We don't collect your journal.

1Who we are

Ruminate is made by Eiderlane LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("we", "us"). This policy covers the Ruminate app for iPhone (the "app"). You can reach us at [email protected].

2What we collect

Through the app: nothing. We don't run a server for the app, and the app never sends us your data. Specifically, the app has:

• no account, sign-up or login
• no analytics, advertising, attribution or crash-reporting SDK of any kind
• no advertising identifier, and no access to your contacts, location, photo library, calendars or health data
• no connection to any server of ours

Because we receive no personal information from the app, we don't sell it, share it, use it for advertising or build a profile of you from it.

Outside the app, the only personal information we receive is what you choose to send us by email (see If you email us). What Apple does as the App Store's operator is covered by Apple's privacy policy. Network connections explains how that touches the app.

3What stays on your iPhone

To work, the app stores the following on your device. None of it is sent to us.

4How the app uses it

Everything above is used only on your iPhone, only to provide the app's features: recording and transcribing, cleaning up text, writing titles and tags, finding to-dos, writing reflections, answering your questions in Ask, search, Read Aloud, reminders and App Lock.

The app keeps its own AI features quiet for some entries. A fixed list of words and phrases stored inside the app decides when, for a given entry, the app won't write a title, clean-up, to-dos or reflections, or use that entry in Ask. That's a rule about what the app's AI writes, not a judgement about you. The app doesn't monitor your entries, can't and doesn't detect distress, crisis or risk, and will never notify anyone. Nothing about that check is scored, recorded or sent anywhere.

5Transcription and on-device AI

Transcription runs on your iPhone, using a speech model (Whisper) that ships inside the app. It runs with no network code switched on and never sends your audio anywhere. If it can't transcribe an entry, the app keeps the recording as audio only. It never sends your audio over the network to transcribe it.

The AI features run on your iPhone. Clean up, titles and tags, to-dos, reflections and Ask use Apple's on-device language model through Apple Intelligence. No entry text, question or prompt is sent to us, to Apple or to any other AI provider. There's no third-party AI in the app.

The app doesn't download models. Whisper is part of the app, and Apple's language model is managed by iOS on your device.

What the AI features produce describes your own words. It isn't advice, may be incomplete or wrong, and your original transcript is always kept alongside it.

6Network connections

The app's only network connections go to Apple's App Store, through Apple's StoreKit. They're used to:

• show Pro's prices, and make a purchase when you choose to buy
• check, when the app opens or comes back to the foreground, whether you have an active Pro purchase
• restore purchases when you tap Restore Purchases, and open Apple's subscription management when you ask to

These requests are between your iPhone and Apple. They include none of your journal. Apple processes your payment. We never see your Apple Account, card or billing details, and the app receives only the status of your purchase. Apple gives developers sales reports, such as how many purchases there were in each country, which don't identify you.

If you've chosen in iOS settings to share analytics with app developers, Apple may give us crash reports and aggregate usage statistics under Apple's privacy policy. You can turn that off in Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements.

Links you choose to open, such as this website or our Terms, open in your browser outside the app.

7Permissions

The app asks for iOS permissions only when a feature needs them, and you can change any of them in Settings › Ruminate at any time. The app keeps working with fewer features.

• Microphone: the first time you record, to capture your voice so it can be transcribed on the device.
• Face ID (or your passcode): for App Lock. The app never sees your face data. iOS only tells it whether unlocking succeeded.
• Notifications: only if you turn on the daily reminder or set a reminder on a to-do. The one-off reminder that your free trial is ending is delivered quietly, without a prompt, and you can turn it off in Settings.
• Photos: no permission is needed. Choosing a profile photo uses Apple's photo picker, which shares only the one photo you pick.

8Sharing

We don't sell, rent or share personal information, and no third party receives data from the app, because the app sends none.

You can share things yourself: an exported entry, a backup file, a diagnostics file, or text you copy. Once you send something somewhere, such as Files, iCloud Drive, a message, an email or another app, it's handled by that service under its own terms. Third-party keyboards and iOS features such as Writing Tools are run by their providers, and if you use them in the app, their privacy policies apply.

