Privacy

Last updated 27 August 2026

Relational is a notebook about the people in your life. That is about as personal as data gets, so this page is written to be checked rather than to reassure. If a sentence here could not survive someone putting the app behind a proxy and watching, it does not belong on this page.

The four things that matter

• Your notes stay on your device. We run no server, so there is nowhere for them to be sent. The app collects no analytics and no crash reports, and there is no account. They live in a folder you can open in the Files app — which also means anything you give Files access to can read them.
• Buying a subscription tells Apple you bought it. It tells us that somebody paid. It tells us nothing about who you are or what you wrote.
• iCloud sync is off unless you turn it on. If you do, your notes go to your own iCloud account — not to us. Apple can read what is in iCloud unless you have Advanced Data Protection switched on, and most people do not.
• Your notes are yours in every state, including when you stop paying. You can read them and export them as plain text, forever.

What the app collects about you

Nothing. There is no account to create, no email address to give us, no analytics library, no crash-reporting library, no advertising identifier and no third-party software development kit of any kind inside the app.

We are not being modest here — we do not have the equipment. There is no server on our side that could receive your notes, which is a stronger thing than a policy promising not to look at them.

How your notes are read

When you write a note, a model running on your iPhone reads it and proposes what it understood — who the note is about, what happened, how people are related. That reading happens on the device. The text is not sent anywhere to be interpreted, and nothing enters your pages until you confirm it.

If the model is not available on your device or in your region, the app still works. Writing, editing and organising your notes by hand is a complete path, not a fallback.

Everything that does leave your phone

This is the complete list. It is short, and it is the part of a privacy policy most worth reading.

Buying, and checking that you have bought

Payment goes through Apple. Apple is the seller; we never see your card, your name, your billing address or your Apple Account. To show you prices and to check whether your subscription is active, the app talks to Apple's servers — so the app does make network calls, and a subscription is what they are for. Apple later gives us sales and subscription reports that are aggregated and do not identify individual people.

iCloud sync, if you switch it on

Syncing between your devices is off by default. If you turn it on, your notes are copied to your iCloud account, using Apple's infrastructure. They still do not come to us. Apple holds the keys to iCloud data unless you have turned on Advanced Data Protection in your Apple Account settings, so if that matters to you, turn it on — it is Apple's setting, not ours, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

Crash logs, if you have already told Apple to share them

We do not add a crash reporter. If you have Apple's Share with App Developers setting turned on, Apple may pass us crash logs it collected. That is Apple's mechanism and you control it in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements. Those logs describe where the app stopped working. They do not contain your notes.

Nothing else

There is no other destination. No telemetry endpoint, no error-reporting service, no feature-flag service, no advertising network, no data broker, and no analytics provider receives anything from the app.

Your notes are in a folder you can open

Relational stores your notes as plain files in the app's own folder, which is visible in the Files app on your iPhone. This is deliberate: it is what makes exporting your notes real rather than a promise, and it means you are not locked in to us.

It has a cost and we would rather you heard it from us. Anyone holding your unlocked phone can open that folder, and any app you grant Files access to can read it. The security boundary for your notes is the device itself — your passcode, Face ID, and who you hand the phone to. The app does not add a second password on top, and it does not claim to.

This website

relationalnotes.com sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and loads no fonts, scripts, images or anything else from another company's servers. There is no banner asking for your consent because there is nothing to consent to.

Our hosting provider, Vercel, keeps ordinary server logs in order to serve the site and defend it from abuse. Those logs are Vercel's, they are the same kind any web server keeps, and we do not build profiles from them.

If we ever add measurement to this site, it will be cookieless and aggregate — no cookie, no identifier, and nothing that could be tied to you or joined up with anything in the app — and this page will say what it records before it records it.

Children

Relational is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone of any age, because we do not collect anything.

Your rights over your data

Depending on where you live you may have rights to see, correct, export or delete the personal data a company holds about you. In our case the honest answer is that we hold none, so there is nothing for us to show you, correct or delete. Your notes are on your device, under your control, and you can export or delete them yourself at any time without asking us.

There is one exception and it is worth naming. If you email us, we have your email address and whatever you wrote in the message, for as long as it takes to help you and to keep a record of the conversation. You can ask us to delete that correspondence and we will.

Who we are

Relational is made and published by AaronInternet. AaronInternet is the company; Relational is the product.

AaronInternet is a sole proprietorship registered in Ontario, Canada, and this policy is written under Canadian privacy law.

For anything about privacy, write to contact@relationalnotes.com.

When this policy changes

The four lines near the top of this page are the ones that matter, and they are the ones we intend to keep. If a future feature cannot be described honestly alongside them, our rule is that the feature changes — not the lines. If something does change, the date at the top of this page changes with it and the change is described here rather than quietly absorbed.