Privacy Policy

01 — The Short Version

Your recordings never leave your device. Monolog asks you one question a day and you record a private video or audio answer. That recording is written to your phone's own storage. It is not uploaded to us. We have no copy of it, no access to it, and no ability to play, review, transcribe, or share it.

What we do hold is your account details and a small record of each entry — the day number, the date, which question was asked, and the length and size of the file — so that your library survives reinstalling the app.

We do not sell or share your personal information, we do not serve advertising, and we do not use your recordings to train any model.

02 — Who Is Responsible for Your Information

Contemplation Inc. is the controller of the personal information described in this Policy. You can reach us at support@monolog.co.

03 — Age Requirement

The Platform is intended only for people aged 16 or over, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you are under 16, do not use the Platform and do not provide any information to us. If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone under 16, we will delete it promptly.

If you are 16 or 17, you should use the Platform only with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian, as described in our Terms of Use.

If you believe we may hold information about someone under 16, please contact us at support@monolog.co.

04 — Information You Provide to Us

Account information. Your email address, and an account identifier from Apple or Google if you use Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google. If you create an account with an email and password, the password is stored only in hashed form by our authentication provider and is never visible to us.

Your birth date, if you choose to give it. Monolog counts the days you have been alive, and asks for a birth date once, after your first entry. This is optional and skippable. If you skip it, the count begins on the date you joined. You can set or change it later in Settings.

Your time zone. Captured automatically from your device as a region name, for example America/New_York, so that the day's question turns over at your local midnight and the daily reminder arrives at the right time. It is refreshed when you open the app and follows you when you travel.

Your preferences, such as whether you record video or audio by default and whether the daily reminder is on and at what time.

Correspondence. Records and copies of your correspondence with us, including your email address, if you contact support.

05 — Information About Your Entries

For each entry you keep, we store a small record on our servers containing the day number, the local date, which question was answered, whether it was video or audio, the duration, the file size, the pixel dimensions, and the name of the file on your device.

This exists so that your library, your day count, and your history of past answers to the same question survive reinstalling the app or moving to a new phone. It contains no part of the recording. Our database enforces, at the database level, that these records can only ever be read by the account that created them.

06 — Information We Do Not Collect

We do not collect, receive, or store your recordings, or any still image, thumbnail, transcript, or automated analysis of them.

We do not collect your contacts, photo library, precise location, or phone number.

We do not collect payment card details. Purchases are handled entirely by Apple or Google.

We do not use anything you record for advertising, for profiling, or to train machine learning models. We have no technical means of doing so.

07 — Device Permissions

The Mobile App asks for access to your camera and microphone in order to record, and for permission to send notifications if you turn on the daily reminder. You can grant or revoke each of these at any time in your device settings. Denying camera access still allows audio-only entries. Denying microphone access prevents recording.

08 — Analytics and Diagnostics

We use Mixpanel to understand where people stop using the app, for example how many people who start a recording go on to keep it. This is deliberately limited to behaviour, never content.

Analytics events are attached to a random identifier generated on your device, not to your account. This is a deliberate design choice: it means our analytics cannot be joined back to your account, even by us.

We never send recording contents, transcripts, file names or paths, question text, your email address, your birth date, or your day number, which would reveal your age. Question identifiers and bucketed counts are sent, and countable values are grouped into ranges rather than sent exactly.

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, analytics is off until you turn it on. We ask once, plainly, and the app works identically either way. Elsewhere, analytics is on by default and you can switch it off at any time. The control is in Settings, under About, wherever you are, and takes effect immediately.

Separately, we may collect app version, device type, operating system version, and crash and error information to diagnose problems.

The Website may use cookies and similar technologies for basic operation and aggregate traffic statistics. Where required by law, non-essential cookies are set only with your consent, and you can withdraw that consent at any time. The Mobile App does not use advertising cookies or tracking identifiers, and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites.

09 — Where Your Recordings Live

Recordings are stored in the Mobile App's storage on your device. If you have enabled your device's ordinary backup — iCloud Backup on iOS or Google's device backup on Android — recordings may be included in it. Those backups are provided by Apple or Google under their own terms and privacy policies, not by us, and we have no access to them.

Because we hold no copy, we cannot recover a recording for you under any circumstances. The Mobile App provides an export function, for a single entry and for your whole archive, and it is the only way to move recordings off your device. That export also serves as your data portability copy.

10 — How We Use Your Information, and Our Legal Basis

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, data protection law requires us to have a legal basis for each use of your personal information. Those bases are named below. For everyone else, the same descriptions explain what we do and why.

To create your account and sign you in, we use your email address, your Apple or Google identifier, and your password hash. Our basis is performance of our contract with you.

To show the day's question and keep your library, day count, and past-answer history working across devices and reinstalls, we use your entry records and time zone. Our basis is performance of our contract with you.

To count the days you have been alive, we use your birth date and join date. Our basis is your consent, which you may withdraw at any time by clearing the date in Settings.

To send the daily reminder, we use your time zone and reminder setting. Our basis is your consent, given when you enable the reminder and withdrawn when you turn it off.

To confirm and restore your one-time purchase, we use your store purchase receipt and entitlement status. Our basis is performance of our contract with you.

To respond to your support requests, we use your correspondence and account details. Our bases are performance of our contract and our legitimate interest in supporting our users.

