Privacy Policy
For the AreaderZ: AI Reader & Summary app for macOS and iOS, and for the website at areaderz.com.
Published and controlled by: Thyme Quake LLC · Effective date: September 13, 2026 · App version: 0.2.8 · Contact: hi@jeremyan.com
1. The short version
AreaderZ is published by Thyme Quake LLC. This page describes what that means for your privacy, in plain English and without padding.
- For the current Free and Pro versions, there is no AreaderZ account. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to log in to, no email address required.
- Those versions collect no personal information of their own. The only diagnostics or analytics data connected to the app is what Apple itself provides, and you control that in your device settings.
- We do not collect your browsing history, the pages you open, the articles you read, the text of your summaries or translations, or your API keys.
- We run no analytics on your content and no advertising or tracking technology of any kind.
- There is no AreaderZ server sitting between you and the page you are reading.
- You decide where the AI runs. It can be entirely on your device, on a computer you own, or a service you have an account with. AreaderZ sends content only to the destination you configured — never anywhere else.
- We do not sell your data and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
- If we ever add subscription, credit or pay-as-you-go plans, this policy will be updated with a new effective date before that feature ships — see section 11.
2. Who we are
AreaderZ is published and operated by Thyme Quake LLC ("we", "us", "our"). For privacy purposes, Thyme Quake LLC is the data controller for the small amount of information this policy describes — the party answerable for it.
We are a small independent studio. We have no advertising business, no data partners and no interest in a profile of what you read. The app is available in a Free version and a Pro version, neither of which requires an account today.
Privacy questions, and requests about any data you have sent us, go to hi@jeremyan.com.
3. What the current versions collect
This is the part most policies make you hunt for, so it goes early. "The current versions" means the Free version and the Pro version of AreaderZ as they exist today. Only those.
The current Free and Pro versions of AreaderZ collect no personal information beyond what Apple itself provides for diagnostics and analytics, and you control whether that sharing happens at all.
What Apple provides means App Analytics and crash reports — operating-system features on macOS and iOS that can send Apple technical data about how an app runs and whether it crashed. That data goes to Apple, on Apple's terms, not to us. We run no analytics service, no crash-reporting service and no telemetry endpoint of our own, and we cannot look up an individual person in Apple's diagnostics.
You are in control of it. On your Mac or iPhone, open Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements to see what your device shares and change it. Turn those options off and no diagnostics leave your device. For the current versions, the App Store privacy label for AreaderZ is "Data Not Collected" — the developer collects no data of its own.
Everything else this policy covers is either data that never leaves your device, or data that goes only to a provider you chose. Both are set out below.
4. No account needed today
AreaderZ does not require an account today. There is no sign-up, no login, no email address to hand over, and no AreaderZ server holding a profile of you. You install the app, turn on the Safari extension, and start reading.
The app's AI features run in one of three places, and you choose which: on your device using Apple Intelligence, on a local server you run (Ollama, LM Studio or similar), or through your own third-party API key (OpenAI, OpenRouter or any OpenAI-compatible service). None of those paths needs us to know who you are.
The app is not instrumented with analytics on your reading. We do not count the pages you summarize, the languages you translate into, the themes you choose, or how often you use the extension. We do not operate an advertising system, and we do not use device identifiers or fingerprinting to recognise you across sessions.
Because there is no account today, there is no profile of you on our side to build, sell, or lose. If a future paid feature ever needed an account, section 11 sets out exactly what that would involve — and commits us to updating this policy first.
5. What we do not collect
The table below describes the current Free and Pro versions:
| Data | Collected by AreaderZ? |
|---|---|
| Browsing history or the URLs you visit | No |
| Article text, page content or the pages you summarize | No |
| The text of your summaries and translations | No |
| Your API keys or provider credentials | No |
| Your name, email address or phone number | No — we never ask for them in the app |
| Location data | No |
| Contacts, photos, calendars, health or other personal files | No — the app does not request access |
| Advertising identifiers | No |
| Usage analytics or behavioural telemetry of our own | No — the only diagnostics involved are Apple's, as described in section 3 |
If you email us for support, we will of course have your email address and whatever you choose to write in your message. We use it only to answer you. We do not add you to a mailing list, and we do not use support conversations for marketing.
6. What stays on your device
Almost everything AreaderZ does happens locally, on the Mac or iPhone in your hands:
- Reader view — stripping ads and clutter from a page happens entirely in your browser, on your device.
