Instant Journal — Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 August 2026

Instant Journal is a voice journaling app. You speak, and the app turns what you said into written entries. This policy explains exactly what happens to that material — what stays on your phone, what briefly leaves it, and who else is involved.

There are no accounts. We do not ask for your name, email, or phone number, and we have no way to identify you.

The short version

Your entries are stored on your device. We cannot read them.
Your recording, and the text made from it, leave your device only to be processed, and are not stored by us afterwards.
If you turn on location tagging, the location never leaves your device.
If you back up, the backup goes to your own iCloud. We cannot read it.
We do not use advertising identifiers, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
We never sell or share your data for advertising.

What stays on your device

Your entries — the transcript, the polished text, tags, and timestamps.
Audio recordings — deleted immediately after transcription unless you turn on "Keep the audio" in Settings. When kept, they stay on the device and are not uploaded anywhere.
Location — if location tagging is on, the coordinate and the place name are saved with the entry on the device only. They are never transmitted to us or to anyone else. Place names are resolved by Apple's own on-device location services. You can turn location tagging off in Settings, and doing so also stops the app from asking for the permission at all.
Your settings, including reminder times and preferences.

What leaves your device

Two things leave, both only to be processed, and both only for as long as that takes:

What	Why it leaves	Kept by us?
Your audio recording	To be transcribed into text	No
The resulting transcript	To be tidied into readable prose	No
An anonymous install identifier	To limit abuse of the service	Only as a counter, which expires automatically after about a day

Both requests pass through our own relay server, which holds the API credentials so that they never ship inside the app. That relay does not store your audio or your text. It writes nothing but a usage counter.

The anonymous install identifier is a random value the app generates the first time it runs, stored only on your device. It is not your Apple ID, not your device's advertising identifier, and not linked to any account or to you personally. Deleting and reinstalling the app produces a new one. Its only purpose is to stop a single installation from overwhelming the service.