Privacy Policy

For the Start Somewhere iPhone app and this website.
Published by KO CREATIONS, the data controller for the purposes of this policy.
Last updated 10 August 2026.

1. What is collected

Nothing. Specifically, the app does not collect, transmit, store or process:

• your name, email address, phone number or any other contact detail;
• an account, login or password, since there is no account system at all;
• a device identifier, advertising identifier (IDFA), or any other identifier used to recognise you or your device;
• usage or analytics events, such as which screens you opened and what you tapped;
• crash reports sent to us;
• your location, contacts, calendar, photos, microphone or camera;
• the contents of your tasks, in any form, for any purpose.

There is no profile of you anywhere, because there is no “anywhere”. No servers are operated in connection with this app.

2. Where your data lives, and how long it is kept

Everything you put into the app (task titles, your answers to its questions, deadlines, timer sessions, settings, and the internal history it keeps so it can undo things) is written to a SQLite database file inside the app’s private storage on your device. iOS keeps that storage isolated from other apps.

That file is never uploaded, synced or mirrored by the app. It stays on the device it was written on, and nothing in the app sends it anywhere. You can hand a readable copy of your tasks to another app yourself — see section 4 — and that is the only way anything in it moves.

There is no retention period, because there is no holder. Nothing is kept on a schedule, aged out, or archived anywhere by us. The file lasts exactly as long as you keep it, and every decision about its lifetime is one you make on your own device.

Deleting a task inside the app does not erase it immediately. Deletions are reversible by design: the task is hidden from every list and its row is kept, so that undo works and so that a mis-swipe during a review pass is not permanent. Deleted tasks are listed under Deleted, reached from the Everything screen, and can be put back. This is described here rather than glossed because “deleted” ought to mean what the storage actually does, and what it does is keep the row.

Deleting the app deletes the data. Removing Start Somewhere from your phone removes its private storage, and with it every task you ever wrote down, including the ones you had already deleted inside the app. There is no copy anywhere else, so there is nothing left to ask anyone to delete.

3. Device backups

If you have iCloud Backup or encrypted local backups switched on, iOS may include this app’s data in your device backup, the same way it does for other apps. That backup belongs to you and is governed by Apple’s privacy policy, not by this one. It is never visible to us.

You can exclude it or turn backups off entirely in your iPhone’s Settings. This is mentioned because it is a route by which your tasks can leave the device without you thinking about it on the day, and it would be dishonest to claim “nothing ever leaves your phone” without saying so. The other route is the export in section 4, which is the same honesty applied to a thing you do on purpose.

4. Taking your tasks out

The app can hand you a plain text file of everything you have written down — Take your tasks with you, in Settings, and on the screen that asks you to subscribe. It exists because your tasks are yours whether or not you are paying, and leaving should never cost anything.

Nothing is sent anywhere by the app. The file is built on your phone and handed to iOS’s own share sheet, which is where you choose what happens to it: copy it, save it to Files, mail it to yourself, AirDrop it, or cancel. The app has no say in that and never sees where it went. If you cancel, nothing has moved.

It is a genuine way your data can leave the device, which is the point of it. Mailing the file or saving it to iCloud Drive sends your task titles to whichever service you picked, under that service’s privacy policy rather than this one. That is worth saying plainly rather than hiding behind the fact that you asked for it: this page would be dishonest if it listed a backup as a way out and not this.

The file contains your task titles, deadlines, effort estimates, what a blocked task is waiting on, and any note you wrote about where to start. It deliberately leaves out the answers you gave to the app’s rating questions, and it does not include tasks you have deleted. Nothing is added that you did not put in.

5. Purchases and the subscription

Start Somewhere is sold as an auto-renewing subscription through the App Store, with the first month free. Apple handles the entire transaction.

• We never see your payment details. No card number, no billing address, no name. None of it passes through the app, and none of it is stored by us.
• There is no customer record. The app asks the operating system whether the Apple ID signed in on this device currently holds an active subscription, and gets back essentially yes or no. It does not create, keep or transmit any identifier for you.
• There is no billing server. Subscription status is verified on the device by iOS itself. Nothing is sent to a service we run, because we do not run one.
• The free month is Apple's, not ours. It is an introductory offer attached to the subscription, so Apple tracks it against your Apple ID and enforces one per person. The app is not told who you are and does not count anything itself. It used to: an earlier version wrote the date you first opened it into its own database and compared it to today. That date is no longer written or read, and nothing replaced it.

