Privacy Policy

This policy explains what vournal collects, how it is used, and who else processes it.

vournal ("we", "us") is operated by Mohamad El Naboulsi, based in Tripoli, Lebanon. Contact: hello@vournal.app.

Please read section 3 carefully — it explains that your voice recordings and journal text are sent to third-party providers, including AI services, in order to transcribe and organise them. The app asks for your permission before it sends anything to them.

1. The short version

• You speak; we record, transcribe, and organise what you said.
• To do that, your audio and transcripts are sent to specialist providers, including AI services (listed in section 3). They process it on our behalf.
• The app asks for your permission before it first sends a recording or entry to those providers. You can withdraw it at any time in Profile.
• If you choose to link a person in your journal to a contact on your phone, that contact is read on your device only. Your contacts are never uploaded.
• We do not sell your data, use it for advertising, or read your journals except in the narrow cases described in section 6.
• You can delete any recording, any entry, or your entire account at any time.

2. What we collect

Account information

• Email address
• A password, if you use one, stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never store or see your actual password
• Your time zone (so times you speak, like "2pm tomorrow", land on the right hour)

Content you create

• Audio recordings you make in the app
• The text transcript of those recordings
• Information automatically derived from your entries, including: a short summary, an estimated mood rating and mood-related words, tasks and their dates and times, recurring topics, places, and names of people you mention

Purchases (if you subscribe to vournal Plus)

• Your plan and the date it renews or ends
• The identifiers that link a purchase to your account, such as Apple's original transaction id
• We never receive your card or bank details. The store you buy from handles payment.

Technical information

• Basic operational logs needed to run and secure the service (for example, request timestamps and error records)

Contacts on your device (optional)

You can link a person in your journal to a contact on your phone. If you choose to, the app asks for access to your contacts and reads the name, phone numbers, and email addresses of the contact you pick, so it can show them to you.

• This happens on your device. Your contacts are not uploaded to our servers and are not sent to any third party.
• The link between a person and a contact is stored only on your device. It is removed when you unlink the contact or delete your account.
• Access is optional. The rest of the app works without it, and you can turn it off at any time in your device settings.

Calendar and Reminders on your device (optional)

You can ask vournal to copy the tasks and appointments it extracts into Apple Reminders and Apple Calendar. If you turn this on, the app asks for access, creates a list and a calendar named "vournal", and keeps the copies up to date as you edit, tick or delete tasks in the app.

• This happens on your device. vournal only looks at the copies it made, to keep them up to date and avoid duplicates. Nothing from your calendars or reminders is uploaded to our servers.
• You can turn it off at any time in Profile, and remove everything vournal added with one tap.

Sign in with Apple or Google (optional)

If you sign in with Apple or Google, they confirm who you are to us. We receive your email address (or Apple's private relay address, if you choose to hide yours) and an account identifier, never your Apple or Google password. The token they send us can also include your name and profile picture; we don't keep those. Apple and Google act under their own privacy policies.

• For Sign in with Apple, we keep a token, encrypted, only so we can revoke vournal's access when you delete your account.

Alerts on your device (optional)

If you turn on alerts, vournal schedules them on your device for when a task is due. An alert shows the task's text, which can appear on your lock screen.

• Alerts are scheduled on your device. They are not sent through our servers or to any third party.
• You can hide alert previews in your device settings, and turn alerts off at any time in Profile or in your device settings.

We do not track your location or collect advertising identifiers. If you pin a place to a task, we store the place name and the map coordinates you chose; searching for a place sends your search text from your device to Apple's map service. We do not store your contacts, calendars, or reminders on our servers, and we do not use your device's microphone outside of recordings you explicitly start.

3. Third parties who process your data

To turn speech into organised text, we send your data to the following providers. They act as processors on our behalf and are contractually limited to providing their service to us.

Payments. If you subscribe in the app, Apple sells the subscription and processes payment under Apple's terms; Apple tells us the purchase's transaction details so we can turn Plus on, renew it and end it. Apple acts under its own privacy policy.

