Privacy

Who we are

Bifolio is made by Canopus Labs Ltd (“we”, “us”), a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17471266, with its registered office at ⁨71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom⁩. We are responsible for the little personal data this website handles. For anything to do with privacy, write to support@bifolio.app.

The app collects no data

The Bifolio app has no account, no server of ours, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Its App Store privacy label reads Data Not Collected. The only third-party code inside it is a small library for reading zip files, which runs on your iPhone and makes no network connection.

Encrypted before it syncs

Everything you write is sealed on your iPhone with AES-256-GCM before it is stored or synced: the words of each entry, its mood, place and weather, the questions you answered, your journals’ names, and every photo, video, recording, transcript and drawing.

If you’re signed in to iCloud, the sealed records sync through the private iCloud database of your own Apple Account, so your journal reaches your other devices. Apple holds that copy under its own privacy policy; we have no access to it. To keep the journal in order, a few details are stored alongside each sealed record without encryption: its identifiers, the date and time of an entry and which journal it belongs to, when it was created, changed or deleted, the order and cover colour of your journals, and the kind and size of each attachment.

Bifolio works fully with iCloud switched off. Your journal then stays on that iPhone alone, and Settings ▸ iCloud says so.

Your keys and the recovery key

The keys that open your journal are kept in the iOS Keychain and travel between your devices in iCloud Keychain, which Apple encrypts end to end. They never come to us.

You can also create a recovery key in Settings ▸ Privacy & Encryption. It is optional. Bifolio uses it to keep a copy of your journal’s keys, locked with the recovery key, in your iCloud, so you can open your journal on a new device even if iCloud Keychain can’t bring the keys. The recovery key is shown to you once and also kept in your iCloud Keychain, so that keys made later can be added. Anyone who has both your recovery key and access to your iCloud data could open your journal, so keep it somewhere safe.

What stays on your iPhone

So that lists, search and widgets can work without opening every entry, Bifolio keeps a readable index of your entries on each iPhone. It is never synced, and it is left out of device backups.

Your settings stay on each device and don’t sync: the lock and journal passcode, the reminder, place and weather, prompts, the intelligence switch, what widgets may show, and your backup folder.

Place and weather — optional, off by default

If you switch on Settings ▸ Location & weather ▸ Record place and weather and allow location access while using the app, Bifolio reads your location, at roughly kilometre accuracy, when you save a new entry on the day you write it. It reads your location at no other time.

That location is sent to Apple: to Apple Maps, to find the name of the town, and to Apple WeatherKit, for the current conditions. The town, the coordinates, a weather symbol and the temperature are sealed into the entry — they never come to us. The coordinates aren’t shown in the app, but they are included when you export to Markdown. Places imported from Day One come across with their coordinates too, and a Journaling Suggestion you choose can add a place to an entry whatever this setting says.

Weather data is provided by Apple Weather (data sources). To stop, switch the setting off or remove Bifolio’s location access in the Settings app.

Photos, camera and microphone

You add photos and videos through Apple’s picker, which gives Bifolio only the items you choose. The camera and microphone are used only when you take a photo or video or make a recording. Recordings are transcribed on your iPhone by Apple’s speech recognition, where your language is supported; the first time, iOS may download the language model from Apple. Transcripts are sealed with the recording.

Writing prompts and Apple Intelligence

The questions an empty page can offer are built into the app. On iPhones with Apple Intelligence, Bifolio can also suggest questions drawn from your recent entries: Apple’s model reads up to your 40 most recent entries in the open journal, on your iPhone, and nothing is sent anywhere.

Journaling Suggestions is Apple’s own picker; Bifolio receives only the suggestion you choose. Writing Tools is Apple’s feature too, and follows Apple’s privacy terms: Apple may process a request with Private Cloud Compute, or send it to ChatGPT if you agree to that.

All three are under one switch, Settings ▸ Intelligence ▸ Apple Intelligence features, which is on wherever they can run. Switch it off and Bifolio makes no use of any of them. Transcription is separate, and always stays on your iPhone.

Reminders and widgets

The daily reminder is a notification scheduled on your iPhone. No server is involved, and it stays off until you switch it on.

Widgets read the index on your iPhone. They show counts and dates, and a line from your entries only if you switch on Show entry text in widgets — never while the journal lock is on.

Lock and journal passcode

Face ID and Touch ID are handled by iOS: Bifolio learns only whether you were recognised, never anything about your face or fingerprint. A journal passcode is kept on that iPhone alone, as a salted one-way hash in the iOS Keychain, along with a count of wrong attempts. It never syncs, and no one — us included — can recover it.

Import, export and backup

Files you import are read on your iPhone. Exports and backups are made on your iPhone and are plain files, not encrypted, as Bifolio says wherever it makes one. An export goes only where you send it from the share sheet; a backup goes to the folder you choose. If that folder is in iCloud Drive or another service, its privacy terms apply.

Deleting your journal

Deleted entries and journals wait in Recently Deleted for 30 days, then are deleted for good on all your devices. Deleting the Bifolio app removes the copy on that iPhone. To remove the iCloud copy as well, open the Settings app, go to your Apple Account’s iCloud storage, choose Bifolio and delete its data. We never receive your journal, so there is nothing for us to delete on our side.

This website

bifolio.app is separate from the app, and handles a little data:

• Hosting. Cloudflare, Inc. hosts this website. Like any web server, it processes technical details such as your IP address and browser to deliver pages and keep the site secure. We rely on our legitimate interest in running a working, secure website.
• Visit counts. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to see how many people visit, which pages they read and how quickly those pages load. It doesn’t use cookies to identify you: a visit is counted when you arrive from another site or come here directly, and page views are recorded anonymously — the page, the site that referred you, your country, your type of browser, device and operating system, and how long the page took to load. We rely on legitimate interests here too.
• The waiting list. If you give us your email address, we use it for one thing: a single email when Bifolio launches. Until then, we keep it in a Cloudflare database in the EU, along with the date you joined and the language of the page you joined from. We delete it once that email has gone out, or sooner if you ask. A deleted address can stay in the database’s automatic backups for up to 7 days. We rely on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by writing to support@bifolio.app.

Cloudflare, Inc. is based in the United States, so this information may be processed there, under Cloudflare’s data-processing terms.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of any personal data we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw consent at any time. In practice, the only personal data we could hold about you is a waiting-list email address. Write to support@bifolio.app.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new date at the top.