RefinePrivacy Policy
The short version
- Refine does not sell your data, show ads, or track you across other apps and websites.
- Your Apple Health readings never leave your iPhone.
- To write summaries, Refine sends book text, what you upload, and the passages you ask about to our servers and to the language-model and voice providers named below.
- Usage counts go to Google Analytics without book titles or searches. You can turn this off in the You tab.
- You can delete your account and its data in the app at any time.
1Who we are
This policy explains how Refine ("we", "us") collects and uses information when you use the Refine app and website. If you have a question or a request, write to privacy@refines.app.
2What Refine collects
| Information | What it is | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account ID | A random ID Refine creates the first time you open the app. If you sign in with Apple, it is linked to your Apple ID. | To keep your library and progress with you. |
| Email address | Only if you sign in with Apple and choose to share it. Apple may give us a private relay address instead. | To identify your account and contact you about it. |
| Your library | The books and documents on your shelf, your reading progress, highlights, notes, review history, the maps you build and your settings. | To sync and restore your library, and to schedule reviews. |
| What you add | Documents and PDFs you import, web pages and text you add, photos of pages, and the questions you ask about a passage. | To turn them into chapters, reads, narration and answers. |
| Scans | Recognition runs on your iPhone. Refine sends what it read from a cover, barcode or page, and for some scans the image, to identify the book or read the page. | To find the book and write its two-minute read. |
| Searches | What you type into Discover search. | To find books and papers. |
| Usage events | Counts of what is used, such as a book added, a chapter opened or a review finished, with an app-instance ID, approximate region, and the age range you pick when you first open Refine (you can choose not to say). Never a book's title, what you search, or Health data. | To understand how Refine is used and improve it. |
| Quality grades | For books you add, measures of the map Refine wrote (for example how many ideas and links it has), with the book's title, stored under your account ID. | To find and fix books whose maps came out badly. |
| Answers to review questions | For questions every reader of the same text shares: whether you answered right, which wrong option you picked, how long you took, how sure Refine predicted you would be, and how many days since you first answered that question. Sent at most once a day, without your account ID or anything that identifies you. You can turn it off in Settings › Privacy. | To find and fix questions readers find unclear, and to measure how much readers remember a week and a month later. |
| Feedback | What you write when you send feedback or answer the rating question, with the app version. | To read and act on it. |
| Notification token | A token Apple and Firebase give your device, sent with a request when you ask to be told a book is ready. | To send that one notification. |
| Device check | Apple's App Attest or DeviceCheck confirms that requests come from a genuine copy of Refine. It does not identify you. | To protect our servers from abuse. |
| Purchases | Whether you have Refine Pro, your trial and renewal status, and credits, from Apple through RevenueCat. We never see your payment card. | To unlock Pro, count your books and add credits. |
The waitlist on refines.app
Before launch, you can join a waitlist on this website. We keep your email address and which link brought you to the site (for example, a TikTok or Instagram post), stored in Google Firebase in the United States. We use it only to email you once, when Refine launches. We do not add you to a newsletter, and we do not share or sell the address. To be taken off the list, write to privacy@refines.app from that address.
This website uses Google Analytics to count visits: pages viewed, the link that brought you here, and your rough location and device type. It sets cookies in your browser to recognise a returning visitor. These cookies are set only if you accept them in the banner. It does not collect your name or email address. Change your cookie choice.
Like most websites, our host (Google Firebase Hosting) records each request to this site: the page, the time, your IP address, your browser and the page that linked here. We use these logs, without cookies, to count visitors and to keep the site running. They are deleted after 30 days.
What stays on your iPhone
- Apple Health. If you connect it, Refine reads sleep, heart rate variability and resting heart rate on your iPhone to decide how many review cards to show. The readings are never sent to us or anyone else, and are never used for advertising.
- Camera. The camera feed is processed on your iPhone. Only what is described under Scans above leaves it.
- Reminders. Your daily reminder is scheduled on your iPhone.
- Obsidian. If you turn on Obsidian sync, your highlights and notes are written to a folder you choose on your device. We do not receive that folder.
