Privacy policy

Last updated: 25 October 2026

This policy covers the Hearthtold app for iPhone. Visits to mirentha.com, and messages sent with the support form, are covered by the mirentha.com privacy policy.

Who we are

Hearthtold is made by Mirentha Ltd, a company incorporated in England and Wales (company number 17207914), with its registered office at 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. For anything about privacy, write to [email protected].

The short version

• Hearthtold has no account, no server, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. Mirentha receives nothing you record or make in it.
• Recording, writing out, making chapters and follow-up questions all happen on your iPhone.
• Your recordings, transcripts, chapters, photos and book are files on your iPhone and, if iCloud Drive is on, in Hearthtold’s folder in your own iCloud Drive, stored by Apple under your Apple Account. Mirentha can’t see them.
• Hearthtold contains no third-party code and shares nothing with any other company. The Apple services it uses are covered by Apple’s privacy policy.
• Purchases are handled by Apple. We never see your payment details.

Because the app sends us nothing, Mirentha doesn’t process personal data through Hearthtold, and its App Store privacy label is “Data Not Collected”.

What the app handles

Recordings

Hearthtold uses the microphone to record the conversation you start from its recording screen. Recordings are saved as audio files on your iPhone, a new file every minute, so a crash loses at most the last minute. Each conversation begins with the storyteller’s spoken yes, kept as its own short clip with the conversation; if you tap “Not now” instead, that clip is deleted at once (if Hearthtold is closed before their yes, the clip goes to Recently Deleted). If you lock your iPhone or switch to another app while recording, Hearthtold keeps recording, and iOS shows that the microphone is in use.

When you tap Off the record, what follows is still recorded, in its own audio files, but it isn’t written out, and it never goes into a chapter, the book or the recordings Hearthtold joins up for sharing. It is kept with the conversation’s other recordings (on your iPhone, in your iCloud Drive copy and in a Save everything archive’s files) until you delete it: tap Delete audio on its line in the transcript.

Transcripts

Conversations are written out on your iPhone by Apple’s on-device speech recognition. The speech model for each language is downloaded from Apple once (Hearthtold suggests doing it on Wi-Fi); Hearthtold sends nothing about your conversations with that download. When you first allow the microphone, iOS also asks you to allow Speech Recognition.

Chapters and follow-up questions

Chapters made for you and follow-up questions use Apple Intelligence’s on-device model, on your iPhone. For chapters, the model is given the storyteller’s transcribed sentences, numbered, and returns the numbers of the sentences where each story starts, and may point to a short phrase in one of them for the heading; it never writes words of its own. For a follow-up question, it is given the storyteller’s words from the last minute and picks out a person, place, time or thing they named, which goes into one of Hearthtold’s own questions. Hearthtold sends none of this to Mirentha or to any other company, and uses no server model.

Photos and the camera

You can add photos to the book from your photo library, using Apple’s photo picker, which gives Hearthtold only the photos you choose and needs no permission. You can also photograph old prints with the camera, which asks for camera permission. Each photo is saved as a new JPEG file in the storyteller’s folder, with the caption and year you type. Hearthtold doesn’t read any text from photos, and photos taken in Hearthtold aren’t added to your photo library.

Your library and its files

Hearthtold keeps a library on your iPhone: each storyteller’s name, how you know them, their language and whether they’re marked In memory; your conversations and the questions you chose or typed; transcripts and your corrections; chapters; book settings, including the name you type for the book’s colophon and the people you’ve ticked in “People named in this book”; and photo captions. The library isn’t synced to any server.

Each storyteller also has a folder of open files: the recordings (.m4a), transcripts (.txt), chapters (.md), photos, the book (.pdf) and a manifest.json file that holds the library’s details for that storyteller, so it can be rebuilt on a new phone. You can see these files in the Files app, under On My iPhone › Hearthtold. The manifest keeps the details of things you’ve deleted until they are removed for good (below).

The book PDF carries the colophon (who told the stories, when, and who checked them) and records that it was arranged with on-device AI from recorded speech.