If you subscribe on our website, Paddle (paddle.com) is the reseller and merchant of record: it receives your email address and the payment details you enter at checkout, and tells us the subscription's status, including Paddle's subscription id, which we keep. Paddle acts under its own privacy policy.

This means your voice recordings and journal text leave your device. They are transmitted over encrypted connections and processed to produce your transcript and its structure.

We select providers that do not use customer data submitted through their APIs to train their models. Provider terms can change; the list above reflects our current providers and we will update it when it changes.

Your permission. Speechmatics and Anthropic are AI services. Before the app first sends them a recording or an entry, it shows you who receives what and asks for your permission. Nothing is sent to them unless you allow it. You can withdraw your permission at any time in Profile. The app then stops sending new recordings and entries, and you will not be able to create new entries until you allow it again. Entries already in your journal are not affected.

AI actions (vournal Plus). If you have vournal Plus and turn on AI actions, the app can act on what you say: log spending, check off habits, add gifts, update projects and goals, and similar changes. To propose them, we send Anthropic your entry text together with the parts of your vournal data needed for it (such as your money, health and food, people, habits, projects, goals and tasks). Every proposed change waits on a review card, and nothing changes until you tap Save. The app asks for your permission before AI actions first run. You can turn AI actions off at any time in Profile or on life.vournal.app; it is the same setting as AI on life.vournal.app.

4. Sensitive content

A voice journal is unusually personal, and two categories deserve specific mention:

Mood and emotional information. The app estimates a mood rating and emotion words from what you say, and shows trends over time. This is generated to give you a reflection of your own entries. It is not a clinical assessment, not a diagnosis, and not a medical record.

Other people. Your entries may mention friends, family, or colleagues, and the app may store their names as part of your entry. Please be thoughtful about what you record about others.

5. Why we process your data (legal bases)

Where required by law (for example under the GDPR), we rely on:

• Performance of a contract — to provide the service you signed up for
• Legitimate interests — to keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and fix faults
• Consent — where you have given it, such as the permission to send your content to the AI providers in section 3 and the permission to read a contact you choose to link. You may withdraw either at any time
• Legal obligation — where we are required to retain or disclose information

6. Who can see your journals

Your entries are private to your account. We do not read them for advertising, profiling, or sale. Our staff do not routinely access journal content. Limited access may occur only where strictly necessary to:

• investigate a technical fault you have reported to us
• respond to a credible security incident
• comply with a valid legal obligation

7. Retention and deletion

• Delete a recording — removes the audio file while keeping the written entry.
• Delete an entry — removes the entry, its recording, and the tasks derived from it.
• Delete your account — removes your account and associated content.
• Withdraw AI permission — in Profile. Stops new recordings and entries being sent to the AI providers. It does not delete entries you already have.
• Unlink a contact — removes the link from your device. Your contact itself is never changed.

Free month of Plus. When an account gets its free month of Plus, we keep a one-way code made from its email address and sign-in identities, even after the account is deleted, so the free month is given once per person. The code can't be turned back into the address.

Deletions are actioned promptly. Copies may persist briefly in encrypted backups before being overwritten in the ordinary course of operations. Transient copies held by processors are deleted according to their retention practices.

8. Security

• Data is transmitted over encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS)
• Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, never in readable form
• Recordings are held in private storage and served only through short-lived, authenticated links
• Access to accounts requires an authentication token that expires and can be revoked

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

9. International transfers

We operate globally and our providers may process data in countries other than yours, including the United States and the European Union. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for such transfers.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, export, or restrict processing of your data, to object to processing, and to lodge a complaint with your data-protection authority.

If you are a California resident: we do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are defined under California law.

Many of these rights can be exercised directly in the app. For anything else, contact hello@vournal.app and we will respond within the period required by applicable law.

11. Children

vournal is not intended for children under 16. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If changes are material, we will notify you in the app or by email before they take effect. The date at the top shows the current version.

13. Contact

Questions, requests, or complaints: hello@vournal.app