Last updated 12 August 2026
Booktrace has no accounts, no login and no servers of our own. We cannot see who you are, and we do not want to.
Your library, listening sessions, playback speeds, chapter positions, notes, ratings, goals, tags and subscription status are stored locally on your phone. There is no account to sign into and no copy on a server we control, because we do not operate one. Deleting the app removes all of it, permanently and with no way for us to recover it.
When you search for a book, add one, or view an author or narrator, the app sends that query to third-party catalogue services to fetch titles, covers, runtimes, chapter lists and credits.
| Service | What it receives |
|---|---|
| Audible / Amazon | Your search text, or the identifier of a book you opened. Used for the catalogue, covers, chapters and bibliographies. |
| Audnexus | A book, author or narrator identifier, to fetch credits and biography details. |
These requests carry no name, no email, no account and no advertising ID. They are ordinary catalogue lookups, and each provider handles them under its own privacy policy. They are not linked to your analytics ID or to each other.
Booktrace can discuss a book with you without spoiling it past where you have listened. That feature cannot work locally, so when you send a chat message, information leaves your device. This is the most significant disclosure on this page and we would rather be blunt about it.
Requests go to OpenRouter, which routes them to the language model that writes the reply. Each request contains:
It does not contain your name, your email, your device identifier, your analytics ID or your notes. We do not store a copy of your conversations on any server; they are kept on your device. OpenRouter and the model provider process the request under their own terms, which may include retention for a period for abuse monitoring.
If you would rather none of this leave your phone, do not use the chat tab. Every other feature in Booktrace works without it.
Booktrace records a small number of anonymous events so we can tell which parts of the app are useful and where people get stuck. These are processed by PostHog on servers in the United States.
| What is sent | What is not sent |
|---|---|
|
A random ID generated on first launch Which screen or tab was shown That a session was logged, a book added, a chat opened Whether a permission was granted or declined Answers to onboarding questions Paywall and purchase outcomes App version and operating system |
Book, author or narrator names Anything you typed, in chat or in notes Your listening positions or history Your name, email or phone number Your device ID or advertising ID Anything you could be identified by |
The random ID identifies an installation, not a person. It is not derived from anything about you or your device, it is not shared with anyone, and deleting the app destroys it permanently. Reinstalling produces a new one that cannot be connected to the old one.
If you allow notifications, they are scheduled and delivered by your own device. The Live Activity that shows a session on your lock screen runs entirely on your phone. We do not operate a push server and we never receive a record of what you were alerted about or what you were listening to.
Subscriptions are sold and processed by Apple through the App Store. We use RevenueCat to check whether a subscription is active; it receives an anonymous subscriber ID and the receipt Apple issues, and returns whether the app should be unlocked. We never see your payment details, card number or billing address. Apple's handling of that information is covered by Apple's Privacy Policy.
Booktrace is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. Since we collect no personal information from anyone, we hold none belonging to a child.
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct or delete personal information held about you. In practice we hold none: there is no account to look up and nothing that identifies you. If you want the anonymous usage events from your installation deleted, email us from the support page and we will remove them — you will need to send us the random ID, which the app can show you.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we will update the date at the top of this page and describe the change here.
Questions about privacy: brian@booktrace.app