Your iCloud Drive copy

If iCloud Drive is on, Hearthtold copies each storyteller’s folder, one way, to Hearthtold’s folder in your own iCloud Drive: every recording (off-the-record audio and the spoken yes included), transcript, chapter, photo, the book and the manifest. These copies are stored by Apple under your Apple Account. Mirentha has no access to them. Recently Deleted, the library itself and the app’s settings aren’t copied. You can see the copy in the Files app under iCloud Drive › Hearthtold. When you delete a storyteller, conversation, chapter, recording or photo in Hearthtold, its iCloud Drive copy is removed too. To remove the whole copy, first turn iCloud Drive off for Hearthtold (Settings › your name › iCloud › iCloud Drive), then delete the folder in the Files app or in Settings › your name › iCloud › Manage Account Storage. While iCloud Drive is on for Hearthtold, a copy deleted only in the Files app is copied again the next time Hearthtold opens.

On a new iPhone, Open from iCloud Drive reads only your own storyteller folders in that iCloud Drive folder, or a folder you choose in Files.

Sharing

Nothing is shared unless you share it. Save everything, and Share on a conversation, chapter or the book, hand an archive, a recording, a transcript, a chapter or the PDF to the iPhone’s share sheet, and it goes wherever you send it.

Settings kept on your iPhone

Hearthtold keeps a few settings on your iPhone: whether your free chapters have been used, the date your Plus subscription is paid to (so the app works offline), when you last dismissed the second-copy reminder for each storyteller, the Follow-ups switch, which notices you’ve seen, chapter-making to restart after the app was closed, and how many chapters you’ve ticked checked (so Apple’s rating prompt appears at most once a version).

Apple services

• Purchases are made through Apple’s App Store. Apple handles payment; we receive only the App Store’s usual sales reports, which don’t identify you.
• iCloud Drive is Apple’s service on your Apple Account, as described above.
• Speech recognition and Apple Intelligence run on your iPhone with models Apple provides.
• Backups: like any app’s data, Hearthtold’s library and files are included in your iPhone’s own backups (iCloud Backup or a computer), if you make them.
• Crash reports and usage statistics: if you have chosen to share analytics with app developers (Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements), Apple may share crash reports and usage statistics with us. Hearthtold has no analytics or crash reporting of its own.

Apple’s privacy policy: apple.com/legal/privacy.

Keeping and deleting

Everything stays on your iPhone, and in your iCloud Drive copy, until you delete it. Nothing is deleted on its own, except as follows:

• A storyteller, conversation, chapter, recording or photo you delete goes to Recently Deleted (Settings › Recently Deleted) for 30 days, where you can restore it. After 30 days it is removed for good, with its files, the next time you open Hearthtold. Delete now removes it at once.
• Files made for sharing are kept in a temporary folder and cleared each time Hearthtold starts.
• Deleting the app removes everything on your iPhone. Your iCloud Drive copy, your iPhone’s backups and any archives you saved elsewhere keep what they hold until you delete them.

Changing permissions

You can turn the microphone, speech recognition and camera on or off at any time in Settings › Hearthtold. Recording needs the microphone; photographing prints needs the camera; adding photos from your library needs no permission.

The people in the stories

Recordings hold the storyteller’s voice and stories about other people. You decide what is recorded and shared: ask the storyteller first, use Off the record for anything they’d rather keep out, and check the people named before you share a book.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict or object to the processing of personal data, and to data portability. Mirentha holds no personal data from Hearthtold, so there is nothing of yours from the app for us to provide or delete: everything is on your iPhone and in your iCloud Drive, under your control. For anything we hold through the website or the support form, see the mirentha.com privacy policy or write to [email protected]. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

Children

Hearthtold isn’t aimed at children. It collects nothing from anyone, children included.

Changes to this policy

If Hearthtold starts handling data differently, we’ll update this policy before that version is released, and change the date at the top.

Contact

Mirentha Ltd, 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. Email [email protected], or use the form on the support page.