To diagnose faults, keep the Platform secure, and prevent abuse, we use diagnostics together with account and entry records. Our basis is our legitimate interest in a working, secure product.

To understand in aggregate how the app is used so that we can improve it, we use analytics events recorded under a random device identifier. Our basis is your consent in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, and our legitimate interest elsewhere.

To send you service messages about your account or about changes to these policies, we use your email address. Our bases are performance of our contract and compliance with our legal obligations.

To comply with legal obligations and respond to lawful requests, we use whatever information is required. Our basis is compliance with a legal obligation.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether those interests are overridden by your rights, and you may object at any time as described under "Your Rights" below. We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects concerning you.

An email address and a sign-in method are necessary to have an account. Your birth date is optional. Analytics is optional. Nothing else is required of you.

11 — Disclosure of Your Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising or targeted advertising.

We may disclose personal information to service providers who handle information on our behalf, under written terms, only on our instructions, and only for the purposes described above. As of the date at the top of this Policy these are Supabase, for database, authentication and hosting; Mixpanel, for analytics; RevenueCat, for purchase validation and restore; Expo, for app builds and updates; and Apple and Google, for sign-in, app distribution, purchases, and notification delivery.

We may disclose personal information to a buyer or successor in the event of a merger, divestiture, restructuring, reorganization, dissolution, or other sale or transfer of some or all of the Company's assets, including in bankruptcy or a similar proceeding. You will be told before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

We may disclose personal information to comply with any court order, law, or legal process, including responding to a government or regulatory request. Note that we cannot produce recordings in response to any legal process, because we do not have them.

We may disclose personal information to enforce our Terms of Use at www.monolog.co/terms, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of the Company, our users, or others.

We may disclose personal information with your consent, or for any other purpose disclosed to you when you provide the information.

We may disclose aggregated or de-identified information that does not identify any individual without restriction.

12 — International Transfers

We are based in the United States, and our service providers are located in the United States and elsewhere. If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, your personal information will be transferred to and processed in countries that may not provide the same level of data protection as your own.

Where we make such a transfer, we rely on appropriate safeguards. These are the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, together with the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the Swiss addendum where applicable; or a valid adequacy decision covering the recipient, including the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK extension where the recipient is certified.

We also assess each recipient and apply additional technical measures, including encryption in transit and access controls, before transferring. You may request a copy of the relevant safeguards by emailing support@monolog.co.

Your recordings themselves are never transferred anywhere, because they never leave your device.

13 — Data Retention

Account information and entry records are kept while your account exists, and are deleted when you delete your account.

Support correspondence is kept for up to 24 months after the matter is closed.

Diagnostics and crash reports are kept for up to 12 months.

Analytics events are not linked to your account and are retained under our analytics provider's standard retention period, then deleted or anonymised.

Records we must keep by law, such as tax and transaction records held by us, are kept for the period the law requires.

14 — Your Rights

Wherever you live, you can view and change your birth date, recording preference, analytics setting, and reminder settings at any time in the Mobile App's Settings.

You can delete your account from within the Mobile App, in Settings. Deletion removes every recording stored on your device, every entry record, your profile, and your account, in a single operation. It is immediate and cannot be undone, and we cannot restore anything afterwards. If you want to keep any of your recordings, export them first.

15 — Rights in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, you have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you and receive a copy of it.
• Rectify information that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erase your information, sometimes called the right to be forgotten.
• Restrict our processing in certain circumstances.
• Object to processing carried out on the basis of our legitimate interests, and object at any time to direct marketing.
• Receive the information you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and have it transmitted to another controller where technically feasible.
• Withdraw consent at any time, where we rely on consent, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before withdrawal.
• Lodge a complaint with your data protection authority. In the UK this is the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. In Switzerland it is the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner. In the EEA it is the authority in your country of residence, place of work, or where you believe the issue arose.

To exercise any of these rights, email support@monolog.co. We will respond within one month, extendable by two further months for complex requests, and we will tell you if we need more time. We may need to verify your identity first. Exercising your rights is free, and we will not treat you differently for doing so.

16 — Rights in California and Other US States

You may have the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it, to access a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. To exercise any of these rights, email support@monolog.co or use the in-app controls described above. You may use an authorised agent, and we may ask for proof of authorisation.

We do not sell personal information and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, including that of consumers under 16 years of age.

California's Shine the Light law, Civil Code Section 1798.83, permits California residents to request certain information about our disclosure of personal information to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. To make such a request, email support@monolog.co.

17 — Data Security

We have implemented measures designed to protect your personal information from accidental loss and unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. Data in transit is encrypted, and access to your entry records is enforced by row-level security in our database rather than by application logic alone, so that no account can read another account's records. Administrative access is limited to those who need it.

The security of your information also depends on you. Where you have chosen a password, you are responsible for keeping it confidential, and we ask you not to share it with anyone. Your recordings are protected by your device's own lock screen and encryption, and we recommend keeping a passcode set.

If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority and, where required, you, in accordance with applicable law.

No transmission of information over the internet and no method of storage is completely secure. Although we do our best to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its security.

18 — Changes to This Policy

Any changes we make to this Policy will be posted on this page, and the date at the top will be updated. If we make a material change, we will give notice within the Mobile App or by email to the address associated with your account before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent.

19 — Contact Information

To ask questions about or comment on this Policy or our privacy practices, or to exercise any of your rights, contact us at support@monolog.co.