Apple processes the purchase as a merchant of record, under its own privacy policy and terms.

6. Information Apple may share with the developer

Independently of the app, Apple provides developers with App Store business reports: download counts, subscription totals, aggregate crash data, and similar. These are aggregated statistics produced by Apple, not data the app sends, and they cannot be used to identify you. Whether Apple includes your device in them depends on the analytics sharing setting in Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements on your iPhone, which is yours to change at any time.

7. Third parties inside the app

There are none. To be concrete about what that rules out:

This is a deliberate architectural constraint rather than a preference, and it is the reason the rest of this page can be so short. An app with no third-party code in it has no undisclosed data flows to disclose.

Two third parties exist around the app rather than inside it, and both are named in full above and below: Apple, which processes the subscription (section 5), and Cloudflare, which serves this website (section 11). Neither receives any of your task data, because the app never transmits it. Both operate under published privacy policies that afford your data protection at least equal to what this policy describes, and both are linked here so you can check that rather than take it from us.

There is no parent company, subsidiary, affiliate or other related entity with access to your data, and no data is shared with, sold to, or rented to anyone, including any data broker, advertising network or AI service. The app has no mechanism by which it could.

8. Network activity

The app makes no network requests of its own. It has no code that opens a connection, calls an API, fetches a configuration, or reports anything.

The only network activity associated with it is the App Store purchase and subscription check, which is performed by iOS on the app’s behalf. If you never buy anything, the app never causes any network traffic at all.

Exporting your tasks (section 4) is not an exception to that, and is worth being precise about rather than filed under “no network requests”. The app writes no connection of any kind; it hands a file to iOS. If you then pick something that sends it — mail, a message, iCloud Drive — that app makes the request, from your phone, because you told it to. Picking Copy or cancelling sends nothing anywhere.

9. Children

The app is not directed at children under 13 and collects no personal information from anyone of any age. Because nothing is collected, there is nothing to obtain parental consent for and nothing to delete.

10. Your rights

Data-protection law (including the GDPR and the CCPA/CPRA) gives you rights to access, correct, port, delete and restrict the processing of personal data held about you, and to object to it being sold or shared.

No personal data about you is held. There is no controller-held record to access, correct, export or erase, and nothing has ever been sold or shared. The app has no mechanism for either. Your own copy of your data is on your phone, under your control, and goes away when you delete the app.

Withdrawing consent, and asking for deletion. Nothing here runs on consent, because nothing is collected to consent to. There is no analytics prompt to decline, no tracking permission to refuse, and no marketing to unsubscribe from. Deleting your data is therefore something you do rather than something you request, and the complete erasure is removing the app. The app has no “delete forever” of its own, deliberately, because a bin you can empty is a bin you can empty by accident. Should you ever want a deletion or a withdrawal recorded by us in writing anyway, ask at the address below and it will be confirmed.

If you believe personal data about you is held after all, write to the address at the bottom of this page. You are also entitled to complain to a data-protection supervisory authority: in the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office, and in the EU the authority for the country you live in.

11. This website

This site is a handful of static files: HTML, CSS, two fonts and some screenshots. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics, includes no third-party scripts, fonts, embeds or tracking pixels, and has no forms to fill in.

It is served as static files from Cloudflare’s network, with no application code running on a server at any point. There is nothing there to receive a request beyond the file it returns. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes technical information (your IP address, the page requested, your browser’s user agent) in order to deliver the page and protect the service against abuse. That processing is Cloudflare’s, under Cloudflare’s privacy policy; no analytics product is enabled on top of it and no visitor-level reporting is consulted.

12. Changes to this policy

If the app ever gains a capability that changes any of the above, sync being the obvious candidate, this page will be updated before that version ships, with the date at the top changed and the change described plainly rather than folded into a paragraph. A privacy policy that quietly grows a new clause is worse than not having one.

13. Contact

Start Somewhere is published by KO CREATIONS, which is the data controller for anything described on this page. Questions about privacy, requests under any of the rights in section 10, or anything you think this page gets wrong:

privacy@startsomewhereapp.com

This page is the same policy the app links to from Settings → Privacy policy and from its purchase screen. There is one copy of it and this is the copy.