Questions about anything below? Write to [email protected] — we’ll answer in the same plain English.
Last updated
July 29, 2026
The Short Version
Your reading life belongs to you. Almost everything you put into Kiveo — your books, sessions, quotes, reflections — stays on your device or in your own iCloud account, where we cannot reach it. We don’t sell data, we don’t run ads, and we don’t build a profile of you.
There are a small number of things we do collect, and we’ve listed every one of them below.
Who We Are
Kiveo is made by Fanxie Lab, based in Bogotá, Colombia. Fanxie Lab is the data controller for the information described in this policy.
For anything privacy-related — questions, requests, complaints — write to [email protected]. A person reads it.
What We Collect
We collect the minimum needed to run Kiveo well. That’s it, in full:
Your reading life — on your device. Your books, shelves, reading sessions, quotes, and reflections are stored on your device. If you turn on iCloud, they’re also stored in your own iCloud account, managed by Apple under Apple’s terms. We cannot see or access either one.
Book searches. When you search for a book or scan a barcode, the query goes to our own book service, which we run ourselves. We use it to answer your search and to keep the service from being overwhelmed by automated traffic. We don’t build a search history tied to you.
Technical records from our servers. Like any web service, our servers briefly record IP addresses in order to apply rate limits and keep things running. We don’t use these to identify you, and we don’t combine them with anything else.
App analytics. We collect a small amount of usage data to understand how Kiveo is used — which screens people reach, which features get used, where things break. We’re currently moving this from TelemetryDeck, an outside service, to Beaconstat, our own tool that runs on our own servers. For a period the two run side by side while we make sure nothing is lost; once we’re confident, TelemetryDeck comes out entirely and this becomes something we handle ourselves.
Here’s the honest shape of it. To know whether Kiveo is actually working — whether readers come back after a month, whether a new feature helped — we need to be able to tell one install apart from another over time. So each installation of Kiveo carries a random identifier. It isn’t your name, your email, or your Apple ID, we never see your IP address, and there is no way for us to work out who you are from it. But it is stable, which means the usage records from one install sit together rather than dissolving into a crowd.
We’d rather say that plainly than claim more than we do. The identifier belongs to one installation on one device — if you read on both an iPhone and an iPad, those are two unrelated records to us, and nothing joins them up. What we don’t do: use advertising identifiers, follow you into other apps, or connect any of this to what’s in your library — your books, quotes, and reflections never reach us at all.
If you’d rather not take part, or you want the records from your install removed, write to [email protected] and we’ll take care of it. Tell us roughly when you started using Kiveo and on which device, and we’ll find it.
Website analytics. On kiveo.app we use Rybbit, a privacy-focused analytics tool, to see which pages people visit. It doesn’t follow you around the web.
Your newsletter email address, if you give it to us. Covered in its own section below, because it’s the one place we hold something that identifies you.
The Newsletter
Our newsletter is entirely optional. Nothing in Kiveo depends on it.
What we collect. Your email address. Along with it, we record the date and time you signed up, the page you signed up from, and the IP address the sign-up came from. We keep those three things only as proof that the sign-up was real and freely given — a protection for you as much as for us.
We don’t ask for your name. We don’t ask for anything else.
How signing up works. After you enter your address, we send you one message asking you to confirm. Nothing else is sent until you click that link. If you never confirm, we delete the address.
What we use it for. Sending you the newsletter. Nothing else. We don’t use it to advertise to you elsewhere, we don’t share it, we don’t sell it, and we never pass it to anyone who wants to market their own things to you.
What we don’t track. We don’t record whether you opened an email or which links you clicked. There is no tracking pixel in our messages and our links go where they say they go. We do keep basic delivery records — whether a message reached your provider or bounced — because without them we couldn’t keep our email working at all.
Kept apart from the app. Your newsletter subscription lives in a separate system from anything in Kiveo. There is no connection between your email address and your library, your sessions, or your reflections. We could not link them if we wanted to, and we don’t want to.
Leaving. Every message has an unsubscribe link, and it works immediately. Once you unsubscribe we remove your address; we keep only a scrambled, one-way fingerprint of it so that a future import can never accidentally add you back.
Legal basis, for those who want it. We send the newsletter on the basis of your consent, given when you confirm your address. You can withdraw it at any time by unsubscribing, and withdrawing it costs you nothing else.
Age. The newsletter is for readers aged 16 and over.
What We Don’t Collect
We do not:
- Read, receive, or store the contents of your library, sessions, quotes, or reflections
- Ask for your name, phone number, address, or location
- Follow your behaviour across other apps or websites
- Use advertising identifiers, or run ads of any kind
- Store your IP address — our servers see it in passing, take a rough sense of the country, and discard it
- Sell or share your data with advertisers, data brokers, or anyone else
- Track whether you open our emails
Where Your Data Lives
Your reading data stays on your device and, if you choose, in your own iCloud account.
Our own services — the book service, the newsletter system, and Beaconstat — run on Railway, in the United States. All three are ours: we run the software and control the databases directly, rather than handing anything to an outside platform.
Newsletter delivery goes through Postmark, in the United States, which sends the messages on our behalf and sees the address it’s delivering to.
If you’re reading this from the EU, the UK, or elsewhere outside the United States, this means the small amount of data described above is transferred to the United States, where privacy law differs from your own. We rely on standard contractual clauses with our providers for that transfer, and we keep what we send them to the minimum.
How Long We Keep Things
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Unconfirmed newsletter sign-ups | Deleted after 14 days |
| Confirmed newsletter subscriptions | Until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete |
| Unsubscribed addresses | Removed; a one-way fingerprint is kept so we can’t re-add you |
| Sign-up records (time, page, IP) | Kept alongside the subscription; deleted with it |
| Server rate-limiting records | A short rolling window, measured in hours |
| Usage data | Individual records for 180 days, then kept only as summed-up figures |
| Your install’s identifier | Deleted when you ask us to |
| Backups | Our backups roll over within 30 days, so deletions clear from them within that period |
Your Rights
Whatever the law where you live, we’d rather you simply had these. Write to [email protected] and we’ll act on any of them:
- Know what we hold about you, and get a copy of it
- Correct anything that’s wrong
- Delete it — including your newsletter subscription and its sign-up record
- Take it elsewhere, in a portable format
- Object to what we’re doing, or ask us to pause it
- Withdraw consent for the newsletter, at any time, without needing a reason
You can also always: delete the app to remove your local data, and remove your Kiveo data from iCloud through iOS Settings. Neither of those requires asking us.
We’ll respond within 30 days, and usually much sooner — there is one person answering, and he reads everything.
If you’re in the EU or UK and you think we’ve got something wrong, you’re entitled to complain to your national data protection authority. In Colombia, that’s the Superintendencia de Industria y Comercio. We’d genuinely rather you told us first, so we can fix it.
Changes To This Policy
If we update this policy, we’ll post the change here and note the date. If a change meaningfully affects your privacy, we’ll say so clearly rather than quietly editing the page — and if it affects the newsletter, we’ll tell subscribers by email.
Contact
Questions or concerns? Email [email protected].
In Short: Your reading data never leaves your phone unless you ask it to. And if you give us your email address, it’s for the newsletter and nothing else.
