The short version
- →The notes you write are encrypted on your phone before they leave it. We store them, but we can't read them. Neither can anyone who breaks into our database.
- →We don't track you. No ads, no analytics, no third-party trackers of any kind. There is nothing to opt out of, because there's nothing running.
- →We never sell your data, and we never will. BetterFriend makes money from subscriptions, not from you.
- →Your data is stored in London. Names, photos and birthdays are stored readable so we can write "It's Sarah's birthday". We explain exactly why below.
- →You can delete everything from inside the app, in a few taps, and it's gone for good.
What we never do
It's easier to start with the things that aren't happening, because for most apps this list is empty.
- ✗No advertising. There are no ads in BetterFriend and there is no ad software inside it.
- ✗No analytics. We don't measure which screens you open, how long you spend, or what you tap.
- ✗No tracking across apps or websites. Nothing about you is shared with data brokers or ad networks. Ever.
- ✗No crash or usage reporting SDKs. Nothing phones home in the background.
- ✗No profiling and no automated decisions. We don't build a picture of you, and nothing about your account is decided by an algorithm.
- ✗No selling or renting your data, to anyone, under any circumstances.
- ✗No marketing emails unless you ask for them. The only emails we send are the ones the app owes you: password resets, address changes, and a receipt when you delete your account.
Notifications are the one thing we send to your phone, and those are the product. They're the nudges you signed up for. We will never repurpose that channel to advertise to you.
Who we are
BetterFriend is built and run by Rik Bergevoet in the Netherlands. It's a small independent project, not a company with a privacy department, which is precisely why this policy is short enough to read.
Under data protection law, the person responsible for your data (the "controller") is Rik Bergevoet. You can reach us at:
- Privacy and data requests: privacy@betterfriend.site
- Anything else: support@betterfriend.site
A real person reads both.
Who's in charge of what
BetterFriend is a private notebook about the people in your life. That makes the arrangement a little unusual, and it's worth being clear about it.
You decide what goes in it. The people you add never signed up for anything. They're in there because you chose to remember something about them. What you write about your friends and family is your business, the same way a paper address book or a diary would be. The law treats a private address book as a personal, household thing, and it stays yours.
We built and look after the notebook. That means we're responsible for keeping it secure, for collecting as little as we can get away with, for being honest with you about all of it, and for giving you the controls to take your information back or destroy it.
One thing follows from that, and we'd rather say it plainly: because you decide what goes in, you're the one deciding what to record about other people. Most of it will be birthdays and "loves Italian food". Some of it might be genuinely sensitive: that someone is unwell, or going through a divorce. That's exactly the sort of thing a good friend remembers, and it's why we encrypt it so that only you can read it. Please write about others the way you'd want someone writing about you.
What we store
About you, the account holder
- Your email address and first name, so we can sign you in and say good morning properly.
- Your password, if you signed up with one. It's stored scrambled (hashed) by our login provider. We never see it and we can't recover it, only reset it.
- Your Apple or Google identity, if you signed in that way. If you used Sign in with Apple, we also keep a token that lets us properly disconnect your Apple account if you ever delete your account.
- A notification token for your phone, the address your device gives us so nudges can reach it.
- Your time zone, so nudges arrive at 9am where you are, not 9am somewhere else.
- Your plan (free, beta or Pro) and whether you've read the encryption warning.
- If you turn on Backup & recovery: a locked copy of your encryption key, plus a record that you switched it on and when. The locked copy is useless without your recovery phrase, and we never see your recovery phrase.
Our hosting provider also records the usual security information when you sign in, such as an IP address and which kind of device it was, so that break-in attempts can be spotted.
About the people you add
Here's the part where we have to be straight with you, because it isn't all encrypted.
Stored in a form we can read: the person's name, their photo, whether they're a friend / family / colleague, their interests, their birthday and other important dates, how often you want to be nudged about them, and the dates and times you logged a catch-up.
Why aren't names encrypted too?
Because our server writes the notification. To send you "It's Sarah's birthday today 🎂", something on our side has to be able to read the word "Sarah" and know the date. That single design decision is the reason names, photos, birthdays and relationship labels sit unencrypted.
What we genuinely cannot read
Everything you actually write is encrypted on your phone, with a key that only your phone has, before it's sent to us:
- Facts you save about someone ("going through a divorce", "loves Italian food")
- Notes about conversations you logged
- Follow-up prompts ("her interview is Thursday")
- One-off reminders you set
We store these as scrambled text. We have no key, no back door and no way to unscramble it. Not for us, not for a curious employee, not for anyone who steals the database. It's AES-256-GCM encryption, the same standard banks and governments use, and the key lives in your iPhone's Keychain and nowhere else.
