excluded from automatic suggestions.

This selection is not a reliable assessment of how a memory will make you feel. An untagged or positively tagged entry may still be upsetting. You can turn suggestions off or choose not to suggest a particular journal again. Those choices do not delete the journal or remove it from deliberate browsing or search.

Earned bookmarks remain if you delete an individual journal, without keeping that journal in your library. Account deletion also removes the associated profile and bookmarks, subject to the limited retention exceptions below.

We do not use these features to make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on you.

9. International processing

Journologue is operated from Singapore. Journal content stored in our cloud service is held in the United States. Our account, transcription, hosting, support and security providers may process information in other countries where they or their service providers operate.

Those countries may have different privacy protections from the country where you live. Where required, we use applicable contractual safeguards or another lawful transfer mechanism. Contact support@journologue.com to ask about safeguards relevant to your information. We do not promise storage only in your country.

10. Retention, deletion and recovery copies

We retain personal information for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described here. Relevant factors include whether you maintain an account, the features you use, your deletion instructions, applicable storage limits, security needs, outstanding disputes, and legal recordkeeping duties. We do not offer permanent archival storage.

Saved journals remain in your cloud library while you have access and during the applicable retention period below, unless you delete them or removal is required under the Terms. Deleting an individual journal removes it from the active library and starts removal of its associated content.

When you choose Delete in 30 days and complete the confirmation and any required identity check, the app confirms when your request has been accepted. Your account is then deactivated for a recovery period of 30 consecutive days from acceptance. During this period, you can sign in and choose Restore account to cancel the deletion request. Signing in alone does not cancel it. Restoring an account does not restart a trial or grant a paid subscription.

Unless you cancel the request during those 30 days, we automatically delete your account and its associated journals, recordings, transcripts, photos, profile and sign-in identity after the recovery period. Once final deletion is completed, the account cannot be restored. This recovery period applies to your account-deletion request, not to deletion of an individual journal. It does not override a requirement to erase information sooner under applicable law.

You can instead choose Delete permanently now. Once this request is accepted, access is closed and irreversible deletion begins without a recovery period. Processing and removal from all relevant systems can take time. If a request fails or has not been confirmed, do not assume deletion has been scheduled; check its status in the app or contact support.

Account deletion does not cancel an Apple subscription. Billing and renewals may continue unless you cancel through your Apple subscription settings. An active subscription or automatic renewal does not cancel a pending account-deletion request.

Subscription or trial expiry is separate from requesting account deletion. The cloud-content retention periods below are part of these Terms and the Privacy Policy, not a separate agreement or notification preference. The app shows a deletion date only when automatic retention is enabled and billing has been verified.

After paid access ends, including any Apple billing grace period, cloud journals are retained for three calendar months. An account that has never subscribed has 30 consecutive days after its 14-day trial ends. Verified purchase history determines which period applies; uncertainty pauses cleanup rather than assigning the shorter trial period. Calendar-month deadlines use UTC, clamping to the final day if a month is shorter; the app shows the date in your local time. When this policy is first activated, existing accounts receive the full applicable period starting no earlier than activation.

Unless you subscribe or resubscribe before irreversible cleanup begins, we then remove cloud journals, recordings, transcripts, photos, related library information and any profile photo. Your sign-in account, username, Support ID, used-trial history, purchase ownership and earned bookmarks remain. Local drafts and copies saved to Files or elsewhere are not removed by this cleanup. We recheck billing before cleanup and pause when status is uncertain or a purchase is unresolved. Subscribing cannot recover deleted content or cancel a separate account-deletion request.

Request and save an export before the deletion date. An admitted export is protected until its displayed expiry, at most 72 hours beyond that date; repeated requests do not keep extending retention. You can prepare up to three fresh copies per UTC day. Failed preparation is not counted as a successful copy; downloading an existing available copy does not use that allowance. Contact support if a failure prevents you from keeping your information.

Retention information appears on Today and in Your account. If notifications are enabled, a never-subscribed user receives a push when their free trial ends and the 30-day retention window begins. Former subscribers receive a push when their three-month countdown begins, one calendar month before deletion and seven days before deletion. We also notify you when a requested download is ready. These are essential account notifications only. Push delivery is not guaranteed: check the date in Your account. We send no marketing, daily or retention reminder emails; account sign-in and verification emails remain separate.

Download anything you want to keep before requesting account deletion. A later subscription or new account cannot restore content already deleted.

After full account deletion is completed, you can create a new account with the same sign-in details. It starts empty, with a new 14-day trial beginning on the first saved journal. Restoring an account during its recovery period, or removal of cloud content after a subscription or trial ends, does not create a new account or restart its trial.

Temporary recordings, processing files and export archives are kept only for the time needed to provide the relevant feature and deal with failures. Export availability and download links are time-limited. Save a copy before the expiry shown in the app or any earlier account-deletion deadline.

