Privacy policy

Bouky · last updated 18 September 2026

Bouky has no account, no sign-in and no password, and there is no back end of ours holding anything of yours. Your books, your photographs of their pages, the words and passages you kept, the notes and tags you wrote and the meanings that were worked out for them stay on your phone. What does leave the phone is one thing, it is counting rather than content, and it has a section of its own below.

What stays on your device

• The photographs you take of pages, kept as image files in Bouky's own container on the phone.
• The text recognised from them, and every word and passage you chose to keep, with its book, its page number, its tags and your notes.
• The meanings and translations worked out for a word, and the language each one was written in.
• Your settings: the app's language and appearance, the hour the morning page is waiting at, whether the owl is switched on, and whether counting is switched on.
• Whether this device holds a purchase, as the App Store reported it.

None of it is sent to us and we hold no copy of any of it. Deleting the app deletes all of it from the phone.

Reading the page, and what a word means

Text recognition uses Apple's Vision framework and runs entirely on the device. Meanings and translations use Apple's on-device foundation model, which also runs entirely on the device and needs no download. The photograph of your page and the words on it are never sent anywhere, not to us and not to any third party, and no part of either is used to train anything.

The camera and your photo library

Bouky asks for the camera so you can photograph a page, and for your photo library only when you choose a photograph of a page or of a book's jacket yourself. Neither is asked for at launch, and neither is asked for until you have pressed something that needs it. Bouky reads only the images you hand it and never browses your library.

iCloud

If you have bought Bouky, your library travels to your other devices through your own private iCloud database, under your own Apple Account. That is Apple's service and not ours: we cannot read it, we are not sent a copy, and no account of ours is involved. If you have not bought Bouky, or you have no iCloud, the library stays on the one device and nothing travels at all.

Purchases

Buying, renewing and cancelling are handled entirely by the App Store. We never see your payment details and they never pass through us. What Bouky sees is what the store tells it: whether this Apple Account holds a purchase.

Notifications

The morning page is scheduled on your own device by the app itself, at the hour you chose. There is no push server, nothing is sent over the network to deliver it, and no notification is sent by us.

Counting how Bouky is used

Bouky counts what people do with it, so that we can see where the app is confusing and where it breaks. This is the one thing that leaves your phone, and it is worth being exact about what it is.

An event is a verb and a few small words beside it, and nothing else: that a screen was opened, that a book was added, that a page was photographed, that a word was kept, that the buying screen was shown or dismissed, that a purchase succeeded or failed, how many books are on the shelf. Nothing you have written, photographed or kept is ever in one. Not a title, not an author, not a word, not a passage, not a note, not a tag, not a filename, not a page.

• There is no account and no name. Events carry a random number Bouky made up on your phone the first time it opened. It is tied to no reader and no device, it is not an advertising identifier, it is not joined to anything outside this app, and it is gone for good when Bouky is deleted.
• The events are held by PostHog on our behalf, on servers in the European Union, and they are used by us and by nobody else. They are not sold, not shared with advertisers and not used to build a profile of you.
• Nothing is recorded or filmed. There is no session replay and no screen capture in Bouky, because recording a session would film a reader's own photographed pages, which is the one thing this app must never do.
• Crashes are reported, as the place in the code that failed and the version it failed in. A crash report carries no content of yours either.

You can turn all of it off. Settings, then Counting, then Help Bouky along. Switched off, nothing is sent at all, and everything in the app goes on working exactly as it did.

Where an install came from

If Bouky is advertised on the App Store, the app asks Apple once, in its first few openings, whether this install came from one of those advertisements. Apple answers with campaign numbers, or answers that it did not. That answer is kept on the phone and travels with the events above so that we can tell whether an advertisement was worth paying for.

No advertising identifier is read and no tracking permission is asked for, because there is nothing here to track you with. We do not track you as Apple defines tracking, and nothing about you is joined to any data from any other company or app.

What Bouky does not do

• No advertising inside the app, ever.
• No advertising identifier, no App Tracking Transparency request, and no tracking as Apple defines it.
• No name, no email address, no phone number and no location is asked for or collected.
• Nothing you read, wrote, photographed or kept is ever counted, sent or held anywhere but your own phone and your own iCloud.
• Nothing is sold to anybody.

Your rights

Deleting the app removes every photograph, word, passage, note and setting from the phone, and there is nothing of yours left with us to ask about, because we were never sent any of it. For the counting described above, the switch in Settings stops it, and if you would like the events already sent from your phone removed, write to the address below and say roughly when you installed Bouky and on which storefront; we will delete what can be found from that.

Children

Bouky is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect any personal data about them.

If this changes

If what Bouky sends changes, this page changes before that version ships, and the date at the top changes with it. The App Store privacy labels and the app's own privacy manifest are changed on the same day, because those describe the build rather than the intention.

Contact

Write to contact@pwnera.com. That address is read by a person.