Auto Journal Privacy Policy

Effective date: November 10, 2026

Auto Journal is a personal journaling app for iPhone and Mac that automatically records the places you spend time. This policy explains what the app accesses, how that information is used, and what leaves your device. Auto Journal is made by Thoughtful Development, LLC.

The short version

• There is no account and no sign-up. You are never asked for a name, email, or password to use the app.
• Your journal (the places you’ve been, your notes, photos, and companions) is stored on your own devices and in your own private iCloud account. We can’t see it.
• We don’t show ads, use advertising trackers, or sell or share your data with anyone for marketing.
• Anonymous usage analytics are off unless you turn them on, and they never include where you’ve been.
• To name places and add weather and city facts, the app sends coordinates or a city name (never your identity) to Apple, a weather service, and Wikipedia. Details below.
• This website sets one cookie, a random ID that lets us count returning visitors, and never records your screen.

Information the app uses

Location. With your permission, Auto Journal uses your location, including in the background (“Always”), to detect when you’ve stayed somewhere for 15 minutes or more (you can change this) and log it as a visit. Your location history is kept as your journal. You can turn tracking off at any time by changing location access in iOS Settings.

Motion & Fitness (optional). The app uses your iPhone’s motion history to tell stopping at a place apart from driving or walking past it, and to measure how far you walked between visits. This stays on your device.

Photos (optional). If you enable photo matching and grant Photos access, the app looks at the date and location of your photos to match ones you took during a visit. This happens on your device. Photos matched to a visit, and photos you add yourself, are kept as references to your photos, not copies, so a photo you delete from your library also disappears from your journal. (Photos added with older versions of the app were stored as copies in your journal and your iCloud.) The app never uploads your photos anywhere else.

Contacts (optional). If you use the “who was with you” feature, or let the app recognize home from your contact card, the app reads contact details you select. They are used only to label visits and recognize home.

Calendar (optional, read-only). If you allow calendar access, the app suggests calendar events that match a visit and uses them to help name places. It never changes your calendar.

Apple Health (optional, read-only). If you allow it, the app reads steps, walking and running distance, active energy, workouts, and heart rate to add them to a visit or a day. It never writes to Health. Health data is never shared with Siri, Shortcuts, or AI assistants.

Notifications (optional). Used to ask about a visit, tell you when you reach a Bucket List place, and remind you of past memories.

Things you share into the app. If you share a link from another app, the app saves what you shared to your journal.

Apple Intelligence, Siri, and Shortcuts

“Ask your journal,” day-journal drafts, and city descriptions use Apple Intelligence’s on-device model, so your journal is not sent anywhere to answer them. Siri and Shortcuts requests are handled by Apple under Apple’s privacy policy, require your iPhone to be unlocked, and never include places you’ve excluded.

AI assistants on your Mac (optional, off by default)

The Mac app can let AI assistants on your Mac, such as Claude Desktop, Claude Code, or Codex, read your journal to answer your questions. When you turn this on, the journal details an assistant reads are processed by that assistant’s provider (for example, Anthropic or OpenAI) under their privacy policy, not this one. Access is read-only. Places you’ve excluded, the addresses of your Home and Work, and Health data are never shared. You can turn this off at any time in Settings → AI Assistant.

What leaves your device

Auto Journal has no servers of its own. To fill in details, it sends the following, and nothing else:

• Apple (MapKit / Maps): the coordinates of a place, to find its name and street address and the route distance between two visits. Covered by Apple’s privacy policy.
• Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com): the coordinates of a visit, to look up the weather at that time and the ground elevation.
• Wikipedia and Wikidata: the name of a city on a trip, to show its population and a short description.

These lookups don’t include your identity, and no visit history, notes, photos, or contacts are sent to them.

Optional usage analytics (off by default)

If you turn on “Share anonymous usage analytics” in Settings → Privacy, the app sends PostHog, a US-based analytics service, which screens and features you use, along with technical details (such as app version, device model, and when the app opens and closes) and crash reports. This helps us learn what works and fix problems. It never includes place names, addresses, coordinates, people, notes, or photos. To tell whether the app keeps naming the same place correctly, it uses a scrambled code that is unique to your install and cannot be turned back into a location. You can turn analytics off at any time.

This website

When you visit thoughtfuldev.com, the site uses PostHog to understand how its pages are used, such as which pages are viewed, the site or link that brought you here, and whether you’ve visited before. To tell a returning visitor from a new one, the site sets one cookie, td_vid, which holds a random ID and is sent to PostHog with each visit. The cookie says nothing about who you are, is used only for these statistics, isn’t used by any other site, and lasts 13 months from your latest visit. You can remove it by clearing this site’s cookies in your browser. PostHog also keeps a session ID in the tab’s temporary storage, which is cleared when you close the tab. The site does not record your screen and does not try to identify you. As with any website, your IP address reaches PostHog, which uses it to estimate your country and city. None of this is connected to the app or to your journal.

If you use the contact form to send me a note, the name, email address and message you enter are sent to me by email so I can reply. They aren’t stored on the website or shared with anyone else, and I’ll delete them on request. Booking an intro call takes you to zcal, a scheduling service, whose own privacy policy covers what you enter there.

Feedback you send

If you use Settings → Give Feedback, you choose whether to attach diagnostic logs, with location data or without, or no logs at all. Nothing is sent until you press Send in your email app. We use what you send only to investigate and fix problems, and will delete it on request.

Where your data is stored

Your journal is stored on your devices and synced between your iPhone and Mac through your own private Apple iCloud account. That data is governed by Apple’s iCloud privacy terms and is not accessible to me. The app also keeps one backup copy on each device.

Keeping and deleting your data

You are in control. You can delete individual visits and places in the app, or exclude places so they’re hidden. Deleting the app removes its data from that device. A copy remains in your iCloud account until you remove it there. Because there’s no account, the only data we may hold is feedback you chose to send us, which we’ll delete on request.

Children

Auto Journal is not directed at children and does not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes to this policy

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

Contact

Questions about privacy or this policy: send a note through the contact form.