Bramble Privacy Policy
The short version
- Your recordings live on your phone. We don’t run servers that store your videos, audio, or transcripts.
- No account, no email, no name. We never ask who you are.
- AI features are opt-in. If you turn them on, recording audio goes to two carefully chosen processors (AssemblyAI and Anthropic) and is deleted on their side on short, documented timelines. You can turn this off any time.
- Your child’s recordings are sensitive data. We treat them that way — and children never use Bramble themselves.
- No ads. No selling data. No third-party tracking. Ever.
- Delete anything, any time. Deleting the app deletes everything.
This policy covers the Bramble iOS app and the askbramble.com website. We wrote it to be read, not skimmed past — it’s short because we collect very little.
1. What Bramble is, and who uses it
Bramble helps parents have better conversations with their young kids. You — the parent or legal guardian — get a daily question, record a short video of your child answering it, and keep the result. You are the user. Children never have accounts, never operate the app, and never interact with us.
2. What stays on your device
Almost everything. The following is stored only on your iPhone, in the app’s own storage:
- Your videos and their audio
- Transcripts and captions
- Finished, edited clips
- The “memory” notes Bramble keeps to personalize future questions (favorite characters, recurring topics, and the like)
- Profile details you enter, like your child’s first name and age
- Your settings and question history
We — the developer — cannot see, access, or recover any of it. If you turn on “Save to Photos” in settings, finished clips are also copied into your own Apple Photos library; that copy is governed by your Apple account and your Photos settings, not by us.
Your personal iCloud (planned)
A future version of Bramble may sync your recordings’ details (and, eventually, your library) between your own devices via your personal iCloud account, using Apple’s private CloudKit database. If and when that ships: the data goes into your iCloud, under your Apple ID, encrypted in transit and at rest by Apple. We never gain access to it — Apple’s iCloud terms and your iCloud settings apply. Deleting Bramble’s data from the app also removes it from your iCloud copy (Apple completes backend deletion on its own schedule, typically within 30 days).
3. What we actually collect
Exactly one thing:
| What | Why | What’s in it |
|---|---|---|
| An anonymous device identifier | So the app can recognize itself (for example, to remember your subscription state). Stored in your device’s Keychain. | A random string. It is not your name, email, phone number, or Apple ID, and we can’t link it to you. |
The app currently includes no analytics and no crash-reporting SDKs. If we ever add anonymized usage counts or crash reporting to help us fix bugs, we’ll update this section first — and they would never include your recordings, transcripts, or personal content.
4. AI features — opt-in, explained completely
Bramble’s smartest features — captions, auto-edited clips, live follow-up suggestions during recording, and questions that build on what your child said before — need outside processing power. These features are off until you turn them on. The first time you record, we ask. You can change your answer any time in Settings, and saying no (then or later) means nothing ever leaves your phone.
When AI features are on, here is exactly what happens:
- Recording audio goes to AssemblyAI (a speech-to-text service) to be transcribed. Video never leaves your device — only the audio.
- The transcript text goes to Anthropic (the maker of the Claude AI model) to pick the best moments for your clip, suggest a follow-up question, and pull out conversational details (like a favorite dinosaur) that personalize future questions. Those details are stored back on your device, not on a server of ours.
How long the AI processors keep data
| Processor | Receives | Retention | Used to train their AI? |
|---|---|---|---|
| AssemblyAI | Recording audio; the transcript it produces | Deletion of uploaded audio and transcripts begins 24 hours after processing and completes within 48 hours. Audio streamed live during recording (for in-the-moment follow-ups) is not retained at all. | No. Before any family’s recordings are processed, Bramble’s account is opted out of AssemblyAI’s model-improvement program — your audio and transcripts are not used to train AssemblyAI’s models. |
| Anthropic | Transcript text only — never audio or video | Anthropic automatically deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days. (Like most AI providers, Anthropic may retain content longer — up to 2 years — only if it is flagged for violating their usage policies; ordinary family recordings will never trigger this.) | No. Anthropic does not use API customers’ inputs or outputs to train its models. |
Sources: AssemblyAI’s data retention policy, AssemblyAI’s model-training opt-out, Anthropic’s data retention policy, and Anthropic on model training. If a processor’s published terms change in a way that matters, we’ll update this policy and the in-app consent screen.
Turning AI features off
Flip the switch in Settings. From that moment, no audio or transcripts are sent anywhere — recording continues to work fully on-device, without captions or AI editing. Anything previously sent is deleted by the processors on the timelines above.
5. Children’s privacy
Bramble exists to record young children — so we want to be unusually clear about how that works:
- Bramble is a tool for parents, not children. The app is directed to adults. Children don’t have accounts, don’t operate the app, and can’t submit anything to us.
- We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Every recording is made, kept, and controlled by you, the parent or legal guardian, on your own device. We never receive it.
- You are the gatekeeper for AI processing. Your child’s voice is only ever transcribed by the AI processors above if you, the parent, have turned that on — and you can turn it off at any time.
- We treat children’s audio, video, and transcripts as sensitive data. They are never sold, never used for advertising, never shared with anyone except the two processors described above, and only with your consent.
- You can erase your child’s footprint completely. Delete a recording, delete a child’s entire memory profile, or delete the app — each removes the data as described in section 8.
- Only record children in your care. Please only record your own child, a child you are the legal guardian of, or a child whose parent or guardian has given you permission.
6. Payments
Bramble is sold as an auto-renewing subscription through Apple’s In-App Purchase system. Apple processes the payment; we never see your card number, billing address, or any payment details. Apple shares only anonymized, aggregated sales reporting with us. See the Apple Privacy Policy for how Apple handles purchase data.
7. Notifications
Daily reminders are local notifications, scheduled and shown entirely by your phone. There is no push-notification server, and nothing about your notification (including your child’s name in it) leaves your device.
8. Deleting your data
- Delete a recording — its video, audio, transcript, and clip files are removed from your device.
- “Delete all memory” for a child — wipes every conversational detail Bramble has noted about that child.
- Delete the app — removes all Bramble data from your device. (If iCloud sync ships and you’ve enabled it, deletion propagates to your iCloud copy as described in section 2.)
- Turn off AI features — stops all processing by AssemblyAI and Anthropic; their copies expire on the timelines in section 4.
Because we don’t hold your content, there is nothing on our side to request deletion of — deletion is genuinely in your hands.
9. What we never do
- We never sell your data — or your child’s. There is nothing to sell; we don’t have it.
- We never show ads, and never will.
- We use no third-party advertising or tracking SDKs, no fingerprinting, and no cross-app tracking.
10. Security
Your recordings are protected by your device’s own security (passcode, Face ID, and Apple’s file encryption). The anonymous identifier lives in the iOS Keychain. When AI features are on, data travels to the processors over encrypted connections (TLS). No system is perfect, but our biggest security decision was architectural: data that never leaves your phone can’t leak from our servers, because we don’t have any.
11. Your privacy rights
Depending on where you live (for example, California or other states with privacy laws), you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information a company holds about you. Our honest answer: we hold almost nothing — at most the anonymized signals in section 3, which we cannot tie back to you. If you’d like to exercise a right or just ask, email [email protected] and we’ll respond promptly.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy in a way that matters — especially anything touching your recordings or the AI processors — we’ll update the effective date above and tell you in the app before the change applies to you. We will never quietly weaken the promises in “The short version.”