The short version: Marginalia collects no data about you. There is no account, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Your feeds, highlights, notes and journal stay on your iPhone. The app connects only to the websites you add or open, never to us.
Who is responsible
Alírio de Jesus Guilherme Mambo, Alzefa Labs, c/o POSTFLEX PFX-622-266, Emsdettener Straße 10, 48268 Greven, Germany. Email: info@alzefa.com. Full details are in the Impressum.
What the app collects
Nothing. Marginalia does not send any information about you or your device to us. It has no account. It contains no analytics, advertising or tracking code, and no code that sends crash reports anywhere. Nothing goes to anyone else either, except as described under “Network connections” below.
What stays on your iPhone
Your subscriptions, folders, saved articles, highlights, notes, journal entries and settings are saved on your device. We cannot see them. Deleting the app deletes them from the phone, but not any backup file or Markdown export that you saved somewhere else (see below).
If you use your device’s backup (iCloud Backup or a computer backup), iOS may include the app’s files in it. That is controlled by your own device settings and Apple’s terms, not by us.
Network connections
Marginalia connects to the internet only to fetch the feeds and web pages you add or open, and the text and images that belong to them. It also checks your feeds in the background, as often as you set under “Refresh feeds” (iOS decides when that runs). These requests go straight from your iPhone to the site that publishes the feed or page, or to the server that site uses for its images, and not through any server of ours. Those servers can see your IP address and the request, which names Marginalia and its version, as they can for any visitor. Marginalia tries a secure (https) connection first and uses plain http only when a feed is not available over https. What those sites do with the data is described in their own privacy policies.
If you choose “Open page in app” in the reader, the article’s original web page opens inside Marginalia, as it would in a browser. The page’s own scripts run, so the site and any services it loads (for example its analytics or advertising) can see your visit and may set cookies, which stay in the app until you delete it. Nothing from that page is sent to us.
Purchases, once the optional Pro unlock is available, go through the App Store only. Apple handles them under Apple’s privacy policy, and no payment data passes through the app.
Saving a page from the share sheet
When you share a web page to Marginalia from Safari or another app, the share extension writes the page’s address and title, the page itself if Safari provides it, and any note you type, to a queue file that only Marginalia and its extension can read. Marginalia then saves the page into your library. Nothing is sent to us.
Backups and Markdown export
In Settings, “Backup and restore” saves your whole library into one backup file, and Restore reads one. In Settings, “Export to folder” writes your journal entries as Markdown files into a folder you choose once, for example an Obsidian vault. “Import or export feeds (OPML)” does the same for your subscription list. You choose where each file goes, for example Files, a cloud drive or an email to yourself. Nothing is sent to us. Backup files and Markdown files are not encrypted, so anyone who gets one can read it. If you want a cloud drive or another app to hold a copy, that service’s own terms apply.
Crash reports
If the app closes unexpectedly, Marginalia saves a short report about the crash on your iPhone. It holds the app version, the iOS version, the device model, the time and the technical details of the error, with any web addresses removed, and nothing you wrote. Nothing is sent automatically and we never receive it. You can see the reports in Settings, under “Crash reports”, and delete them there. If you choose to send one to us to help fix a problem, you do so yourself, for example by email through the share sheet, and we use it only to find and fix the problem.
Weekly reminder and Photos
The weekly reminder is off until you turn it on in Settings. It is a local notification that your iPhone schedules on the device, not sent through any server. Marginalia asks for permission to send notifications, and you can say no and still use the app. The notification shows the text of one of your past highlights, so it can appear on your lock screen.
If you save an image from an article to Photos, iOS asks for permission to add it. Marginalia only adds the images you choose and never reads your photo library.
Sync (planned for version 1.1)
A later version is planned to offer optional sync between your own devices through your own iCloud Drive. It will be off until you turn it on. If we add it, the copy will be kept in your own iCloud Drive account, Apple handles it under Apple’s privacy policy, and we will not receive it. We will update this page before that version ships.
Links and email
If you write to us, we receive your email address and your message, and we use them only to answer you (legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) or (f) GDPR). We delete support emails 12 months after the conversation ends, unless the law requires us to keep them longer. Our email is hosted by Apple (iCloud+). Apple may store and process the messages on servers outside the European Union, including in the USA; Apple states that it covers these transfers with the EU standard contractual clauses (Art. 46 GDPR).
Links in articles open in your system browser, not inside the app, and the browser’s own privacy rules then apply.
These web pages
These pages set no cookies and load nothing from other companies. Our web server keeps access logs (such as the IP address, the time, the page requested, the referring page and the browser’s user agent), which we use to keep the site secure and running and to count visits, without cookies. The logs are kept for 14 days and then deleted. The website is hosted on a server in Spain, in the European Union. More is in the website privacy policy.
Children’s privacy
Because Marginalia collects no personal information from anyone, it collects none from children, including children under 13 (COPPA) and under 16 (GDPR-K). The app has no accounts, no chat, no advertising and no social features. If you are a parent and believe your child has sent us personal information, such as by email, write to us and we will delete it.
Your rights
Because we hold no data about you in the app, there is nothing for us to access, correct or delete. Your data is on your device and in the files you made, and you control all of it. For anything we hold from an email you sent, you have the right to access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability, and to object to processing based on legitimate interest (Art. 15 to 18, 20 and 21 GDPR). To use them, write to info@alzefa.com; we respond whatever your country of residence. You can also complain to a data protection authority (Art. 77 GDPR), for example the Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany, or the authority where you live.
Changes to this policy
If the app ever changes in a way that affects your privacy, we will update this page and its date before the change ships, and the App Store privacy details will change with it.