Legal

Privacy Policy

Written to be read, not to be survived. If something here is unclear, email us and we'll fix the wording.

Last updated: 8 October 2026

The short version

You save things. We store them for you, and we use Google's Gemini models to work out what each one is and write it a title and a summary.
What gets sent for that: the link you saved and what is on the page, pictures you attach, voice notes you record, and short-form videos you save. You can turn this off.
Grabd shows no ads inside the app, and we do not sell or rent your data to anyone. We do advertise Grabd elsewhere, so when you install it we measure which ad or link brought you here, and we tell Meta when a subscription starts. iOS asks your permission for that first, and saying no costs you nothing in the app.
Grabd Pro is a paid subscription. Apple takes the payment; a service called Adapty keeps track of whether yours is active.
We measure how Grabd is used with Google Analytics for Firebase and Mixpanel. They see which features you use and how often, never what you saved.
If you ask to be reminded about a place when you are near it, your iPhone does the watching. Grabd never reads, stores or sends your location.
Your library is private to you. The one exception is something you have to switch on yourself, one note at a time: you can turn a single note into a web page that anyone with the link can read, and take it down again. Your voice recording is never part of that page.
You can delete every grab, or your whole account, from inside the app.

What we collect

Your account. Your email address, the user ID Firebase assigns you, and a display name if you give one or if Sign in with Apple or Google passes one along. Passwords are handled by Firebase Authentication; we never see or store them.

Your grabs. This is the app, so it is most of the data: the links you save, the titles, notes and thoughts you type, the pictures you attach, the voice notes you record, the tags and collections you organise things into, and anything the analysis step writes back (category, summary, takeaways, action items). Grabs live in Firestore and Cloud Storage under a path scoped to your account (users/{your-id}/…), and security rules make that path readable and writable by you alone. The one exception is a note you choose to publish, which is copied to a public address outside that path — see Sharing a note.

Your settings. Category preferences, Explore preferences, onboarding state, and whether you have analysis switched on. Most of these stay on your device in an app group; some ride along with your grabs so they are the same on a reinstall.

Your subscription and how you found us. Whether Grabd Pro is active, and which product you bought. An identifier generated for this installation, your device and app version, your App Store country and your network address, so we can tell which ad or link brought you here. Apple's advertising identifier joins that list only if you allow tracking when iOS asks. Details under Adapty, Singular and Meta.

Your GitHub connection, if you make one. Grabd can file a Dev grab as a GitHub issue. If you connect GitHub we store the installation ID and the account login you installed it on. We never hold your GitHub password or a long-lived token — the backend mints a short-lived installation token for each request.

Your location stays on your phone. If you ask Grabd to remind you about a saved place when you are near it, iOS asks for "While Using the App" location access and then watches for that place itself: the reminder is delivered by your phone, and Grabd never reads, stores or sends where you are. Grabd asks only when you set that kind of reminder, never at launch, and never for "Always" access. Say no and every other reminder still works. The only geography we see is the rough country your network address suggests, described under Analytics.

What we do not collect. No advertising identifier unless you allow it: iOS asks, and until you say yes your device hands out zeros in its place. No phone number, no SMS, no contacts, no health data, no calendar. Grabd does not ask for photo library access as a blanket permission — when you attach a picture, iOS hands us that one picture. Transcription of a voice note starts on your device — the words are written as you speak. It does not end there if you have analysis switched on: the recording itself goes to Google, and Google's pass may correct those words or write them from scratch. That is set out under "Google — Gemini" below.

Everything in your library is private to your account unless you decide otherwise, and there is exactly one way to decide otherwise: turning sharing on for a single note. It is off for every note until you do, and no page and no link exist before you do.

How it starts. Open the note and choose Create a link. Grabd makes a copy of that note on the web and hands you its address. Sharing is per note — there is no setting that publishes your library.

What goes on the page. The note's title, the written note, the transcript of what you said in words, and whatever you attached to it. Pictures and files you attached are copied to a public location so that a reader can open them; links you attached travel as the links they already are, since they were reachable anyway. A transcript is written by a machine listening to the recording, so the words on the page may not be exactly the ones you spoke. The published copy also carries the date you shared it.

What never goes on the page: the recording. The audio of a voice note is not copied, is not linked, and is not so much as named in the published data. A shared note publishes what was said and never the voice that said it.

Who can read it. Anyone holding the link, and anyone they pass it to. No Grabd account and no app are needed. The address contains a long random identifier, so it is not something a stranger can guess, and the page asks search engines not to index it — but it is a genuinely public web page, so the link is the key to it. Treat it the way you would treat the note itself.

Edits. While sharing is on, changes you make to the note are published to the page on their own, so the page keeps up with what the note says.

Stopping. Choose Stop sharing and the published copy is deleted, which is what makes the link stop working: there is nothing left at that address to serve. Deleting the note revokes its share as well, and deleting your account — or clearing your library with Reset / Delete All — removes every share you have. Two things are worth knowing before you share anything. Turning sharing on again makes a new link, so the old one is dead for good and cannot be brought back. And anything someone already read, saved or downloaded while the page was up is theirs — taking the page down cannot reach it.