3Who processes your information
We share information only with the service providers that run Refine for us, and only what each needs:
| Provider | What they receive | For |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase | Your account ID, library, uploads, feedback and quality grades; usage events (Google Analytics); answers to review questions, without your account ID. | Accounts, storage, servers, notifications, analytics. |
| Anthropic | Book text, text you upload or photograph, and passages and questions you ask about. | Writing reads, maps and answers. |
| Google (Gemini) | Book titles and text, search queries, and images of covers and pages. | Finding books, reading pages, labelling and sorting. |
| Speechify | The text to be read aloud and the voice you chose. | Narration. |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, purchases, notifications and device checks, under Apple's own privacy policy. | Sign-in, payments, notifications, App Attest. |
| RevenueCat | Your account ID and your purchase history from Apple. | Managing subscriptions and credits. |
| Book catalogues | Search terms and book titles, sent from our servers without your account ID: Open Library, Google Books, Standard Ebooks, Project Gutenberg, arXiv, PubMed Central. | Finding books, covers and free texts. |
Anthropic and Google process what we send them to provide their service to us. Under their terms for business customers, they do not use it to train their models.
We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people's safety or our rights, or as part of a merger or sale of Refine, in which case this policy continues to apply.
Shared without your name
- Summaries Refine writes for a published book in its catalogue are kept and may be shown to other readers of the same book. They contain nothing about you. Text you upload, and reads written from it, are never shown to other readers.
- To show which books are popular, Refine counts the titles across readers' libraries. Only totals are used, never who added what.
4What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent your personal information, or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
- We do not show ads, and Refine does not use Apple's advertising identifier.
- We do not track you across other companies' apps or websites.
- We do not use your Health data, or your uploads, for anything except providing Refine to you.
5Your choices
- Usage data: turn off Share usage data in the You tab.
- Apple Health: turn off Paced by readiness in the You tab, or remove Refine's access in the Health app.
- Notifications and camera: change them in your iPhone's Settings.
- Delete content: remove a book, highlight or note in the app.
- Delete your account: in the You tab, under Account. This deletes your account ID and the data stored with it from our servers.
6How long we keep it
- Your account data is kept until you delete it or your account.
- If you never sign in and delete the app, your anonymous account cannot be reached again. We delete anonymous accounts that have not been used for 12 months.
- Server logs, which can include search terms and book titles from requests, are kept for up to 30 days to run and secure Refine.
- Website request logs (IP address, browser, page) are deleted after 30 days.
- Usage events in Google Analytics are kept for the retention period set in our Google Analytics account, at most 14 months, then deleted.
- Summaries of published books contain no personal information and are kept to serve other readers.
- Waitlist email addresses are deleted 90 days after Refine launches, or sooner if you ask.
7Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your personal information, to object to or restrict how we use it, and to withdraw consent. You can delete your account in the app. For anything else, write to privacy@refines.app from the email address linked to your Apple sign-in, and we will reply within 30 days. If you have not signed in, we cannot tell which data is yours, so deleting the app's account in the You tab is the way to remove it. We will not treat you differently for using these rights.
European Economic Area and United Kingdom
We use your information to provide the service you asked for (performance of our contract with you), with your consent (Apple Health, usage analytics, notifications), and for our legitimate interests in keeping Refine secure and improving it. You can complain to your local data protection authority.
California
California residents have the right to know what personal information we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in California law.
8Where your information is stored
Refine's servers are in the United States (Google Cloud, us-central1), and our providers may process information in the United States and other countries. Where the law requires it, these transfers rely on the providers' standard contractual clauses or similar safeguards.
9Security
Information travels encrypted between the app and our servers. Each reader's data is stored under their own account ID, and our servers accept requests only from genuine copies of Refine. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your information, we will tell you as the law requires.
10Children
Refine is not meant for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has used Refine, write to us and we will delete their information.
11Changes to this policy
We will update this policy when Refine changes how it handles information. If a change is significant, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top shows the latest version.
12Contact
Refine
500 Wall St, Seattle, WA 98121, United States
privacy@refines.app