Privacy Policy
Last updated: September 23, 2026
This notice describes how Shane McGraw (doing business as Jottings, “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, stores, uses and shares your information when you use the Jottings app or this website (the “Services”). If you do not agree with it, please do not use the Services. Questions are welcome at hello@jottingsapp.com.
Summary
- Your phone number is the only identifying thing we store. It is how your notes find you on a second phone.
- The page photograph never leaves your phone. It is read on the device and deleted as soon as it has been read.
- Your voice is sent once to be turned into text, then discarded. It is never stored and never used to train anything.
- We do not use location services of any kind.
- We do not advertise, profile or sell. There are no analytics, no ad networks and no third parties buying your data.
- Your notes are yours. Export them as text whenever you like, and delete them — or the whole account — whenever you like.
Contents
- What information do we collect?
- How do we use your information?
- When and with whom do we share it?
- Do we use cookies and tracking?
- Do we use machine recognition?
- How long do we keep your information?
- How do we keep your information safe?
- Do we collect information from minors?
- What are your privacy rights?
- Do-Not-Track features
- US residents’ privacy rights
- Updates to this notice
- How to contact us
- Review, update or delete your data
1. What information do we collect?
In short: your phone number, and the notes you make.
What you give us
- Your phone number
- Jottings requires an account, and a phone number is how you sign in. It is the only identifying field stored on your account. There is no name, no email address, no username and no password.
- Your books
- The title and author you type when you add a book.
- Your notes
- The passage you marked or read aloud, what you said or wrote about it, and the page number if the page showed one.
What the app asks your phone for
- The camera
- To photograph the page you are reading, so the app can find the passage. The photograph is read on your phone and deleted immediately afterwards, whether or not the reading succeeded. It is never uploaded.
- The microphone and speech recognition
- To hear the passage you read aloud and the note that follows. Speech is recognized on your phone while you are talking. The recording itself is uploaded once to be transcribed and is then discarded.
What we do not collect
- Location. Jottings does not use location-based services and never requests your location.
- Your contacts, calendar, photo library or files.
- Device identifiers. Your device’s identifier is not stored; it is scrambled in a way that cannot be reversed, so that a phone can hold notes before you have signed in.
- Passcodes. The code we text you when you sign in is created and checked by our messaging provider. We never see or store it.
- Information from third parties. We do not buy or receive information about you from anyone else.
2. How do we use your information?
In short: to keep your notes and to let you sign in.
- Signing in. To text you a passcode and to bind your notes to your account, so they are there on a new phone.
- Making a note. To turn what you said into text, to find the passage you read on the photographed page, and to save the result.
- Showing and exporting your notes. To list them under the book they came from and hand them back to you as text.
- Keeping the service running and safe. To diagnose faults and prevent abuse. Our request logs record the address requested, the response code and how long it took — never the contents of a request.
- Legal obligations. To comply with the law where we are required to.
We do not use your information to advertise to you, to build a profile of you, or to train machine learning models.
3. When and with whom do we share it?
In short: with the four companies that run the plumbing, and no one else.
We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. We use these service providers, each of which handles only what the job requires:
| Provider | What it does | What it sees |
|---|---|---|
| Neon | Hosts the database | Your phone number, books and notes |
| Vercel | Hosts the service and this website | Requests in transit, and the usual server logs |
| Deepgram | Turns your recording into text | One recording at a time, kept only for as long as the request takes. We instruct Deepgram not to retain it or use it to improve their models. |
| Twilio | Sends and checks your sign-in passcode | Your phone number |
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or in connection with a merger, acquisition or sale of assets — in which case we will say so before your information is transferred.
Jottings has no public areas and no sharing between readers. Nobody else using the app can see your notes.
4. Do we use cookies and tracking?
In short: no.
The app sets no cookies and carries no analytics, advertising or tracking software of any kind. This website sets no cookies and measures nothing. It does load a typeface from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google’s servers to fetch it; nothing about you is sent with that request beyond what any web request carries.
5. Do we use machine recognition?
In short: yes — to read a page and to hear a sentence, and for nothing else.
Jottings uses three kinds of automated recognition:
- Reading the page
- Text recognition runs on your phone, using the operating system’s own facility. The photograph does not leave the device.
- Following your voice as you speak
- Live speech recognition runs on your phone, so the highlight can follow the words you are reading. It is not sent anywhere.
