Privacy

Effective August 9, 2026

Refrain is built so that this page can stay short. There is no Refrain server, no Refrain account, and no analytics. We could not read your highlights if we wanted to — and we don't want to.

What Refrain collects

Nothing. Refrain has no server-side service and collects no personal data, usage data, or telemetry of any kind.

Where your library lives

Your books, passages, and notes are stored on your device. If you're signed in to iCloud, they sync between your devices through your own iCloud account, in a private database that only your devices can read. Apple's handling of iCloud data is described in Apple's privacy policy. If you're not signed in to iCloud, everything simply stays local.

Signing in to Amazon

To sync your Kindle highlights, Refrain opens Amazon's own sign-in page in a web view inside the app. Your Amazon credentials go to Amazon and nowhere else — Refrain never sees, stores, or transmits them. The app then reads your highlights from read.amazon.com the same way your browser would, directly from your device.

During a sync, Refrain also downloads your books' cover images from Amazon's image server, using the addresses found on your own notebook page. Covers are cached on your device, never uploaded anywhere, and never synced. Books without cover art wear a jacket Refrain generates locally.

On-device intelligence

Search, rhymes, threads, and echoes are computed entirely on your device using a bundled model. No passage, note, or any derivative of them is ever sent anywhere for processing. The go deeper action composes its research brief on your device too — nothing is shared unless you yourself hand the finished brief to another app.

The only requests Refrain makes to us

When you sync, the app may download a small configuration file from this site (getrefrain.app/scraper-config.json) that tells it how to read Amazon's current page layout. With the unlock, it also downloads the Echoes quote collection once from this site — a public corpus of attributed quotations; the matching against your library happens on your device. Both are plain file downloads: no user data, identifiers, or telemetry are sent with them, and we keep no logs of them.

Purchases

The one-time unlock is processed by Apple through the App Store. Refrain receives no payment details and keeps no purchase records beyond the entitlement Apple provides to your device.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date. Given how Refrain is built, there isn't much room for it to change.