Privacy Policy

Effective 12 October 2026

Take & Read is a reading app. It is built so that what you read and write is yours alone.

What we collect

Only usage counts, and you can turn them off. Take & Read has no accounts, no advertising and no tracking. We, the makers of Take & Read, never receive your journal, the list of passages you keep, what you search for, or anything that says who you are.

To learn whether the app does what it’s for (whether passages lead readers on into the books, whether they write about what they read, and whether they come back), Take & Read sends us counts, unless you turn them off:

After each visit to the app: how long it lasted, how many passages were read and kept, how many passages were opened in their work and how many words were read there, how many journal entries were written, and how often the free part of a work ran out and Unlock the Library was tapped. Most are sent as a range, such as 5–9. When you write a journal entry, its length in words is counted, never the words themselves; when you reach the end of a work, that’s counted too. These carry the app’s version and a random number made for this installation of the app, sent only scrambled (hashed), so that visits on different days can be counted as one reader’s. It isn’t connected to your name, your Apple Account or your device.
Apart from you: one passage in twenty that’s read in the feed, with its work and tradition and whether it was kept, opened in its work or written about; the works read to the end; and the traditions chosen when you first open the app. These carry nothing that links them to you, to your installation or to your visit, and are sent at a different time, so they can’t be put together into what any one person reads.

The counts go to TelemetryDeck, an analytics service, which keeps them for us. They aren’t used for advertising, aren’t sold, and aren’t combined with data from anywhere else.

Seeing and stopping it. In Settings (the gear in My Commonplace), under Privacy, you can see every count waiting to be sent and the last ones sent, exactly as they go, and turn the counts off. They can also be turned off on the welcome page when you first open the app. Once they’re off, nothing is counted or sent, and the counts not yet sent and the installation’s random number are deleted. If you turn them on again, a new random number is made.

What stays on your iPhone

Everything you make in Take & Read is stored on your iPhone, in the app’s own storage:

your journal entries and the passages they’re written beneath, and any responses you write
the passages you keep, and the works you mark as favourites
where you are in each work you read, and which passages you’ve already seen, so the feed can show you new ones
your preferences, such as appearance and text size

If you delete the app, this is deleted with it. Your iPhone’s own backups (iCloud Backup or a computer backup) include it, as they do for any app, under Apple’s privacy terms rather than ours.

Purchases

Unlocking the library and leaving a tip are bought through the App Store, and Apple handles the payment under its own privacy policy. Apple tells us how many of each are sold, as it tells every developer, but not who bought them. Take & Read asks the App Store on your iPhone whether the library is unlocked, and sends that answer nowhere.

When something leaves your iPhone

Apart from the usage counts above, only when you send it. If you share a passage, export your commonplace as Markdown, or make a backup file, Take & Read hands it to the iOS share sheet, and you choose where it goes: Files, Mail, Messages or another app. What happens to it there is governed by that service.

Children

Take & Read collects no personal information from anyone, children included. The usage counts above are the same for everyone, and can be turned off.

Changes

If a future version changes any of this, for example by adding iCloud sync, we will update this policy and its date before that version is released, and say so in the release notes.

Contact

Questions about privacy: support@prodromus.app.