Privacy Policy — Plain and Simple Thoughts

Last updated: August 22, 2026

Plain and Simple Thoughts keeps the things you meant to hold on to: links you share to it from anywhere on your phone, recipes, receipts and warranties, and papers like a passport or a licence. This policy covers all of it.

This app does make requests to the internet, and it is the only Plain and Simple app for iPhone that does so on your behalf. That is stated first rather than buried, because it is the thing you would want to know. There are two kinds: the one it makes for every link you save, described next, and one you have to switch on yourself, described further down.

What it fetches, and from whom

When you save a link, the app asks that website for the page's title and its preview picture, so that what you saved reads as the thing it is rather than as a row of characters. That request goes to the site you saved and to nowhere else.

Three things follow from that, and all three are true:

• The site you saved can see that somebody fetched that page. As with any request from any browser, it sees an IP address and the fact of the request. This is the same thing that happens when you open the link yourself — it just happens at the moment you save rather than the moment you read.
• Nothing about you is attached to it. No account, no name, no email, no device identifier and no advertising identifier, because the app has none of those to send.
• It goes nowhere near me. There is no Plain and Simple server. The request does not pass through anything of mine, and I never learn what you saved.

The app also strips tracking parameters — utm_source, fbclid and their relatives — off a link before it stores it, so what you keep is the page rather than a record of where you found it.

It will only fetch ordinary public web addresses. Addresses on your own network and on your own machine — localhost, 192.168.x.x, 10.x.x.x and the rest — are refused outright, so that an app handing the share sheet a crafted address cannot make this app reach into your home network.

Summarizing, and the one case where your words leave the phone

The app can compare a set of things you have saved and show you where your sources agree and where they contradict each other. It is switched off when you install the app, and nothing about it runs until you switch it on. There are three settings, and this is exactly what each one does:

• Off. The default. Nothing is compared and nothing is sent anywhere. Every sentence in the section above is the whole story.
• On this iPhone. Apple's own model, running on your phone. No account, no key, no charge, and nothing leaves the device — not to me, not to Apple, not to anyone.
• My own key. You supply an API key for a company you have an account with — Anthropic or OpenAI. When you run a comparison, the app reads the pages you selected and sends their text, along with any notes you wrote on them, to that company, under your key and charged to your account.

Three things about that third option, and all three matter:

• It goes to your account, not through mine. The request is made from your phone directly to the company whose key it is. There is no Plain and Simple server in between — there is none at all — so I never see what you compared, and I have no way to.
• What happens to it there is between you and them. Their terms govern it, not mine. If that matters to you, read them before you paste a key in.
• Your key is kept in your iPhone's keychain, is deliberately not copied to your other devices through iCloud, and cannot be read back out of the app — the app shows you that a key is stored, never the key itself. Restoring onto a new phone means pasting it again, which is the cost of not moving it for you.

Nothing is read or sent until you confirm, and the confirmation tells you how many pages will be read and where they are going.

Data the developer collects

None. There is:

• No account or sign-in.
• No analytics or tracking of any kind — nothing counts what you save, what you read, or when.
• No servers of mine, no SDKs, and no advertising networks. The only requests this app ever makes are to the site of a page you saved, and — if you switch summarizing on and supply a key — to the model provider you chose. Both are your relationships, not mine.
• No ads, no purchases, no subscription.
• No reading history sold, shared, or shown to anyone.
• Nothing downloaded after you install it except the titles and pictures of the links you chose to keep, and the pages you ask it to read.

The app is declared as "Data Not Collected" on its App Store privacy label. That declaration is about what the developer collects, and the honest answer is nothing at all — which is why the outbound request above is described in full here rather than left to it.

Where what you save is kept

Your library — the links, their titles, your notes, your tags, what you have read or archived, any photographs you attached, the recipes you wrote out, and your receipts and papers — is stored on your device and in your own iCloud account, using Apple's CloudKit. That is what puts a link saved on your phone onto your iPad.

It is your iCloud, not mine. It sits in your private database, under your Apple Account. I have no access to it, no way to read it, and no way to recover it for you. There is no copy anywhere else.

Preview pictures — the ones the app fetches from a page — are different: they are cached on your device only, capped in size, never put in iCloud, and can be cleared at any time from Settings.

