Privacy

Anecdote has no user account, no server of its own and no analytics or tracking of any kind. It does not collect, transmit or store your personal data anywhere we can reach. Your contacts stay on your devices and in your own iCloud account.

On first launch the app asks for permission to access your contacts. If you grant it, Anecdote reads and writes the cards in your Mac and iCloud address book through Apple’s Contacts framework, on your device. Those contacts continue to live in the system Contacts store and to sync through iCloud Contacts, under Apple’s terms, exactly as they did before you installed the app. Anecdote does not copy them anywhere else.

You can withdraw the permission at any time — System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Contacts on the Mac, Settings ▸ Privacy & Security ▸ Contacts on iPhone and iPad. The app then loses its ability to read the store.

A few things are not part of the address-book format, so Anecdote keeps them itself: which card is yours (“My Card”), keep-in-touch cadences and last-contacted dates, smart lists, the edit template, display preferences, and — while the app lacks Apple’s restricted notes entitlement — the notes you write on a contact.

These are stored in a small file inside the app’s own container on each device, and synced between your devices through a private CloudKit database in your iCloud account. A private CloudKit database is readable only by the iCloud account that owns it. The developer of Anecdote has no access to it.

• No account to create, and no credentials collected.
• No analytics, telemetry, crash-reporting or advertising SDKs.
• No third-party services receive your data from the app.
• Nothing is sold, shared or profiled, because nothing is collected.

Two features open things outside the app, at your request and only when you tap them:

• Quick actions and field links hand a tel:, sms:, facetime:, mailto: or Maps URL to the system handler, which opens the relevant Apple app.
• Look up on the web opens a search URL for that person at Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, Gmail, X or Facebook in your browser. Those sites then see the request under their own privacy policies, as any search you typed yourself would be.

Postal addresses on a card are geocoded to draw a map thumbnail, using Apple’s MapKit on your device.

anecdoteapp.com is a static marketing site hosted on Vercel. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or tracking scripts. Vercel, as the host, processes standard server request logs (including IP addresses) for delivery and security; see Vercel’s own privacy policy for that.

If you email us to ask for a beta invite, we keep that email in order to reply to you and send you a build, and for nothing else. Ask us to delete it and we will.

Anecdote is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it, and material changes will be noted in the app’s release notes.

Questions about privacy: hello@anecdoteapp.com.