Privacy Policy
The short version
PageTime has no account and no server holding your reading. Your books, sessions, streak and settings live in a single file on your iPhone, and deleting the app deletes them. Photos of book pages are read on your device and thrown away. Two things reach the internet at all: looking up a book’s cover art, and handling a subscription through the App Store. Both are described below.
Who this is from
PageTime (“the app”) is made by PageTime, the data controller for the small amount of processing described here. You can reach us at support@pageti.me.
This policy covers the PageTime iPhone app and this website. It is written to be read, not to be survived — if anything here is unclear, email and ask.
What stays on your phone
Almost everything. PageTime keeps its entire state in a single file inside the app’s own storage container on your device:
- Your books — titles, authors, page counts and progress
- Your reading sessions — when, how long, which book, how many pages
- Your streak, goal, reading pace and the other assumptions behind the estimates
- Any reading pact you set up, and the days each side completed
- Notes of when you used the emergency unlock, and the reason you gave
- The opaque reference to the apps you chose to shield (see below)
None of this is transmitted to us or to anyone else. There is no account to create, no sync, and no backup on our side — which also means that if you delete the app, this data is gone and we cannot restore it. Your own iCloud or encrypted device backup may include it, under Apple’s terms rather than ours.
Camera and book pages
If you choose to verify a session by scanning the page you finished on, PageTime asks for camera access. The image is passed to Apple’s Vision framework, which runs entirely on your device, and the page number it reads is offered to you as a suggestion.
The photo is never written to disk and never uploaded. It is held in memory for the moment it takes to read the page number, and then discarded. Scanning is always optional — you can type the page or log the time instead.
Screen Time and the apps you shield
App shielding is built on Apple’s Screen Time (Family Controls) framework. When you pick which apps to shield, you do so in Apple’s own picker, and Apple hands the app back an opaque token rather than a list of names.
This means PageTime cannot see which apps you use or shield, even if it wanted to. It knows only how many things you selected. That token is stored locally with everything else and is never transmitted.
Where PageTime shows a weekly screen-time total, it is either a figure you typed in yourself or one supplied by Apple’s reporting on your device, and the screen says which.
The two things that use the network
| Service | What is sent | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Open Library (Internet Archive) |
A book’s title and author — the same two fields already on your screen. No identifier, no account, no API key. | To fetch real cover art for a book on your shelf. The result is cached on your device so the lookup happens once. If it fails, the app draws its own cover instead. |
| RevenueCat | A randomly generated, anonymous app user ID; your App Store purchase receipt; and basic device and app metadata such as platform and version. | To check whether a PageTime Full subscription is active, and to restore it if you reinstall or change device. |
| Apple (App Store) |
Handled entirely by Apple. We never see your payment details. | To take payment and manage the subscription. |
Both Open Library and RevenueCat operate in the United States, so using those features involves an international transfer of the data described above. Their own policies apply to what they do with it: Internet Archive and RevenueCat.
What PageTime does not do
- No analytics or telemetry SDK, and no crash reporter that sends your usage anywhere
- No advertising, no advertising identifier, no third-party trackers
- No sale or sharing of personal information, under any definition, ever
- No profile of you built anywhere but on your own phone
- No email list you are enrolled into by installing the app
Notifications
If you turn on nudges, PageTime schedules local notifications on your device for the windows you set. They are generated on the phone. Nothing is sent through a push server, and we do not know whether they fired.
This website
This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and embeds nothing from a third party — the fonts and images are served from the same domain as the page. Our web server keeps ordinary short-lived request logs (IP address, page requested, timestamp) for security and debugging, which are rotated out in the normal course of operating a server.
Children
PageTime is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Because the app has no account and collects no personal data on our side, there is nothing for a parent to request the deletion of beyond deleting the app itself.
Your rights
Under the UK GDPR, the EU GDPR and comparable laws elsewhere you have the right to access, correct, delete and port your personal data, and to object to processing.
In practice, for almost everything PageTime holds, you exercise those rights directly: the data is on your phone, you can see all of it in the app, edit the assumptions behind it in Settings, and delete every trace by deleting the app. We hold no copy to hand over.
The exception is subscription data held by RevenueCat on our behalf, which is processed to provide the subscription you bought (a contractual basis) and to prevent fraud (a legitimate interest). Email support@pageti.me and we will find and delete that record. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office.
Retention
On-device data is kept until you delete it or delete the app. Subscription records are kept for as long as the subscription is active and afterwards only as long as tax and accounting rules require.
Changes
If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes with it and the new version is published here before it takes effect. We will not quietly start collecting something this page says we do not.
Contact
support@pageti.me — a real person reads it.