Circle — Privacy Policy

1. The short version

• Circle has no account, no sign-in, no servers and no analytics.
• Everything Circle stores lives in a local database on your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded, synced or shared by the app.
• Circle reads your Contacts only with your permission and only the people you allow. It never writes to your address book unless you explicitly edit a contact inside Circle and confirm.
• Circle never sends messages, e-mails or calls on your behalf. It can open the system composer with a draft; sending is always your action.
• You can export everything Circle knows as a file, and delete it, at any time, from Settings inside the app.

2. Information Circle accesses

2.1 Contacts

When you grant access, Circle reads the following fields from the contacts you allow:

• name (given, family, nickname and formatted name), organization and job title;
• phone numbers and e-mail addresses (used for search and for opening the system Phone, Messages and Mail apps);
• birthday;
• city from the postal address;
• the contact's thumbnail photo, loaded on demand for display only.

Circle supports both full and limited Contacts access. With limited access, only the contacts you picked in the system picker are visible to the app; every other contact remains invisible to Circle.

Circle keeps a small search index of these fields on your device so the list and the search work quickly. The index contains no photos at original size and is rebuilt from Contacts whenever needed. If you revoke access, Circle stops reading Contacts, removes the projected contact data from its screens and keeps only what you created inside the app (see section 3), unlinked from any address-book entry.

2.2 Notifications

If you allow notifications, Circle schedules local notifications on your iPhone for reminders, birthdays and reconnections. No notification is sent through a server. You control, in the app's Settings, which categories are enabled, the preferred hour, and how much a notification may reveal on the lock screen: the full subject, only the person's name and kind of alert, or a generic message. The text of a note is never placed in a notification.

2.3 On-device intelligence

Where the device supports Apple's on-device models, Circle may generate suggestions (for example, a birthday message draft) using only the facts you explicitly select. Generation runs on the device; no prompt or result leaves it. If the model is unavailable, every feature keeps working manually.

3. Information Circle creates

Inside the app you can create:

• the list of people you mark as important;
• a contact cadence per person and its snooze;
• private notes;
• interactions ("Talked today", with an optional date and note);
• reminders (title, optional note, date, repetition);
• the activity history that records those actions;
• app preferences.

This information belongs to you and is stored only in Circle's local database on your iPhone. It is never written to your Contacts app, never synced to any cloud service by Circle, and never transmitted anywhere. It is included in your device backups according to your iOS backup settings.

4. What Circle does not do

• It does not sell, share, rent or use your contacts or notes for advertising or any other purpose.
• It does not build a database of contacts on the developer's side.
• It does not contact anyone in your address book.
• It does not select recipients or send bulk communications.
• It does not use third-party SDKs, analytics, crash reporters or advertising networks.
• It does not track you across apps or websites.
• It does not log names, phone numbers, e-mails, notes, searches or prompts. Diagnostic logs contain only event names, counts and error codes.

5. Diagnostics you can share

From Settings you can generate a diagnostics report to send to support. The report contains the app version, schema version, counts of records and error codes. It contains no names, contact identifiers, notes or any free text, and it is shared only if you choose to share it, using the system share sheet.

6. Your controls

All of the following are available in the app's Settings:

• Contacts access — see the current status and open the system Settings to change it.
• Notifications — enable or disable each category, set the hour and lead time, and choose the lock-screen privacy level.
• Export — save everything Circle created as a JSON file. By default the export does not include fields from your Contacts; you can choose to include names.
• Clear activity history — removes the history without deleting notes, interactions or reminders.
• Delete AI data — removes any stored suggestions.
• Delete all Circle data — removes notes, interactions, reminders, cadences and history. Your Contacts address book is not touched.
• Clear cache — removes rebuildable data such as the search index; it is rebuilt on the next sync.

Uninstalling the app deletes its local database.

7. Retention

Circle keeps what you created until you delete it or uninstall the app. Contact data projected into the index is refreshed from Contacts and removed when access is revoked or the contact disappears; notes and other private data linked to that person are preserved and marked as belonging to a person who is no longer accessible, so nothing you wrote is silently lost or attached to someone else.

8. Children

Circle is not directed at children under 13 (or the minimum age required in your jurisdiction) and does not knowingly collect information from them. Because Circle collects no information at all on the developer's side, there is nothing to request or delete from us; all data stays on the device.

9. Security

Circle relies on the protections of iOS: the app sandbox, device encryption and your passcode or biometrics. The database is stored in the app's private container. Circle opens no network connections.

10. Changes to this policy

If Circle starts to access new data, use a new permission or introduce any online feature, this policy will be updated before that version is released, and the change will be described in the release notes. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.

11. Contact

Questions about privacy: quicktap2024@gmail.com.