Account-email delivery and security records are kept for limited periods to confirm service operation, prevent repeated requests and investigate delivery problems. They are not a journal archive. We do not enable email open or click tracking. A standard logo image in an email may be loaded from our website by your email app or its image proxy; it uses the same image address for everyone, without a recipient-specific tracking identifier.

Removal from the active service is not immediate erasure of every copy. Deleted information may remain temporarily in recovery copies, caches or service-provider systems until their retention periods end. Such copies are not available as an ongoing journal library or a promised undo option.

We keep limited deletion records to prevent removed content from reappearing. These records do not contain journal text, recordings or photos. The separate copies used to protect service recovery are scheduled for automatic removal after 30 days. They do not prevent you from creating a new account after full account deletion.

We do not keep deleted journals for continued use or future restoration. Restricted support, security, transaction or legal records may remain for as long as needed for their stated purpose or required by law. A binding preservation obligation may require particular information to be kept longer. Temporary recovery and service-provider copies remain subject to the limits explained above.

When the app completes sign-out or confirms account deletion, it removes its local account data, including unsaved drafts, from that iPhone. Copies you exported to Files, shared elsewhere or retained on another device are outside that cleanup. Cloud account deletion does not remotely erase every such copy. Uninstalling the app or logging out does not itself request cloud account deletion. You are responsible for removing copies outside our control.

11. Security and device access

We use safeguards including encryption in transit, protected storage, account verification and access controls. Protections differ between local drafts, cloud information and files you export.

An App lock or biometric unlock protects access on a device; it is not a replacement for cloud account authentication or an assurance that nobody can access data on a compromised device. We do not receive the biometric template used by iPhone system authentication.

No storage or transmission method is completely secure. Software faults, interrupted transfers, lost devices, compromised accounts, deletion, provider failures or other events can cause loss or unauthorised access. We will handle security incidents and required notifications in accordance with applicable obligations, but cannot promise that incidents never happen.

Protect your device and email or provider account, do not share sign-in links, and keep independent copies of important material. Support cannot bypass ownership checks. Drafts that were never saved to the cloud may be lost if you uninstall the app, lose your device or remove local data.

12. Your choices and privacy requests

In the app you can manage your profile, choose optional attachments and feelings, control memory suggestions, delete individual journals, request an export of retained cloud journals, and request account deletion. Device permissions are controlled in iPhone Settings.

Download your journals provides a copy of your retained cloud journals and their attached details. It does not include unsaved local drafts or every record we hold about your account. Contact us separately for a broader request to access your personal information.

Depending on where you live and the circumstances, you may have rights to access, correct or delete personal information, receive a portable copy, object to or restrict particular processing, withdraw consent, challenge a decision on a request, or complain to a competent privacy authority. Nothing in this policy removes those rights.

Send requests to support@journologue.com. Your Support ID can help us locate the account, but is not proof of ownership. We may need proportionate verification to avoid exposing or deleting another person's information. We will respond within applicable time limits, explain any lawful restriction or refusal, and provide an appeal or review route where required.

Withdrawing consent does not make earlier lawful processing unlawful. It may prevent the affected feature from continuing. We may still retain information where another valid legal basis requires or permits it. There is no penalty for exercising a privacy right.

13. Website, cookies and links

You can read journologue.com without creating a Journologue account. The website does not use advertising trackers. Hosting and security services process ordinary website request information, including IP addresses, requested pages, browser details and errors.

Cloudflare or the hosting platform may use strictly necessary cookies or similar storage for security, request routing or access controls. We do not use those to target advertising. You can manage cookies in your browser, although blocking necessary storage may affect functionality. We will explain and obtain permission for non-essential tracking where required before introducing it.

Following an external link or contacting support takes you to a service with its own privacy practices. We are responsible for our own processing, not every practice of an independent service. See Cloudflare's privacy notice for its infrastructure practices.

14. Younger users

Journologue's general minimum age is 13. It is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly allow them to submit personal information. Do not create an account or use cloud transcription if you are under 13.

You must also meet any higher age requirement for the processing described here under the rules where you live. We do not verify users' ages or offer a parental-consent process. If you cannot lawfully use a feature without that process, do not use it.

If you are under the age of legal adulthood, review the service and the Terms with a parent or guardian. Their involvement does not automatically give them access to your private journals. Requests concerning a young person's information must be verified and handled under applicable requirements.

If you believe a child below the applicable minimum age has provided information, contact support@journologue.com. We will investigate and take appropriate steps to restrict processing and remove information when required. Parents and young users should avoid sending sensitive journal content merely to report an age concern.

15. Changes and contact

We may update this policy as the service, providers or applicable requirements change. We will show the updated date and version and give appropriate notice of material changes. Where a change requires fresh permission, an updated page alone will not substitute for it.

Questions about your information, a possible privacy issue or this policy can be sent to support@journologue.com.