Privacy

Last updated 2026-09-24

InkWhale is a small app made by Ingre Labs Inc., which is responsible for what it keeps about you. If you have a question, want something changed, or want to reach the person responsible for privacy, write to hello@inkwhale.app.

What we keep

• Your reading. The books you add, the pages you save, your notes, and when you saved them.
• An install identifier. A random number made when you install the app, so your reading can be kept together.
• Your email address, only if you sign in to keep your books.
• What you said, as text, only if you choose to share transcripts.
• Diagnostics: counts of crashes, freezes and other problems, described below.

Audio never leaves your phone. Speech is turned into text on the phone itself. We don't collect your name, your contacts, your location or your advertising identifier, and there are no third-party analytics or trackers in the app or on this site.

Why

For three things: keeping your place and your notes; during the beta, making page recognition better by looking at transcripts that readers have chosen to share; and finding and fixing problems in the app. We don't use it for anything else.

Your choice about transcripts

Before the microphone is first used, the app asks whether you want to share transcripts, and "Don't share transcripts" is an equal choice. You can turn sharing off in Settings at any time. When you do, the transcripts you already shared are removed from our servers too.

Diagnostics

So we can find and fix problems, the app keeps two kinds of diagnostics. Neither ever includes a book title, a note, a transcript or anything you typed or said.

• Problem counts, from Apple's MetricKit. About once a day your iPhone gives the app a summary of how it ran: how many times it crashed, froze, was closed by the system and why, and used too much storage or processor, with the iOS version, the iPhone model and the app's version. The app keeps each summary on your phone for two weeks and adds its counts to your reading data, so they reach our servers along with it and are deleted with it.
• A log of recent app activity. The last 300 things the app did, such as which screen opened, when a book search started or finished, when the microphone started or stopped, and how much memory the app was using. It stays on your phone. It leaves, together with the kept summaries, only if you choose "Send diagnostics" in Settings (in test builds), and then it goes wherever you send it.

We use diagnostics only to find and fix problems.

Where it goes

• Supabase stores your reading and your account. The data is kept in Canada (Montreal).
• Resend, in the United States, sends the sign-in email. It sees only your email address.
• Open Library and Google Books, both in the United States, receive the text you type or say when you search for a book. That's a book title, not anything about you.
• Apple receives crash reports from TestFlight builds.

How long

If you never sign in and the app is inactive for 12 months, its data is deleted from our servers. If you sign in, your data is kept until you delete it. Deleted data stays in our backups for up to seven days, and then it's gone.

Your rights

You can edit or delete any book, page or note in the app. "Export my data" in Settings gives you everything we hold about your reading as a file. "Delete all data" removes everything from the phone and from our servers. "Delete account" removes your account and its data from our servers. You can also ask us for any of this at hello@inkwhale.app.

If you're not happy with how we handle your information, tell us first and we'll try to put it right. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.