Third parties that see your content

We keep this list exhaustive on purpose. If a service is not named here, it does not receive your data.

Google — Gemini (the analysis step)

This is the one worth reading carefully. When a grab is analyzed, Grabd sends it to Google's Gemini models, either from your phone through Firebase AI Logic or from our Cloud Functions through Vertex AI in Google Cloud.

What is sent:

The link you saved, plus what is on the page — title, description, preview text and preview images fetched from that page.
Pictures attached to the grab, including screenshots you share into Grabd.
Voice notes — the audio recording, and the transcript your phone produced.
Short-form video — TikTok videos and Instagram Reels you save, so the model can actually watch and listen to the clip instead of guessing from a thumbnail. YouTube links are passed to Gemini as a link rather than a download.

Why: to work out what a grab is (a recipe, a film, a place, a note), give it a title and a summary, pull out the details worth keeping, and pick the right catalog provider to enrich it with.

Your control. Analysis is off until you say yes. Before anything is sent, Grabd shows you a screen — "Let Grabd analyze your grabs?" — that names Google, lists what goes to it, and waits for you to choose Allow AI analysis or Not now — save without AI. You will see it while setting the app up, or the first time you open your library if you signed in to an existing account.

Whatever you choose, you can change it later at You › Analysis, and the same screen is reachable from You › Data & Privacy. Turning analysis on always goes through that screen rather than a bare switch, so you are never opted in by a stray tap. Turn it off and grabs are saved, synced and searchable exactly as before — nothing is sent to Gemini, and grabs created while it is off are never queued for analysis later.

Your answer is remembered on the device you gave it on, not on your account, because that device is what would be doing the sending. If you install Grabd on a second phone or iPad, it will ask you there too.

Google processes this content under the terms that apply to Firebase AI Logic and Vertex AI. See Google's privacy policy and the Firebase AI Logic terms.

When you save a TikTok video or an Instagram Reel, our backend asks Apify to fetch that public post's video file. Apify receives the post URL, and nothing else — not your account, not your notes, not your other grabs. The video comes back to our storage, where it is used for two things: the analysis pass above, and playing the clip inside the grab so it works even when the platform's own embed refuses. The shared copy in our cache is deleted after 30 days; the copy attached to your grab lives as long as the grab does.

Catalog and enrichment providers

Once Gemini has classified a grab, the backend looks it up with whichever provider knows about that kind of thing. These lookups send the title and a few disambiguating hints (a year, an author, an artist, a neighbourhood), sometimes the page URL, and your device's language and country so results match where you are. They do not send your notes, your account, or anything else from your library.

Provider	Used for	What it receives
TMDB	Films and TV	Title, year, country (for streaming availability)
JustWatch (via TMDB)	Where a title is streaming	Reached through TMDB; attribution is shown on the grab
OMDb	Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores	Title, year
Google Places	Places and venues	Place name or place ID, country; coordinates when the Maps link you saved contained them
YouTube Data API	Video grabs	The video ID from the link you saved
Apple iTunes Search	Apps, books, music	Title, author or artist, storefront country
Apple Music Catalog	Album editorial notes	Album ID, storefront country
IGDB (Twitch)	Games	Title
Wikipedia / Wikimedia	Article and topic summaries	Article title or the Wikipedia URL you saved, language
The New York Times API	News articles and the Explore news rail	Article URL or search terms
Apple Marketing RSS	Explore charts	Nothing about you — it is a public chart feed
Best Buy	Product prices	Product title or barcode
UPCitemdb	Product lookup by barcode	The barcode, US only
The page you saved	Recipes, products, articles, events	Our server, and your phone when it builds a link preview, request the page you saved the same way a browser would

Grabd also builds plain search links to Amazon, Walmart, Target and Google Shopping. Those are links, not lookups — nothing is sent until you tap one, and then you are on that site under its own policy.

Apple. When you save a place by name, Grabd asks MapKit to find its coordinates, which sends that place name to Apple. Sign in with Apple, if you use it, is Apple's own flow and gives us only what you approve.

GitHub. Only if you connect it, and only what a Dev grab contains: the issue title and body you are filing, sent to the repository you chose.

Adapty — your subscription

Grabd Pro is bought through Apple, but Adapty is what tells the app whether your subscription is active, and what draws the upgrade screen you see. It receives an identifier for your installation, your device's network address, the advertising identifier if you allowed tracking, and the purchase itself — which product, when it started, whether it renewed or lapsed. It does not receive your grabs, your notes, your email address or your Grabd account id.

To learn that network address, Adapty's SDK asks a public lookup service, ipify, what your address is. ipify receives the request and nothing else — no identifier, no account, no purchase.

The identifier Adapty knows you by is generated per device rather than per account, so a subscription follows the Apple ID that bought it. That is why You › Restore purchases exists: it asks Apple, not us, what you own.

