Privacy
Journlet is built so that the people running it cannot read your journal. This page explains what that means in practice, and is written to be checkable against how the app actually works rather than to sound reassuring.
The short version
- Your journal is encrypted on your device before it is sent anywhere.
- The server stores that ciphertext and your email address. Nothing else.
- The encryption key never leaves your devices, so the operator cannot decrypt a journal even if compelled to try.
- There is no analytics, no tracking and no advertising, on this site or in the app.
- You can use the app fully offline without ever creating an account.
What is stored, and where
On your device: the whole journal, held in your browser's local storage and readable only by the app. This is the primary copy. If you never sign in, it is the only copy, and no data of yours exists anywhere else.
On the server, only if you enable sync: your email address, and a sequence of encrypted updates representing your journal. The updates are encrypted with AES-GCM using a key generated on your device and wrapped by a second key that is only ever shown to you as your journal key. Neither key is transmitted to the server, so the stored updates are unreadable to the operator, to the hosting provider, and to anyone who obtains a copy of the database.
Sync is provided by Supabase, acting as authentication and encrypted storage only. No application code runs on the server, and the server performs no processing of journal content, because it cannot. The project is hosted in Supabase's London region, so the ciphertext and your email address sit on servers in the United Kingdom.
What the operator can see
Being precise about the limits matters more than the reassurance. With sync enabled, the operator can see that an account exists, the email address attached to it, when it last synced, and roughly how much encrypted data it holds. That last point means the approximate size of your journal is visible, though not a word of its content.
The operator cannot see your entries, your collections, your reminder times, your tags or anything derived from them. Search and indexing happen entirely on your device, which is a deliberate trade-off: server-side search would require the server to read your journal.
Accounts and email
Signing in uses a magic link sent to your email address. There are no passwords. Your email address is used to authenticate you and to send those links, and for nothing else. You will not receive marketing from Journlet.
Notifications
Reminders fire locally on your device. Reminder times are part of your encrypted journal and never reach the server in readable form. If server-sent notifications are ever added, this page will be updated before that happens, and the change will be described plainly.
This website
This page and the rest of journlet.com are static files. There is no JavaScript, there are no cookies, no analytics and no third-party requests of any kind. The fonts are served from this domain rather than from Google, so visiting this site does not disclose your visit to anyone else.
The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which processes visitors' IP addresses in the course of serving requests, as any web server must. The operator does not receive, retain or analyse that data.
Your data, and getting rid of it
Export: the app exports your entire journal as Markdown, generated on your device. There is no lock-in and no need to ask anyone for a copy.
Deletion, on your device: signing out wipes the local journal and the keys from that device immediately.
Deletion, on the server: there is currently no way to delete an account from inside the app. This is a gap rather than a policy, and it is being fixed. Until it is, email privacy@journlet.com and the account, its encrypted journal data and the email address attached to it will be removed. Given the encryption, what is deleted is ciphertext nobody could read in the first place, but it is your data and you are entitled to have it gone.
Recovery: your journal key is the only way back into an encrypted journal. If you lose every device and the key, the data cannot be recovered by anyone, including the operator. This is a consequence of the design rather than an oversight, and the app says so at the point where it matters.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you have the right to access, correct, export and erase your personal data, and to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office. In Journlet's case the personal data held is limited to your email address, since the journal content is not readable by the operator. Requests go to privacy@journlet.com.
Who is responsible
Journlet is an independent project, not a company. Privacy enquiries, deletion requests and anything else covered by this page: privacy@journlet.com.
To complete: the data controller's name and postal address. UK GDPR Article 13 requires a privacy notice to identify the controller, and a contact email alone does not satisfy it once there are users other than you. Options are set out in the site README — a company name and registered office if one exists, or a service address if not. Not legal advice; worth twenty minutes of a solicitor's time before launch.
Changes
Material changes to this page will be described rather than quietly applied. The page history is public in the site's source repository.