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. Each cover's address is kept with the book and syncs through your own iCloud, so your other devices download the same images from Amazon's image server — no Amazon sign-in involved. The images themselves are cached on each device, never uploaded anywhere, and never synced. Books without cover art wear a jacket Refrain generates locally.

On-device intelligence

Refrain finds the passages that rhyme, gathers threads, names them, searches by meaning, and matches echoes on your device, with models that live on the device. On devices with Apple Intelligence, thread names get a second opinion from Apple's on-device model — still on the device, never anywhere else, and never over your own names. Your passages are not sent anywhere for any of this. The Echoes collection is downloaded to your device and matched there.

Go deeper

Tapping Go deeper sends one brief — the passage, your note, up to three rhymes, the name of its thread, and the questions you've chosen — to Apple's Private Cloud Compute: Apple's servers, running Apple's model. Nothing is sent before you tap, and nothing runs in the background. The reading comes back to your device and is saved with the passage — synced through your own iCloud, if you use it; Refrain has no server and receives nothing. Apple's published design for Private Cloud Compute states that a request is used only to fulfill itself and is not stored or accessible afterwards; that handling is Apple's, under Apple's terms. If your device has Apple Intelligence and can't reach Apple's Private Cloud Compute, the reading runs on the device instead. Hand to your AI works as before: the brief goes where you send it, and that service's terms apply. Refrain's App Privacy label remains Data Not Collected.

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.