Gladys Privacy Policy

Are you using any analytics? E.g. Google, Flurry, Hockey, etc.

No. Analytics-based software design is the software equivalent of populism. Features should be things people request in an engaged manner. Things they consciously care about. Hence, my email address and the invitation to request features is openly displayed in the app.

Designing interactions based on "unconscious biases" encourages users to behaviourally devolve back into apes and lizards. Our strength and evolution lies in subtlety and diversity, not in catering to common-denominator patterns which we've inherited through our cellular heritage. It’s not a coincidence that Internet companies with analytics-driven product design have helped devolve global politics (from every side) into what it is today. I don’t want my apps to be any part of this.

On the operating system level, if you have chosen "share data with developers" as part of your device setup, macOS and iOS will send anonymised reports which are aggregated in iTunes across all users using differential privacy. These reports provide a high-level overview of how many installations there are across all users, how long the average installation period was, etc. You can find out more about this at developer.apple.com, specifically search for App Store Connect and Analytics.

Can you or any third-party see the contents I saved in Gladys?

No. Gladys keeps everything locally on your device. If iCloud sync is enabled then it also uploads copies to your own private iCloud container, which not even Apple can access without your credentials. It never reports on user actions or user contents to anyone. If you explicitly invite others to share an item, only the intended recipients get access to that items data; please see the section below on sharing for more details.

An exception is crash reports sent by the operating system - which are both anonymised and enabled only if you have chosen the option to share such reports with developers during your device setup. Those reports however still do not contain any info on what a user stores or does - although they may reveal, from a technical perspective, the action that caused the crash: "app exploded when user clicked on button X" for example, to help trace the problem and fix it.

Does the app collect my personal information?

No. Gladys stores only what you explicitly provide, and it doesn’t inspect or care about what that data is. iCloud or App Store login credentials are held by the operating system and the app could not see them even if it wanted to. Any ML-based operations, if enabled, use local on-device API that does not log or propagate any info about what was processed.

When you store a URL link Gladys will scan the origin once to pick up the site’s title and preview icon, so in theory a site owner could tell that someone from your IP address dropped a link to their page in Gladys if they were searching their access logs for that scan. The same goes when using the download option for a data component with a link.

How is my information protected?

Gladys doesn’t take any additional steps to protect your information above what your operating system and Apple already do, which is quite sufficient. While Gladys does not perform any further encryption of the data (not even for "locked" items, a feature which is there to protect from prying eyes, not to secure data), it's worth mentioning that the local filesystem itself IS encrypted by Apple on iOS devices as well as newer Macs. However if another app inside your device were to misbehave (via a jailbreak for instance on iOS) then it could in theory access your data inside Gladys’ sandbox. This means that Gladys may not be a place to store extreme military secrets, for example, but pretty secure in almost every other sense.

How is my data handled when I invite others to share an item?

Gladys shares data using the same CloudKit API which apps like Pages, Numbers, and other CloudKit-based apps do. This API is well-documented by Apple and puts privacy first in both implementation and choice of default settings.

Items are shared as private by default, so nobody but the intended recipient(s) will have access to any item which you have explicitly invited them to, and then they will only have access to that specific item's data, and nothing else. If you make an item public, then anyone with an invite link can accept the share and view that item's data. You can monitor who has accepted the invite via the sharing options in the info view.

Gladys will not include imported share items from other people when you export an archive (but it will include them in an exported ZIP).

Once you stop sharing an item it is removed from others' collections. It's worth noting though that nothing stops others from copy/pasting your shared item as a local duplicate in the meantime, so be aware that once you share an item it can potentially be copied, and if you un-share it later any copies that other people can make of it will live on.