One place your notes do travel: the nudge itself
A nudge lands better when it reminds you where you left off — "You haven't spoken to Sarah in 30 days. Last time: her interview on the 4th." For that to work, the last note you wrote about that person has to reach your phone along with the notification. It's shortened to a line or so, and only nudges about someone you haven't spoken to in a while carry one — birthday nudges don't.
It travels scrambled, exactly as we store it. The companies that deliver notifications (Expo and Apple) carry the locked version and have no key for it. Your phone unlocks it in the last moment before the notification appears. So it stays true that nobody but you can read it — but it is no longer true that what you wrote never leaves our database, and we would rather tell you than have you work it out.
What that means in practice: a line from your notes can now show up on your lock screen, where anyone holding your phone could read it. If you'd rather it didn't, iOS can hide it: Settings → Notifications → BetterFriend → Show Previews → When Unlocked (or Never). You'll still get the nudge; you just won't see what's in it until you unlock.
What this means if we're ever breached
If someone broke into our database tomorrow, they would get names, photos and birthdays, which is bad and we'd tell you about it. They would not get a single word of what you wrote. Not one note, not one fact. That's the whole point of doing it this way.
Why we're allowed to store it
Data protection law says we need a specific reason for everything we hold. Ours are short:
| What | Why we're allowed to |
|---|---|
| Your account, your contacts, your notes, your nudges | To provide the service you signed up for. A reminder app that isn't allowed to store who to remind you about isn't an app. |
| Password resets, address-change confirmations, your deletion receipt | To provide the service. These emails are part of running your account safely. |
| Sign-in logs, rate limits, blocking repeated password guesses | Our legitimate interest in keeping accounts secure. Without it, anyone could hammer your login unopposed. |
Note what's missing: there's no "so we can improve our services" catch-all, because we don't collect anything for that.
Who else touches your data
We use a handful of companies to actually run the app. They're allowed to handle your data only to do the job we hired them for, and nothing else. Here's the whole list:
| Company | What reaches them | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Everything we store, including the encrypted notes they can't read either | Database, accounts, photo storage | London, UK |
| Expo | The text of a notification, which includes a contact's first name — and, on an overdue nudge, your last note about that person in its encrypted form, which they have no key for | Delivering push notifications | USA |
| Apple | The same notification content | Delivering push notifications to your iPhone | USA |
| Apple | Your sign-in identity | Sign in with Apple, if you use it | USA |
| Your sign-in identity | Google Sign-In, if you use it | USA | |
| Resend | Your email address | Sending the account emails listed above | USA |
Two consequences are worth spelling out, and the second one changed in August 2026.
A notification like "You haven't spoken to Sarah in 30 days" travels through Expo and Apple to reach your phone, so a contact's first name passes through them readable. That's the same design decision that keeps names readable in our database, and it goes away if nudges ever move fully onto your device.
An overdue nudge now also carries your last note about that person — scrambled. Expo and Apple pass along a block of ciphertext they have no key for, and your phone unlocks it and writes it into the notification at the last moment. This page used to say that notification text never contains anything you typed. That was true when we wrote it and it isn't any more, so we've replaced the sentence rather than leave it standing. The full explanation, including how to keep it off your lock screen, is further up the page.
Where your data lives
Your account and everything in it is stored on servers in London, in the United Kingdom. The European Commission has formally decided that the UK protects personal data to an equivalent standard as the EU, so nothing extra is needed for it to be stored there.
The companies that deliver your notifications and emails (Expo, Apple and Resend) are based in the United States, so that information travels there. Each of them is covered by the standard legal safeguards for sending data outside Europe.
How long we keep it
While you're using BetterFriend, we keep your data for as long as your account exists. That's the point. A memory app that forgets is useless.
If you stop using it, your data stays with us for as long as your account does. We don't currently delete accounts automatically just because they've gone quiet, so nothing disappears behind your back. If you want it gone, you're always one tap from removing it yourself, and that takes effect immediately.
If you delete your account yourself, it happens immediately. Your contacts, notes, photos, dates and login all go, and we email you a receipt confirming it. There's no 30-day grace period where we quietly keep a copy. When it's gone, it's gone, and we can't get it back for you either.
Deleting a single contact removes everything about that person, including their photo, straight away.
One thing does outlive your account, on purpose: when you delete it, we ask you to pick a reason from a short list, and that answer is emailed to our support inbox as the account goes. It's sent without your name or email address — just the reason, which plan you were on, how many contacts you had and how long you'd been signed up. We ask because it's the only way we find out what we're getting wrong. To be straight with you: it carries nothing that identifies you, but it does arrive at the moment you delete, so we're not going to claim it's untraceable.
If you pick "Something else…" we ask you to say what, in your own words, and that's emailed too. Two things to know before you type it. Unlike your notes, it isn't encrypted — it can't be, because it isn't attached to an account, so there's no key of yours to lock it with. And once your account is gone we can't find it again to delete it, because there's nothing left to match it against. So please leave out names and personal details. It's capped at 300 characters, and it's the only thing you type in BetterFriend that we can read.
