Privacy Policy

Ceaseless Mind is an app for playing interactive fantasy stories narrated by an AI. You pick a book, make a character, and type or speak what you do next. Running that requires storing a few things. This page sets out exactly what is stored, why, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it.

It is written to be read rather than to be skimmed past. If anything here is unclear, ask us at privacy@ceaselessmind.com.

Who is responsible for your data

Ceaseless Mind is operated by a sole trader in the United Kingdom, and is the data controller for the information described here. Our full trader details, including registered contact address, are published on our App Store and Google Play listings.

For anything about your data, write to privacy@ceaselessmind.com. That reaches us directly and is the fastest route to a person.

What we collect

Account and identity

When you sign in with Google or Apple we receive your email address and a unique account identifier from that provider, along with the display name and profile picture they choose to pass on. We do not receive or store your password. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication.

This is the only thing we ask you for. There is no sign-up form, no questionnaire, and nothing else you have to hand over to use the app.

What you create while playing

• The characters you make: name, backstory, what your character wants, and their statistics and inventory as the story changes them.
• The actions you type or speak on your turn.
• The narration, scenes and images the app generates in response.
• Which books you have started, how far you are through them, and how they ended.

This is kept for the obvious reason: without it you could not put a book down and pick it up again, and the narrator could not remember what you did three chapters ago.

Voice

If you speak your turn instead of typing it, the recording is sent to our transcription provider, turned into text, and not kept. We do not store your audio. The text becomes your turn and is stored like a typed one.

When the app reads narration aloud, we store the generated audio and a record of how much was generated, so the same passage does not have to be paid for twice and so usage limits can be applied. That record holds the length of the text and which voice was used, not the text itself.

Device and usage information

• Your timezone, so a notification lands in your morning rather than ours.
• A push notification token for your device, and your notification settings.
• A log of notifications sent, so the app does not tell you about the same new book twice.
• Technical logs and crash reports produced while running the service.

Subscriptions

If you subscribe to Bex Premium, the purchase is handled entirely by Apple. We never see your card details. We receive and store Apple's signed record of the subscription: a transaction identifier, the product, its status and renewal date, and whether it came from Apple's sandbox or production environment. That is how the app knows what you are entitled to.

What we do not collect

Worth stating plainly, because none of it is obvious from the outside:

• No health or fitness data. Nothing reads Apple Health or Google Fit, and there is nothing in the app for logging moods, symptoms or habits.
• No location. The app does not ask for it and does not use it.
• No contacts, photos library, calendar or microphone access beyond the recording you deliberately make on your turn.
• No advertising identifiers, no ad networks, no third-party analytics or tracking, and no profiling of you across other apps or websites.

The app also does not analyse what you write to draw conclusions about you. What you type is used to continue the story and nothing else.

How your information is used

• To run the story. Your character, your action and the story so far are sent to AI providers to generate what happens next, and to read it aloud if you use voice.
• To remember where you are. So a book you started is waiting for you, in the state you left it.
• To tell you about new books. If you allow notifications, we let you know when a new book is added, at a reasonable hour where you are.
• To run what you paid for. Verifying subscriptions and unlocking premium features.

We do not sell your information. We do not use it for advertising. We do not use what you write to train our own models.

Who else processes it

We use the following providers to run the service. Each receives only what its function requires.

• Google Cloud Platform: hosting, background jobs, and file storage for generated images and audio.
• MongoDB Atlas: the database holding your account and your saved games.
• Firebase (Google): sign-in, push notifications and crash reporting.
• Anthropic: generates the narration.
• Google Vertex AI: generates scene images and the ambient music for a book.
• OpenAI: converts your voice recording to text.
• ElevenLabs: converts narration to speech.
• Apple: processes subscription payments and tells us their status.

These providers act on our instructions. Some are based outside the UK, chiefly in the United States, so your information may be transferred there. Those transfers rely on the safeguards required by UK and EU law, such as standard contractual clauses.

How long it is kept

Your saved games are kept for as long as your account exists, because a story you cannot resume is not worth saving. Delete your account and all of it goes. Operational logs and crash reports are kept for a short period for reliability and security, and Apple subscription records are kept as long as needed for accounting.

Your rights

If you are in the UK or the EU, you have the right to access your information, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it, restrict or object to how it is used, and withdraw consent at any time.

You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app, on the Account screen. It is permanent. For anything else, write to privacy@ceaselessmind.com.

If you think we have handled your information badly you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Credentials are held in a managed secrets service, and authorisation tokens are stored server-side rather than on your device. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.

Children

Ceaseless Mind is not intended for children. Do not use it if you are under 18. If we learn that we hold information about a child, we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and, where the change matters to you, tell you in the app.