- Settings and preferences — your theme, text size, model choices and provider configuration are stored locally on each device. They are not synced to us.
- Cached summaries and translations — recent results are kept on your device so they load instantly. This cache is local; it is not uploaded anywhere and it is removed when you remove the app or clear its data.
- On-device AI — if you use Apple Intelligence, the model runs on your device. The text of the page is not transmitted anywhere. Summaries and translations work with no internet connection at all.
7. When content leaves your device, and where it goes
AreaderZ offers three ways to run the AI. Your choice decides whether anything leaves your device, and if so, to whom.
On-device (Apple Intelligence)
The model runs on your device. Nothing is sent to us, to Apple's servers, or to any third party. This mode works entirely offline. This is our recommended choice if you want the strongest available privacy.
A local server you run (Ollama, LM Studio)
AreaderZ sends the text to the address you configured — typically a model runner on your own computer or your own network. That traffic does not pass through us and does not go to any third party. It is your own machine doing the work.
Your own API key (OpenAI, OpenRouter, or any OpenAI-compatible service)
If you choose this mode, the text needed for the task — typically the article content, or the passage being translated, along with your instruction such as "summarize this" — is sent directly from your device to the provider you selected. It does not pass through any AreaderZ server, because no such server exists.
In this mode the provider processes that text under its own terms of service and privacy policy, which are not ours and which we cannot control. You are responsible for choosing a provider you trust and for reviewing its policies. AreaderZ sends the content only to the destination you configured, and never to us and never to any other company. Fees you pay that provider are between you and them; AreaderZ charges nothing and takes no markup.
If you use on-device or a local server, your reading never leaves your control. If you use your own API key, the page content goes to the provider you picked — because that provider is doing the work — and to nobody else.
8. Your API keys and credentials
- API keys are stored in the Apple Keychain on Apple platforms (and in local extension storage where the Keychain is not applicable). They stay on the device you entered them on.
- Keys are never sent to us. We have no server that could receive them, and today there is no account to attach them to.
- Keys are not synced between your devices. If you use AreaderZ on a Mac and an iPhone, you enter a key on each device separately. That is a deliberate design choice: it keeps your credential inside one device's secure storage.
- Keys are used for exactly one thing: authenticating your requests to the provider you chose.
- The app requests only the permissions it needs, and never the ability to read your keychain for other apps' secrets, your contacts, or your files.
9. This website
areaderz.com is a plain, static website. It has no login, no forms that submit personal data, no cookies, no advertising, and no third-party scripts, trackers, or embedded content. It loads no fonts or resources from external services, so visiting it does not quietly report your visit to anyone else.
Like virtually all websites, the hosting provider that serves these pages may keep standard server logs (such as IP address, requested page and time) for security and operations. Those logs are generated by the host as a matter of course, are not used by us to profile visitors, and are not linked to the app.
Email sent to hi@jeremyan.com is handled by our email provider and kept only as long as needed to deal with your enquiry.
10. Apple's role
AreaderZ is distributed through the Apple App Store. Apple processes your download or purchase, and separately handles things like App Store account data and any diagnostic sharing you have enabled in your own device settings. That is between you and Apple, under Apple's privacy policy. We do not receive your reading activity from Apple, and we do not operate any analytics or crash-reporting service of our own.
If you use Apple Intelligence for on-device processing, Apple's own terms for that feature apply to the model itself. In AreaderZ's on-device mode, page content is not transmitted to Apple or to us.
11. If we add paid plans in the future
Nothing in this section is part of the app today. The current Free and Pro versions have no account, no billing and no usage metering, as sections 3 and 4 describe. This section is here so that if we ever do add something paid, you already know the limits we are committing to now.
AreaderZ may in future offer paid options: a subscription, a credit pack, or pay-as-you-go usage that draws on AI capacity we supply instead of your own key or your own server. The option currently on the roadmap is pay-as-you-go credits — buy credits, spend them on summaries and translations served by us, with no subscription. Features like those need to know who to bill, and that is the only reason they would need to know anything about you.
If such a feature is ever introduced, the additional information would be limited to what is needed to operate and bill that service:
- An account identifier — so a balance or subscription can be attached to you. Realistically an email address or a Sign in with Apple identifier, not a profile of your interests.
- Purchase and subscription status — whether a plan is active, what was bought, and when it renews. For App Store purchases, Apple handles the payment; we never see your card details.
