Privacy

Commonplace · last updated 8 October 2026

Commonplace holds the notes you write about the books you read. They are yours. You can take them with you or delete them at any time, and they are never used to train anything.

What is stored

• Your email address and a one-way hash of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered — only reset.
• If you sign in with Apple or Google, the account identifier they give Commonplace and the email address they share, which may be an Apple relay address if you chose to hide yours. For Apple, also a token that exists only so your Apple sign-in can be revoked when you delete your account.
• Books you add — title, author, format, progress, and whether you have archived them.
• Your recaps — everything you write or dictate, kept verbatim, along with the title, quote, and prompt the model generates from it.
• Your answers to the follow-up questions.
• A record of activity — that a recap was saved, a question answered, a password reset requested, and when. It schedules your questions and counts your free allowance. It is also added up across everyone into daily totals — how many recaps were written, how many people wrote one — to show whether Commonplace is being used. Those totals are never broken down by person.
• Token counts for each model call, so the running cost of the service is known. These are numbers, not text.
• Whether you have a subscription — which plan, whether it is current, and when it renews. Not your card, which Apple and Google handle and Commonplace never sees.

There is no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, and no third-party tracker in the app.

Where it goes

The text of a recap is sent to Anthropic to produce the title, quote, prompt, and questions. That is the only place your writing is sent, and only when you save a recap or start an exchange. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, material sent through the API is not used to train their models.

Everything is stored in a Postgres database run by Neon and served by Fly.io, both in the United States. Password reset emails are delivered by Resend.

If you choose to sign in with Apple or Google, they confirm who you are and pass Commonplace an identifier and your email address. They are not told anything you write. Deleting your account revokes Commonplace's Sign in with Apple access.

Subscriptions are handled by RevenueCat, which sits between the app stores and Commonplace and keeps track of whether a subscription is current. It receives your account identifier and what you bought — no email address, no payment details, and none of your writing. It is how Commonplace learns that a subscription renewed or was refunded without asking you to reopen the app.

Book covers are fetched from Open Library when you add a book. They receive the title you searched for and nothing about you.

Your notes are not sold, rented, or shared with anyone else. No human at Commonplace reads them as a matter of course.

How long it is kept

Until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry — a book you set down two years ago is still there when you come back.

Taking it with you

Account → Export gives you everything listed above — books, recaps, unfinished drafts, questions, answers, activity, token counts — either as formatted text you can read or as JSON you can process. No approval step, no waiting.

Deleting it

Account → Delete account. It asks for your password — or, if you sign in with Apple or Google, for you to do that again — because this cannot be undone. Your account and everything attached to it — books, recaps, answers, activity, sessions — is erased from the database immediately, not hidden behind a flag. Anonymous token counts survive with no account attached, because the cost record is the service's and the identity in it is yours.

Backups roll off within 30 days. Prompts already sent to Anthropic are retained by them for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring and then deleted.

Children

Commonplace is not intended for anyone under 13, and accounts are not knowingly created for them.

Changes

If what the service does with your data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. Anything that materially affects existing notes will be told to you in the app rather than left here to be discovered.

Getting in touch

Questions, or a request to see or delete something, go to support@dk-data-sci.com.