- Transcribing the recording
- The recording is sent once to Deepgram, transcribed, and discarded. The request tells Deepgram not to keep it and not to use it for model improvement.
None of your information is used to train our own models, because we do not train any. No decision about you is made automatically.
6. How long do we keep your information?
In short: your notes until you delete them; the rest not at all.
- Page photographs are deleted the moment recognition finishes. The frozen page you see on screen while marking a passage is held in memory only and is never written to storage.
- Recordings are discarded as soon as they have been transcribed. They are never written to a database or a log.
- The recognized text of the page is used to locate the passage you read and then dropped. Only the matched passage is kept.
- Your books and notes are kept until you delete them. Deleting a book deletes its notes with it.
- Something you have deleted is taken out of the app at once and removed from our database for good within 30 days. The delay exists so that a book deleted by accident — which takes every note filed under it — can still be recovered if you write to us quickly. After 30 days it is gone, and we cannot get it back either.
- Your phone number is kept for as long as you have an account.
When we no longer have a reason to hold something, we delete it or strip it of anything that identifies you.
7. How do we keep your information safe?
In short: with sensible measures, and by holding very little.
Traffic between the app and the service is encrypted, as is the database. Access is limited to what the service itself needs. The strongest protection here is the design: there is nowhere in the system that holds a photograph, a recording, or the full text of a page, so there is nothing of that kind to lose. No transmission over the internet can be guaranteed to be completely secure, so please use the Services in an environment you trust.
8. Do we collect information from minors?
In short: no, and we do not market to them.
We do not knowingly collect information from or market to children under 18 years of age. If you are under 18, you must have a parent or guardian’s consent to use the Services. If we learn that we hold information from a user under 18, we will deactivate the account and delete it.
9. What are your privacy rights?
In short: see it, correct it, take it with you, or delete it.
- Look at it. Everything we hold about you is visible in the app.
- Correct it. Passages and notes can be edited in the app at any time.
- Take it with you. Notes can be exported as plain text from the app whenever you like.
- Delete it. Delete individual notes or whole books in the app; they leave the app immediately and are erased for good within 30 days. To delete your account and everything attached to it — which is immediate and total, with no 30-day window — write to hello@jottingsapp.com from, or telling us, the number you signed in with.
- Withdraw consent. You can withdraw consent to our processing at any time by deleting your account. You can also revoke the app’s access to your camera or microphone in your phone’s settings, though the app needs them to make a note.
- Complain. If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland, you may complain to your local data protection authority.
We do not treat you differently for exercising any of these rights. Questions about them go to hello@jottingsapp.com.
10. Do-Not-Track features
Most browsers offer a Do-Not-Track setting. We do not respond to it, because no uniform standard for honouring it has been settled. We also do not track you, so there is nothing for the setting to switch off. If a standard is adopted that we must follow, we will say so in a revised version of this notice.
11. US residents’ privacy rights
In short: you have rights over your information, and we hold almost none of it.
| Category | Examples | Do we collect it? |
|---|---|---|
| Identifiers | Phone number | Yes |
| Identifiers | Name, email address, postal address, account name | No |
| User content | Book titles, passages, your notes | Yes |
| Audio and visual information | Page photographs, voice recordings | Processed, never kept |
| Geolocation data | Device location | No |
| Biometric information | Fingerprints, voiceprints | No |
| Commercial information | Purchase and transaction history | No |
| Internet activity | Browsing history, search history, ad interactions | No |
| Sensitive personal information | Race, religion, health, precise location, contents of mail | No |
| Inferences | Profiles drawn from any of the above | No |
We have not sold or shared personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not intend to. Depending on the state you live in, you have the right to know whether we process your personal data, to access it, to correct inaccuracies in it, to obtain a copy of it, to request its deletion, to opt out of sale or profiling, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. To exercise any of them, write to hello@jottingsapp.com. We will verify your request against the phone number on the account before acting on it, and you may appoint an authorized agent to make it for you. If we decline a request, you may appeal by replying to our response.
12. Updates to this notice
We will update this notice as needed to stay accurate and compliant. The version in force is the one on this page, dated at the top. If a change matters to you, we will make it prominent — by a notice here, or in the app.
13. How to contact us
Questions or comments about this notice: hello@jottingsapp.com.
14. Review, update or delete your data
Your notes are visible, editable and exportable in the app, and can be deleted there. To see everything we hold, to correct it, or to delete your account entirely, write to hello@jottingsapp.com. Deleting your account deletes your phone number, your books and your notes.