- Usage metering — counts such as how many requests or credits were consumed, so usage can be measured and billed. Counts, not content.
Three commitments about information like that, if it ever exists:
- It would be limited to running and billing that service. It would never include your page content, your browsing history, or your API keys.
- It would not be sold, rented or shared with advertisers or data brokers — the same commitment as section 12.
- This policy would be updated first, with a new effective date at the top of the page and, where required, an in-app notice, before the feature ships. You would be able to read exactly what changes, and to close any account the feature created for you.
Nothing in this section changes how the current Free and Pro versions behave. If you never use a future paid feature, no account, purchase or usage data would ever be created for you.
12. We do not sell your data
We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent it, trade it, or share it with advertisers, data brokers, or analytics platforms. We do not disclose it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not process it to build advertising profiles. That is true today, and it is a commitment we are carrying into any future paid offering, as section 11 says.
We would only disclose information if we were legally compelled to — for example by a valid court order — and we could only disclose what we actually hold, which for the current versions is nothing: no account records, no reading history, no article content, no keys. Where we are permitted to do so, we would tell you about such a demand.
13. Children's privacy
AreaderZ is a general-purpose reading and translation tool and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children, and the current Free and Pro versions collect no personal information from anyone. Because there is no account, no registration and no data collection of our own, no personal details about a child can be gathered through the app.
If we ever introduce a paid plan that requires an account, we would still not knowingly collect personal information from children, and any such feature would be described here with an updated effective date before it shipped.
If you believe a child has sent us personal information by email, contact us at hi@jeremyan.com and we will delete that correspondence.
14. Your choices and how to delete everything
- Stop the extension at any time: turn AreaderZ off in Safari's extension settings. It will no longer process any page.
- Control Apple's diagnostics: open Settings → Privacy & Security → Analytics & Improvements on your device to change what is shared with Apple.
- Delete everything: removing the app from your Mac or iPhone deletes its settings, cached summaries and translations, and any stored keys from that device. There is no server-side copy to request, because none exists.
- Change where AI runs: switch between on-device, local server and your own key in AreaderZ's settings whenever you like. Switching to on-device stops any content from being sent off the device.
- Access or correct data: we hold no app data about you to access or correct. If you have emailed us and want that correspondence deleted, just ask.
15. Data retention
For the current Free and Pro versions, retention is easy to describe because there is almost nothing to retain:
- API keys sit in the Apple Keychain on the device where you entered them (or in local extension storage where the Keychain does not apply). They stay until you delete them in the app or remove the app. We never hold a copy.
- Cached summaries and translations live in local storage on your device so results load instantly. They are cleared when you clear the cache in the app, and removed entirely when you delete the app or erase the device.
- Settings and preferences — theme, text size, model choices, provider addresses — stay on the device and are not synced to us.
- Nothing is retained on our side for the app itself, because there is no AreaderZ account or server storing your reading.
- Support email sent to hi@jeremyan.com is kept only as long as needed to answer you and deal with any follow-up, and you can ask us to delete it at any time.
- Website server logs kept by our hosting provider are short-lived operational records used for security and running the site. They are not linked to the app and are not used to build profiles.
If a future paid feature were introduced, the account and billing records it needed would be kept only for as long as required to operate that service and to meet tax and accounting obligations, then deleted. Sections 11 and 14 explain what such a feature could involve and how you would close it.
16. Changes to this policy
If AreaderZ's behaviour changes in a way that affects privacy — for example if a future paid feature adds an account, as described in section 11 — we will update this page and change the effective date at the top before that version or feature is released. Material changes will also be described in the app's release notes on the App Store and, where required, in an in-app notice.
We will not quietly broaden what is collected. If a future version were to add analytics or crash reporting of our own, this policy and the App Store privacy label would be updated first, and the change would be described here in plain terms.
The current version of this policy always lives at https://areaderz.com/privacy.html.
17. How to contact us
Questions about this policy, or about privacy in AreaderZ generally, are welcome. AreaderZ is published by Thyme Quake LLC, which is the data controller for the information described above.
Email: hi@jeremyan.com
We aim to reply within a few working days. For help using the app rather than a privacy question, the support page and user guide may answer it faster.
This document is a plain-English description of how AreaderZ actually behaves. It is not legal advice to you, and it does not create rights beyond those given by applicable law.