Privacy Policy

Last updated: 16 October 2026

Rabbit Hole is an iOS app that shows a feed of content from public sources. No tracking, no account, no ads. Only anonymous usage counts, which you can turn off.

What the app does not do

• No accounts, no sign-in.
• No advertising, no tracking across apps or websites, no profiles.
• Nothing you read, save or search for is sent to the developer.

Anonymous usage statistics

To learn whether people come back and which parts of the app are used, the app sends a few anonymous counts through TelemetryDeck (TelemetryDeck GmbH, Germany), a privacy-focused analytics service.

What is sent:

• that the app was opened, and how many cards were viewed in that session;
• that a card was opened in full or shared, with only its kind (article, photo, artwork…) and its source family (Wikipedia, the Met, NASA…);
• which interests and content languages are switched on, and whether the random share is on;
• technical basics added by the analytics library: device model, iOS version, app version, system language and region.

What is never sent: card titles or texts, links, saved cards, the taste model, your location, API keys, your name, email or any account.

To count distinct installs, the library derives an identifier from the device’s vendor identifier, hashes it on the phone and hashes it again on the server with a salt that changes regularly. It cannot be traced back to you or your device, and it is not used to follow you anywhere else.

You can switch this off at any time in Settings → Privacy → Anonymous usage statistics. When it is off, the app sends nothing to TelemetryDeck.

What stays on your device

• Saved cards and your settings (interests, languages, optional API keys) are stored only on your device. API keys are kept in the iOS Keychain.
• The “taste” model — what you swiped left on, saved, opened or lingered on — is a small set of numbers stored only on your device. You can see, edit and reset it in Settings → Taste. It never leaves the phone.
• Images are cached on the device to save traffic.

Network requests

To show content, the app talks directly to public APIs: Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Foundation), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NASA (Astronomy Picture of the Day), iNaturalist and Open Library (Internet Archive). These services see your IP address and the request, as any website would. Their own privacy policies apply to those requests. Links you open from a card are shown in an in-app Safari view, which follows Safari’s own privacy settings.

Location

If you turn on “Places nearby” in Settings, the app asks for location access. Your location is used only on the device to pick a random spot within 200 km of you and to ask Wikipedia for articles around that spot. The coordinates sent to Wikipedia are of that random spot, not your exact position. The app never stores your location history and never sends it to the developer. You can turn the interest off or revoke the permission in iOS Settings at any time.

Children

The app has no user-generated content and no social features. It is rated 13+, because encyclopedic content can include infrequent references to violence, nudity in art and alcohol.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hello@botandpixel.org

Support

Questions or problems with the app? Write to hello@botandpixel.org or open an issue at github.com/coding-froging/rabbithole-privacy/issues, and I will answer there.