Your writing is nobody’s business but yours.

Bokmo is a writing app for Mac, iPhone and iPad, published by Joan Muller. This page tells you where your writing goes, the only two moments the app connects to the internet, and what does reach us during the testing period.

Your writing

Your texts, your project bible, your notes and your settings stay on your device.

If you turn on iCloud, they are also stored in your own iCloud space, under your Apple account, which is what lets them move from one device to another. They then pass through Apple’s servers, under Apple’s privacy policy, and remain yours. We have no access to them whatsoever: we cannot read them, retrieve them, or delete them.

Your library folder appears in the Files app under “Bokmo”. Your texts are ordinary Markdown files: any text editor can open them, with or without Bokmo, and you can take them with you at any time.

Writing assistance

Bokmo offers suggestions: rephrasings, ideas, chapter summaries, entries for the project bible. They are produced by the language model built into Apple’s operating system, which runs entirely on your device.

Nothing you write is sent to an artificial intelligence service — not ours, not anyone else’s. Bokmo calls no remote text-generation API. None of your sentences is used to train anything.

The only two internet connections

1. The Wiktionary tab in the dictionary. When you look up a word, Bokmo opens the real Wiktionary page in an embedded web view. This is the only place in Bokmo where a word you typed leaves your device. Navigation is kept on a leash: only Wikimedia domains can be reached, and no link takes you elsewhere. The Wikimedia Foundation’s privacy policy governs that visit.

2. Downloading the word lists. The first time the app opens in French on a device, and on the launch that follows a language change, Bokmo downloads once and for all the public word databases its French language tools rely on (conjugations, rhymes, synonyms), about 30 MB, from their authors: lexique.org, raw.githubusercontent.com, and bokmo.app as a fallback if the first two do not answer. If you use Bokmo in another language, this download never happens: the tools it feeds exist in French only. These requests carry none of your words, none of your text, and no identifier. They ask for a public file, and those servers see what they see of any download: an IP address and the name of the file requested.

And one connection that does not happen. If one of your sheets contains an image pointed at by a web address, Bokmo never goes and fetches it: in a PDF, an RTF, a printout or a preview, it is replaced by its caption. An HTML file you export does keep the address you wrote: in that case it is your reader’s browser that will load it, not Bokmo.

Protected projects

A project can be closed with a password. Its contents are then encrypted on disk, and the key is held in your device’s keychain. Face ID and Touch ID serve only to unlock locally: no biometric data is read, transmitted or stored by Bokmo.

We cannot recover a lost password. It exists nowhere but with you, and that is exactly what makes the protection worth having.

The device identifier

On first launch, Bokmo draws a random identifier and stores it in its own settings. It serves one purpose: telling this device apart from your others in your writing-progress tracking, so that two devices do not count the same words twice. It is never transmitted, it does not identify you, and it disappears with the app.

What reaches us

One thing only, and only if you choose it.

Crash reports. If you have agreed to share analytics with developers in your device settings, Apple passes us anonymised crash reports: the technical state of the program at the moment of the failure. They do not contain your writing.

During the testing period (TestFlight), we must add that TestFlight sends us crash logs, along with any feedback you yourself submit from the TestFlight app — your comment, the screenshot you attach, and your tester email address. That is a deliberate act on your part, every time. Careful: a screenshot shows whatever is on screen, and therefore your text. This feedback is used solely to fix the app, is passed to no one else, and is deleted when the test ends.

Children

Bokmo is not directed at children in particular and knowingly collects no data concerning them. Since it collects no data at all, the question does not arise differently for them.

The bokmo.app website

Cookies and analytics

This website sets no cookies during a simple visit, uses no analytics tools and loads no fonts or scripts from any third-party service.

Hosting

The website is hosted by Hostinger. Like any host, it keeps technical logs (IP address, page requested, date, browser) to ensure the security and proper operation of the service; these logs are not used for any other purpose.

Contact form

When you write through the form, your name, your email address and your message are first put on hold, and a confirmation code is sent to that address to check that it really is yours. Until the code is entered, nothing is passed on to the publisher, and an unconfirmed message is deleted within two hours.

Once confirmed, the message is saved in the website’s administration and emailed to the publisher, for the sole purpose of replying to you. It is never sold or used to send you advertising, and it is deleted no later than twelve months after it is received.

To limit abuse, non-reversible hashes of your IP address and your email address are kept for one hour.

Legal basis: your request to get in touch and the publisher’s legitimate interest in answering it.

Your rights

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing on our side to disclose, correct or erase. Your texts are yours and they are with you: deleting them from your device and your iCloud deletes them for good. Uninstalling Bokmo takes its settings and its device identifier with it.

The one exception is the message you send us yourself through this website’s form. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you can ask to access it, to have it corrected or erased, to object to its processing or to have it restricted, by writing through that same contact form.

If you believe your rights are not being respected, you can lodge a complaint with the CNIL, the French data protection authority (cnil.fr).

Changes to this page

If Bokmo ever starts doing something else, this page will be corrected before it does, and the date at the top will change.

Contact

For any question about this policy, write through the contact form: it goes straight to the publisher, with no one in between.

Data controller: Joan Muller, publisher of Bokmo and of this website.