Privacy Policy
Last updated: 13 August 2026
Corteks is an app for capturing your own thoughts and having them read back to you. This policy explains what we store, why, who else touches it, and how to get rid of it.
We have tried to write it in plain language. Where something is unflattering, we have said it plainly rather than burying it.
The short version
- We store the thoughts you capture, because the app is useless if we do not.
- We can read them. Corteks is not end-to-end encrypted, and that is a deliberate design decision explained below.
- Your voice never leaves your phone. Speech becomes text on the device itself, and we never receive or store audio.
- We send the text of your thoughts to Anthropic, our AI provider, to produce the readings, the weekly story, chat answers and the labels on each thought.
- We do not run advertising, we do not use analytics or tracking software, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone for their own purposes.
- You can delete your account from inside the app, and it takes everything with it.
What we collect
Your account. Your email address, which sign-in method you used (email, Google or Apple), and when the account was created.
If you sign in with Google, Google also passes us the name and profile picture on your Google account, and these are stored with your account. We do not ask for them, we do not display them anywhere in the app, and we do not use them for anything. They arrive as part of the sign-in and we would rather list them than let you find them later. Signing in with Apple or with an email address and password gives us no name at all.
What you capture. The content of every thought you save:
- text you type
- the transcript of anything you speak. Speech is turned into text by your phone’s own dictation and we never receive the audio, only the text it produces. Depending on your device and language, iOS may do that transcription on the phone or on Apple’s own servers; either way the recording never reaches us and we never store one.
- images you attach
Your subscription, if you have one. Whether your trial or subscription is active and when it expires, plus the identifier Apple gives the transaction. We never see your card, and no payment details ever reach us — Apple handles the payment and tells us only whether you are entitled.
What it costs us to run. Each time the app asks the AI for something, we record which account it was for and what the request cost. It is what enforces a daily spending limit per account, and it holds no part of what you wrote.
What the app derives from it. Each thought is analysed to produce a title, a one or two sentence summary, a category, themes, tags, short observations, and links to your other thoughts. We also store the objectives you create, the actions you keep, your chat messages with the app, your weekly stories, and the readings the app writes about your thinking.
Technical records of AI usage. For each AI request we record how many tokens it used and what it cost. These records contain no content: no thoughts, no prompts, no replies. They exist so we can understand what the service costs to run.
What we do not collect
- No audio. Speech-to-text runs on your device using the operating system's own dictation. The recording never reaches us and is never stored.
- No analytics or tracking. The app contains no analytics, advertising, attribution or crash-reporting software of any kind.
- No advertising, and no data sold or shared for advertising.
- No location, contacts, calendar, health data or device identifiers.
- No profiling of you for anyone else's purposes. The app forms a picture of your thinking, and that picture is shown to you and used for nothing else.
Why we store what we store
Everything is stored for one purpose: to run the app for you. Your thoughts are stored so you can find them again, so they can be placed on your graph, so the app can notice patterns across them, so it can answer questions about them, and so it can write you a weekly story about your own thinking.
We do not use your content to build products for other people, and we do not use it to train our own models.
We can read your thoughts, and here is why
Corteks does not encrypt your thoughts in a way that hides them from us. An earlier version did, and we removed it deliberately.
The reason is simple: a service that cannot read your thoughts cannot write you a weekly story about them, cannot ground a conversation in them, and cannot notice that you have circled the same subject four times this month. Those features are the product. Encrypting the content beyond our reach would mean shipping an app that does none of them.
So the protection we offer is the ordinary kind, honestly described:
- Everything travels over an encrypted connection (TLS).
- Your rows are isolated per account at the database level, so one account cannot read another's.
- Access to production systems is limited to those who need it to operate the service.
If a service claiming your thoughts are unreadable to it is what you want, Corteks is not that, and we would rather you knew before you started.
Who else touches your data
We use a small number of providers to run the service. They process data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own.
| Provider | What it handles | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Accounts, database, image storage | Stores your account and everything you capture |
| Anthropic | The text of your thoughts, sent per request | Produces the analysis, readings, weekly story and chat replies |
| Replit | Hosts our API server | Runs the code that talks to the above |
| Resend | Your email address, and the contents of the emails we send you | Delivers sign-in confirmations, password resets, export links and the one trial-end notice |
| Google / Apple | Sign-in, only if you choose it | Confirms who you are; we receive your email address |
About Anthropic specifically. When the app analyses a thought, writes a reading, answers a chat message or produces your weekly story, the relevant text is sent to Anthropic's API and processed there.
We do not sell your data. We do not share it with anyone not listed above, except where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety.
How long we keep it
We keep what you capture until you delete it, or until you delete your account.
Delete a single thought and it is removed, along with any image attached to it. Delete your account and everything goes: your thoughts, images, objectives, actions, chat history, stories, readings and the account itself. This is a real deletion, not a flag.
Backups may hold copies for a short period after deletion before they age out.
Deleting your account
In the app: Profile → Delete account.
Or on the web: see Deleting your Corteks account, which explains how to request deletion by email if you cannot open the app.
Your rights
Depending on where you live you may have the right to access, correct, export, delete or restrict the use of your personal data, and to object to how it is used.
You can read everything you have captured inside the app at any time, and you can delete it there. For anything else, write to hello@corteks.app and we will respond.
Children
Corteks is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 years old to use it. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger, and if we learn that we have, we will delete it.
Where your data is held
Your account and everything you capture are stored by Supabase in Singapore (ap-southeast-1).
Data does leave Singapore in the ordinary course of using the app. Our API server is hosted by Replit, and when a thought is analysed, or a reading, story or chat reply is written, the relevant text is sent to Anthropic's API. Both of those process data in the United States.
If you are in a country whose law restricts where personal data may go, that is what happens, stated plainly so you can decide.
Security incidents
If something happens that puts your data at risk, we will tell you and any regulator we are required to tell, as quickly as we reasonably can.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and if the change is significant we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.
Contact
hello@corteks.app
Corteks is run by Sanad Shegem, an individual, at Reem Island, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.