Strophe has no account, no server, and nothing to collect.
| Information | Location | Reaches the developer? |
|---|---|---|
| Books, PDFs, articles, pasted text | Device + your iCloud | No |
| Highlights, notes, reading position | Device + your iCloud | No |
| Reading and listening time, goals, streaks | Device + your iCloud | No |
| Generated narration audio | Device only | No |
| Which books you've imported (as a hash) | Device + your iCloud | No |
| Free Books you browse, search, or download | Project Gutenberg | No |
| Article URL you choose to save | That website | No |
| Subscription purchase and status | Apple | Only as anonymous sales reports |
| Name, email, contacts, location, photos | Never accessed | No |
Strophe is published by Tommy Bergeron, based in Quebec, Canada, referred to here as “we”. This policy explains what happens to information when you use the Strophe app for iOS.
Under Quebec's Law 25, the person responsible for the protection of personal information must be identified. For Strophe that is Tommy Bergeron, reachable at info@brainpad.org. Write to that address about anything in this policy, including a request to exercise any right described below.
You do not sign up for Strophe. There is no username, no password, no email address, and no profile. We do not run a service that receives, stores, or processes your library.
This is not a promise about how carefully we handle your data, it is a statement about the app's architecture. There is no place for your reading to be sent, because no such place exists.
Specifically, Strophe contains no analytics framework, no crash-reporting service, no advertising identifier, and no third-party tracking SDK of any kind. The app never asks for your location, contacts, photos, calendar, microphone, or camera, and cannot access them.
Strophe stores your library as ordinary files in the app's own storage:
Deleting the app removes all of it from that device.
If you are signed in to iCloud and have iCloud Drive enabled, Strophe stores your library in your private iCloud container so it is available on your other devices. This is your Apple account and your storage. We have no access to it, and no ability to read, list, or recover anything in it.
What is in iCloud is governed by Apple's own privacy policy and your iCloud settings. You can turn sync off in iOS Settings, in which case Strophe keeps everything locally instead and continues to work fully offline.
To apply the free-tier limit fairly across your devices, Strophe records a cryptographic hash (SHA-256) of each EPUB and PDF you import, alongside the date it was added. This is stored in the same private iCloud container as the rest of your library.
A hash is a one-way fingerprint: it cannot be reversed into the book's text, title, or contents. It exists so that the same book added on your iPhone and iPad counts once rather than twice. It is never sent to us or to anyone else.
This is one of only two cases in which Strophe contacts a server that is not Apple's. The other is Free Books, below. Both happen because you asked.
When you save a web article, by pasting a link, using the Share extension in Safari, or importing an Instapaper export, Strophe requests that page directly from the website that hosts it, and downloads the images it needs to display the article offline.
That website receives the request the way any browser visit would: your IP address, the page you requested, and a user-agent string identifying Strophe as a Safari-compatible browser. What that site does with that information is governed by its own privacy policy, not ours. We never see the request, and Strophe does not send us the URLs you save.
Strophe does not have access to Safari's cookies or your browsing history. It fetches only the specific page you asked for.
The Free Books tab lists public-domain ebooks published by Project Gutenberg. Opening that tab, browsing a genre, searching, loading a cover, and downloading a book each send a request to gutenberg.org.
Project Gutenberg receives those requests the way any website does: your IP address, what you asked for, and a user-agent string. Ours reads Strophe/1.0 and a support address, so it identifies the app rather than you. There is no account, no device identifier, and nothing tying one request to another or to you. What Project Gutenberg does with what it receives is governed by its privacy policy, not ours.
Worth stating plainly: the titles you browse, search for, and download are visible to Project Gutenberg, in the same way a library website would see them. They are not visible to us. Strophe sends us nothing about what you browse or download, and there is no server here to send it to.
The connection is deliberately forgetful. It uses an ephemeral session with cookies disabled and no disk cache, so nothing about your browsing is written to disk or carried between launches. Once a book is downloaded it is an ordinary file in your library, and reading it never contacts anyone.
Strophe's voices run entirely on your iPhone or iPad. The speech models ship inside the app itself, nothing is downloaded, and no text is uploaded to be spoken.
This matters most for what it rules out. Cloud text-to-speech services work by sending the passage you want read aloud to a server. Strophe does not do this, and cannot: the narration code makes no network requests at all. A private note, a draft, a confidential PDF, or a book you would rather not have associated with your name is spoken by your own device and heard only by you.
Narration works with the device in airplane mode.
Strophe Plus is sold through Apple's In-App Purchase system. Apple handles the entire transaction. We never see and never receive your payment card, billing address, or Apple Account details.
The app asks Apple whether a valid purchase exists and gets back a yes or no along with a renewal date. That answer is stored on your device and in your private iCloud container so your subscription status is known offline and across your devices.
Apple provides us with aggregated, anonymous sales and subscription reports. These show totals, units, revenue, territory, and do not identify individual customers.
To manage or cancel a subscription, use Settings on your device or the Manage Subscription link in Strophe's preferences. Refunds are handled by Apple.
Strophe is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from anyone. Because the app has no accounts and transmits no personal information, there is no data for us to hold about a child or anyone else.
Privacy laws give you rights to access, correct, export and delete the personal information a company holds about you. We hold none, so there is nothing for us to send you or erase. You control your data directly:
If you believe we hold information about you, write to info@brainpad.org. We will respond within 30 days, as Law 25 and PIPEDA require. In almost every case the answer will be that we hold nothing, and we will say so plainly rather than asking you to prove a negative.
Strophe is published from Quebec, Canada, and this policy is governed by the laws of Quebec and the federal laws of Canada that apply there.
Two Canadian regimes cover us: the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and Quebec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, as amended by Law 25. Because Strophe is sold worldwide through the App Store, you may also be covered by the GDPR in the European Economic Area or the CCPA in California.
These laws grant rights of access, correction, deletion, portability, and withdrawal of consent. We honour all of them. In practice they resolve quickly here for a structural reason rather than a procedural one: we hold no personal information about you, so there is no file to disclose, correct, or erase. The section above explains how to reach and remove the data you do hold, which lives on your own devices and in your own iCloud account.
Law 25 requires us to keep a register of confidentiality incidents and to notify both you and the Commission d'accès à l'information if an incident presents a risk of serious injury. We would do so. We also note, honestly, that the realistic scope of such an incident is narrow: there is no server holding customer data to breach.
If you are not satisfied with how we handle a privacy question, you may complain to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec, or to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.
If this policy changes, the effective date at the top changes with it, and the current version always lives at this address. If a future version of Strophe ever collects something it does not collect today, we will say so here before that version ships, not after.