9Backups and exports

Your entries, recordings, reflections and to-dos are deliberately excluded from iCloud and device backups, so they're never copied anywhere you didn't choose. That covers your entries, recordings, to-dos and recaps, and also the words you add to My Words and the name on the menu card, which live with the journal. Only the app's settings (switches, reminder times, whether you have set the app up) are in the normal iPhone backup, and none of them contain anything you said or wrote. That has a consequence you need to know: if you lose, wipe or replace your iPhone, or delete the app, without a backup you made yourself, your journal is gone for good. It's not on a server or in your iCloud backup, and nobody, including us, can restore it.

The app makes an encrypted backup of your whole journal: entries, sections, reflections, to-dos, recordings and My Words. Your settings, the name on your menu card and your profile photo aren't included. It's encrypted on the phone with AES-256-GCM, using a key derived from a passphrase you choose (at least 12 characters). We never receive the file or the passphrase. If you forget the passphrase, the file can't be opened by you, by us or by anyone. The backup is free, with or without Pro.

You can also export a single entry as a PDF, Markdown or plain text. Those files aren't encrypted. The app deletes its temporary copies once you've shared them.

10Security

• The journal is stored with iOS Data Protection, which keeps it encrypted whenever your iPhone is locked.
• App Lock (Face ID or your passcode) turns on when you finish setup, if your phone has a passcode, and asks again each time you come back to the app. The screen is covered whenever the app is in the background, so it doesn't show in the app switcher.
• When you delete an entry, the app overwrites it in its database rather than just marking it deleted.

No system is perfectly secure, and your iPhone's own security (its passcode, and who can unlock it) matters most. Because we hold none of your journal, a breach of our systems couldn't expose it. If a breach ever affected emails you've sent us, we'd tell you as the law requires.

11Keeping and deleting data

In the app, your data stays on your iPhone until you delete it:

• Deleting an entry erases it, its recording and its to-dos right away, along with any reflection that quoted it. There's no Recently Deleted folder and no server copy.
• You can set an entry to disappear on its own after 24 hours, 7 days or 30 days.
• You can delete all recordings while keeping their transcripts, in Menu › Audio & Storage.
• Deleting the app deletes everything it stores. App preferences already in an iCloud or computer backup stay there until that backup is replaced or deleted.

You can withdraw any permission at any time in Settings › Ruminate. To stop entirely, delete the app. If you subscribe, cancel separately in your Apple Account, since deleting the app doesn't cancel a subscription.

Support emails are kept only as long as we need them to help you, and no longer than 24 months after our last message. Ask us and we'll delete them sooner.

12If you email us

When you write to [email protected], we receive your email address, your message and anything you attach. We use them only to answer you. Mail to that address is routed by Cloudflare Email Routing to a Google Gmail inbox we use for support, so Cloudflare and Google process it for us as our email providers.

Please don't send journal entries, recordings or backup passphrases. We'll never ask for them, and we don't need them to help you.

13Children

This app is for adults 18 and older and is not directed to anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone, of any age: the app sends us nothing. If someone under 18 has emailed us and a parent or guardian would like that email deleted, write to us and we'll delete it.

14Your rights

Depending on where you live, laws such as the GDPR, the UK GDPR, and California's and other US states' privacy laws give you rights over personal information: to know what's held, to access, correct, delete or port it, and to object to or restrict its use.

We don't hold your journal or any other data from the app, so there's nothing of that kind for us to access, correct, port or erase. It's on your iPhone and in your control. For emails you've sent us, you can use any of these rights by writing to [email protected], and we'll answer within the time the law requires. We don't sell or share personal information, don't use it for targeted advertising and don't profile anyone. If you're in the EU or UK, you can also complain to your data protection authority.

15Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we'll post the new version on this page with a new date. If a change is material, such as the app collecting something it didn't before, we'll publish the new policy before the version of the app it applies to is released, and tell you in the app.

16Contact

Eiderlane LLC
[email protected]