Our hosting provider keeps security logs (sign-in records and the like) for a limited period on their own schedule, for fraud and abuse protection.
How we keep it safe
- Your notes are encrypted before they leave your phone, with a key stored in the iPhone Keychain. Covered in detail above. The key never leaves the device. The only other thing that can reach it is the small part of BetterFriend that writes your notifications, which runs on your phone as well.
- Every piece of data is locked to your account at the database level. Even a bug in the app can't show one person another person's contacts.
- Contact photos are private. They're not on a public web address. The app fetches them through links that expire, so nobody can stumble onto a photo of your friend.
- Everything travels over an encrypted connection between your phone and our servers.
- Changing your email or password requires your current password, and repeated wrong guesses get throttled, so someone with a borrowed phone can't quietly take over your account.
One detail we'd rather state than bury: so that a 9am nudge can quote your notes while the phone is still locked, the copy of the key that writes notifications is held in a way iOS keeps available from the first unlock after a restart, instead of only while you're actively using the phone. A phone that's switched off or freshly rebooted still gives up nothing, and none of it changes what we can read on our side — which is still nothing. It's a deliberate, narrow trade, and without it the feature wouldn't work at all.
If a data breach ever happens and it puts you at risk, we'll tell you and the relevant authority. That's a legal duty and we take it seriously. As explained above, the notes you wrote would remain unreadable even then.
Your rights
You have all of these, and using them costs nothing:
- See what we hold. Ask and we'll send you everything.
- Fix anything wrong. Every field is editable in the app, so you don't need to ask us.
- Delete everything. Settings → Delete account. Immediate and permanent.
- Take your data with you in a format another app could read.
- Tell us to stop or to limit what we do with your data. In practice this usually means deleting your account, since almost everything we do is the app working.
- Complain if you think we've got it wrong.
To use any of these, email privacy@betterfriend.site. We'll reply within one month. If a request is genuinely complicated we may need longer, but we'll tell you inside that first month if so.
One honest note on getting a copy of your data: because your notes are encrypted with a key only your phone holds, we physically can't produce a readable copy of them. We'd only be able to send you the scrambled version, plus everything we do hold in the clear. A proper one-tap export that decrypts on your device is being built. Until it lands, email us and we'll send you everything we've got.
If you're unhappy with how we've handled your data, you can complain to the Dutch data protection authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. If you live elsewhere in the EU, you can also complain to your own country's authority. We'd rather you told us first so we can put it right, but it's your call.
If someone you've saved wants to be removed
It might happen: a friend finds out you keep notes about them and would rather you didn't.
Because those notes are yours, the fastest fix is in your hands. Open that person in the app and delete them. Everything about them goes immediately, photo included, and the encrypted notes become permanently unreadable.
If someone contacts us directly about being in a BetterFriend account, we'll help. In most cases we can't identify which account holds them (their name might be in there, but their notes are encrypted and we can't search what we can't read), so what we'll usually do is explain how it works and put them in touch with the person who'd need to act. Email privacy@betterfriend.site.
The honest trade-off
Encryption this strong has a cost, and you should know it before you rely on the app.
If you lose your phone, you can lose your notes
Your people are safe. Names, photos, relationships, interests and birthdays are stored on your account, so signing in on a new phone brings everyone back. You'll never have to re-add your contacts.
Your notes might not be. The key that unlocks what you wrote lives on your phone. If you lose the device and can't restore it from an iCloud or device backup, those notes are gone permanently. We can't recover them for you, because we've never had a way in. That's the price of notes only you can read.
If you'd rather not risk it, turn on Backup & recovery in Settings. You'll get a recovery phrase that restores your notes on any device. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe. We never see it, so we can't reset it for you.
Children
BetterFriend is for people aged 16 and over. It isn't designed for children and we don't knowingly keep accounts for them. If you believe a child has created an account, email privacy@betterfriend.site and we'll remove it.
If this policy changes
BetterFriend is still growing, so this page will change. When it does we'll update the date at the top. If a change genuinely affects you, like something new being collected or a new company handling your data, we'll email you about it rather than quietly editing the page and hoping you don't notice.
What changed on 21 August 2026
Nudges about someone you haven't spoken to in a while now quote your last note about them. That note reaches your phone encrypted, so the companies delivering the notification still can't read it, and it's unlocked on the device itself. Nothing new is collected and no new company handles your data. We also took out a sentence saying notification text never contains anything you typed, because it stopped being true — the details are in What we store and Who else touches your data.
Questions
If any of this is unclear, or you just want to know what we hold about you, email privacy@betterfriend.site. It's a small project, so you'll get a real answer from a real person.
Last updated 21 August 2026.