Yours alone

Their words stay private, on their device, until they choose to share them with you.

Privacy is not a setting in Narrative Arc. It is the architecture. Here is exactly what that means.

No cloud transcription
Speech becomes text on your device using on-device recognition. Your audio is never uploaded to a Narrative Arc server.
No content analytics
We do not read, index, analyze, or train models on anything you record. There is nothing to opt out of, because we never collect it.
You decide what is shared
A memoir is private until you publish it. When you do, you choose the audience and you can unpublish at any time.
Stored where you choose
During setup you pick where stories live: your private iCloud, your home Wi-Fi only, or this device alone. Change it anytime in Settings.
Yours to take with you
Export your stories, photos, and audio whenever you want. Deleting the app does not hold your work hostage.
No account to write
A personal memoir works fully signed out on your own devices. You sign in with Apple to publish online, where the published version is tied to you, or to co-author a family memoir.
The full policy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 2026

The short version

Narrative Arc holds your life stories. Voice recordings of memories, the people you love, the moments that made you. That is the most personal content a person can create, and the privacy posture reflects that. The app runs on your device. Your stories never leave your phone or Mac unless you explicitly choose to share or export them.

What we collect

Nothing is collected, transmitted, or stored on a server by default. Narrative Arc has no cloud requirement for any core feature. We do not collect analytics on your stories, your voice, your photos, your relationships, or your timeline. We do not run third-party analytics, advertising SDKs, crash-reporting services, or telemetry of any kind.

Voice and transcription

Speech recognition is on-device only, using Apple’s Speech framework. We enforce requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true at the code level. If on-device recognition is unavailable for your locale, recording surfaces a clear error rather than silently falling back to a cloud service. Your audio recordings are stored privately on your device. They never leave your machine.

Stories, photos, and people

All story text, attached photos, and tagged-people data live in a private database in the app’s sandboxed storage on your device. Photos you attach to stories are imported as resized copies into Narrative Arc’s private storage. Your originals in your photo library are never moved or modified.

Cross-device sync

During setup you choose where your stories live: in your own private iCloud (synced across your devices via your Apple account, never a Narrative Arc server), on your home Wi-Fi only (synced device to device, no cloud at all), or on this device alone. You can change this anytime in Settings.

Sharing and exports

When you export a memoir as a PDF, a video, or a web reader, you choose what gets shared. The output file goes wherever you direct it. Web-published readers are opt-in per memoir, with explicit access controls, and you can take a published memoir down at any time.

Account and Sign in with Apple

Publishing a memoir to the web or co-authoring a shared family memoir requires signing in with Apple. When you do, we store a minimal account record tied to your Apple sign-in: an anonymous Apple-provided identifier, your subscription status, and a small amount of setup state, namely whether you have completed first-time setup and which sync option you chose. This lets us recognize you when you sign in on another device, so your existing memoir is offered to you instead of starting over. This record contains no story text, photos, or voice, only account and setup metadata. If you never sign in, no account record exists.

Contacts and permissions

If you grant Contacts access to import a person, the imported fields (name, email, phone, birthday, profile photo) are stored locally on your device alongside the rest of your Narrative Arc data. We do not retain or transmit your contact list. Microphone, Speech Recognition, Camera, and Photo Library permissions are requested only when needed for a feature you initiate, and you can revoke them in system Settings at any time.

Family collaboration

Narrative Arc has two ways for family to take part in a memoir, both invitation-only and both off until you choose them.

Contributions. You can invite someone to add a single story to your memoir. They record on their device or in a web browser, and their contribution lands in your memoir, attributed to who told it. Contribution audio is held only until you accept it into your memoir, then deleted from our server.

Shared family memoir. If you and up to two other people choose to write one memoir together, that memoir is kept in sync between your devices. Because co-authors are different people on different devices, the in-progress memoir (story text, voice recordings, and photos) is relayed through a Narrative Arc server so each co-author’s device can receive the others’ work. This is the one feature where memoir content is stored on our server before you publish, and it happens only after you explicitly create or join a shared family memoir. We store only the current state of the shared memoir’s media, not its history. We never analyze this content, and it is never shared beyond the co-authors you invited.

Third parties

Narrative Arc does not integrate with any third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking platform. The only third parties involved are Apple’s first-party frameworks (Speech, Vision, PhotoKit, Contacts) for the on-device features described above.

Children

Narrative Arc is designed for adults documenting their life stories. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and the product is not directed at children under 13.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted here with a revised “Last updated” date. Privacy-relevant changes will also be surfaced in the app.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent through the Contact page.