Finding a saved link from your Home Screen

Your saved links can be found from the search you pull down on your Home Screen, without opening the app first.

• The index is a file on your device, built by the app out of what you have already saved and rebuilt when the app opens. It holds a link's title, its address and your note — nothing that is not already on your phone.
• It is never offered to Apple's search. iOS has a second kind of indexing that hands an item to a server so it can turn up in other people's searches. This app does not use it, and a test fails the build if a line that would switch it on ever appears. What you saved is searchable on your own device and nowhere else.
• It is per device. It is built from your library rather than synced, so each of your devices makes its own.
• Archiving something takes it out. Putting a link away and then meeting it in a search the next morning would be the app disagreeing with an instruction you gave it. Deleting the app removes the index with it.

Photographs, the camera, and reading a recipe off a picture

You can attach a photograph to a receipt, a paper, or a saved link — a warranty card, a licence, the page in a book an article is about. There are three ways to add one: scan it with the camera, choose one from your photos, or pick a page out of a PDF.

• The camera is used only when you tap Scan, and iOS asks you the first time. The app never opens the camera on its own, and there is no screen that opens it for you.
• Choosing from your photos does not give the app your photo library. iOS shows you its own picker and hands over only the one picture you picked; the app cannot see the rest.
• A photograph you attach is yours, so it goes to your iCloud with the record it belongs to — that is what puts a receipt photographed on your phone onto your iPad. It goes nowhere else. Pictures are shrunk and capped before they are stored, and only one travels at a time.

You can also share a photograph of a recipe to the app — a cookbook page, a card, something handwritten. It reads the words off it on your iPhone, using Apple's own text recognition. The picture is not sent anywhere, and neither are the words. There is no server involved and no model provider: this is the same kind of on-device reading your phone already does when you select text in a photo.

Nothing read off a picture is saved until you have looked at it. A camera misreads, so the app fills in a recipe form with what it found and waits for you to check it and press Save. If you decide it was not a recipe after all, you throw the picture away and nothing is kept.

Locking the Papers tab, and what that lock is

The Papers tab — a passport, a licence, an insurance card — can be put behind Face ID, or your device passcode. iOS asks you the first time.

• It is off until you switch it on, and the app does not pretend otherwise. Until you do, a licence number kept in there is no better guarded than a note, which the app says on the screen rather than leaving you to assume.
• It accepts your passcode as well as your face. Face ID alone would be a way to be locked out of your own passport number by a cut finger or a failed scan, with no way back in.
• Nothing about this leaves the device. iOS tells the app only whether the unlock succeeded. The app never receives your face, your fingerprint or your passcode, and there is nothing here for anyone to hold.

Reminders

A warranty or a passport can carry a reminder that arrives a few days before the date.

• There are none unless you set them, and the app never adds one on your behalf.
• They are scheduled and delivered by your own iPhone. There is no server involved and no push notification from me — which is also why a reminder set on one device does not appear on another.
• iOS asks permission the first time you set one, and refusing it stops reminders and nothing else.

The widget

A paper you pin can appear as a widget on your Home Screen or Lock Screen.

• It shows only what you pinned — that paper's name and its number — and nothing else from the app.
• A Lock Screen widget is readable without unlocking the phone. That is the point of it, and it is worth knowing before you pin something.
• Switching the Papers lock on empties the widget. The two settings would otherwise contradict each other, and the lock is the one that wins: yesterday's numbers are cleared rather than left sitting on a Lock Screen.

Deleting your data

Deleting a link in the app removes it from your device and from your iCloud. Deleting the app removes everything it kept on that device; to remove what is in iCloud as well, use Settings › your name › iCloud › Manage Account Storage on your device, where this app is listed like any other.

The share extension

The button you tap in another app's share sheet is part of this app. It writes what you shared — a link, or a photograph of a recipe — into a private container shared between the two, and the app picks it up from there. It runs only when you tap it, and it sees only the item you shared. It makes no requests to the internet at all, and it never reads a photograph: it saves the picture and the app does the reading afterwards, on your phone.

Children's privacy

The app collects no data from anyone. It is not directed at children and gathers no personal information.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted at this same URL with a new "Last updated" date.