Your thoughts stay on your device.

Nothing. The Mote app has no account, no analytics, no crash reporting, no ads and no third-party code that sends data anywhere. It doesn’t use advertising identifiers or track you across apps or websites. We never see your thoughts, sketches, voice notes, photos or tags.

Everything you put in Mote is stored in the app’s private storage on your iPhone or iPad:

• thoughts, titles, tags, collections, links and trails
• sketches, photos and voice recordings, and the text Mote reads from them
• your answers to Mote’s suggestions, and your settings

Mote doesn’t sync between devices. If you use iCloud Backup or back up your device to a computer, your Mote library is included in that backup, which is handled by Apple or by you, not by us.

• Voice notes are transcribed on your device. Mote only uses Apple’s speech recognition when it can run on the device; if it can’t, Mote doesn’t transcribe, rather than send audio to a server.
• Apple Intelligence, on devices that have it, suggests how thoughts connect and names trails. Mote uses Apple’s on-device model only; the text it looks at doesn’t leave the device. You decide whether each suggestion is right.
• “Feels related”, search, and reading text in photos and sketches all run on the device. iOS may download language files it needs from Apple; Mote doesn’t send your content with that.

• Camera, to take a photo you add to a thought.
• Microphone, to record a voice note.
• Speech recognition, to turn a voice note into text on the device.

Mote doesn’t ask for access to your photo library. When you add a photo, you pick it in Apple’s photo picker and Mote only receives that one photo, of which it keeps its own copy. You can turn any permission off in Settings; the rest of Mote keeps working.

Only when you send it:

• Share on a thought hands it to the app you choose in Apple’s share sheet.
• Export creates one .mote file with your whole library: a plain ZIP that isn’t encrypted. Anyone who has the file can read it, so keep it somewhere you trust. It leaves out Recently deleted and your name.

A thought you delete goes to Recently deleted for 30 days, then it’s removed for good, along with its files. Erase everything in Settings removes your whole library from the device at once. Deleting the app removes everything too.

We can’t delete or recover anything for you, because we never have it. Copies in your device backups or .mote files you exported are yours to keep or delete.

This site has no cookies, no analytics and no tracking, and it loads no third-party scripts or fonts. Like any website, the service that hosts it may keep standard access logs, such as IP address, browser and time of visit, for security and to keep the site running. We don’t use them to identify you.

Mote collects no personal information from anyone, children included. It is suitable for general audiences under the App Store’s age rating.

Under the Philippine Data Privacy Act of 2012 and similar laws elsewhere, you have rights over personal data that others hold about you. Because we don’t collect or hold any personal data through Mote, there is nothing for us to access, correct or delete. Your data is on your device, where you can see, export or erase all of it. If you have a question or concern, email hello@dayonelabs.co.

If Mote ever changes how it handles data, we’ll update this page and its date before that version of the app is released, and say what changed. We won’t start collecting data without telling you clearly first.

Marc Dimacuha, Day One Labs, Metro Manila, Philippines. Email hello@dayonelabs.co.