Singular — knowing which ad worked

We run ads for Grabd. Singular tells us which campaign, ad or link an install came from, so we stop paying for the ones that do not work. It receives an identifier for your installation, your device and app version, your App Store country, your network address, and — only if you allow it — Apple's advertising identifier.

Meta — measuring subscriptions we advertised

When a subscription starts, the app tells Meta that a purchase happened, with the product and price. That is how a Facebook or Instagram ad gets credited with the subscription it produced. Meta's SDK also records app launches on its own. It never receives your grabs, your notes or your email address, and Grabd has no Facebook login and no Facebook sharing.

Your control over all three

The first time you open Grabd, iOS shows Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt. Decline it and the advertising identifier is withheld from every one of the three above, so an install and a subscription can no longer be tied back to you as a person across other apps. You can change your mind at any time in Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking.

Declining changes nothing about what Grabd does. Every feature, your whole library and your subscription work exactly the same either way.

Where your data is stored

Grabd runs on Google Firebase and Google Cloud. Firestore and the Cloud Functions that serve the app are in europe-west1 / eur3. Some providers above, and some of Google's own processing, happen outside the EEA, and Mixpanel stores its reports in the United States — those transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses each provider offers its customers.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics for Firebase to understand how Grabd is used, so we can see which features earn their place, where people get stuck, and whether a release made things better or worse.

What it records, automatically and without us writing any code for it:

App activity — first launch, app opens, session starts and lengths, screen views, app updates.
An app-instance identifier, generated for the installation. It is not your email, your name or your account ID, and we do not join it to them.
Device and app details — device model, operating system version, app version, language.
Approximate location — Google works out a country, and sometimes a region or city, from the network address your device connects with. Not your GPS. Grabd never reads your device's location.

Google acts as our data processor for this: the reports are ours, and Google handles them under the Firebase terms and its privacy policy.

What we do not do with it. These Firebase signals are not sold, not shared with data brokers, and not used to build a profile of you. They are separate from the attribution described under "Advertising and tracking" below, which is a different set of data going to different companies.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is our second reporting tool, and unlike the Firebase signals above it is tied to your account: it knows you by your Grabd user ID, so that what someone did on their first day and what they did a month later count as the same person. It is hosted in the United States. What it receives is deliberately small — a handful of events, with the detail carried as properties rather than as more events:

That the app was launched for the first time, and how onboarding ended — which step you stopped on or that you finished, how you signed in, which categories you picked, and whether you said you track bugs.
That a grab was saved — its category, which app or site it came from, and how it was saved (share sheet, in the app, from Explore). Our server sends this when the analysis step finishes.
That the upgrade screen was shown — which design it was, what opened it, and how it ended: bought, restored, or closed.
Once a day, a summary of the previous day — how many grabs you opened and from where (Home, search, reminders, a notification), which categories they were in, which actions you took on them (open the website, maps, call, trailer, and so on), and how many you marked done or shared. Counts only.
A profile with your plan (free or Pro), language, whether AI analysis and the Dev category are switched on, your onboarding answers, whether GitHub is connected, and how many grabs you have.

It never receives the content of a grab: no links, titles, notes, pictures, recordings, transcripts or search terms. Adapty forwards subscription events — trial started, renewed, cancelled, refunded — to the same Mixpanel profile, so we can see which release or screen led to a subscription. Mixpanel processes all of this for us as a data processor, under its own privacy policy, and none of it is sold, shared with data brokers, or used for advertising.

Advertising and tracking

Inside the app there are no ads and no tracking pixels. Nothing in your library is used to target advertising, to you or to anyone else, and we do not sell or share anything with data brokers.

Outside the app we do advertise Grabd, and we measure whether those ads work. Two things follow from that, and Apple counts both as tracking:

Attribution. Singular records which campaign or link produced your install.
Conversion. When a subscription starts, the app tells Meta, so the ad that led to it can be credited.

Both are described in full under "Third parties that see your content" above. What they see is an identifier for your installation, your device and app version, your network address, the purchase, and — only with your permission — Apple's advertising identifier.

Your permission comes first. iOS shows Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt, and until you allow it the advertising identifier is withheld: your device returns zeros in its place. Decline, and none of the three services can join what you do in Grabd to what you do in other companies' apps and websites. Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking changes the answer whenever you like.

Nothing in Grabd is gated on that answer. The app, your library and your subscription behave identically whether you allow it or refuse it.

How long we keep things

Grabs stay until you delete them or delete your account.
A note you published stays on the web until you stop sharing it, delete the note, clear your library, or delete your account. There is no expiry — it is up for as long as you leave it up.
The shared social-video cache is swept after 30 days.
Provider lookup caches hold a provider's answer about a film or a place — not about you — and expire on their own schedule.
Account records are removed when you delete your account.

Backups and logs can lag a deletion by a short period before they roll over.

Security

Everything moves over HTTPS/TLS. Firestore and Storage rules restrict users/{uid}/… to that user. A note you publish is the deliberate exception: its copy is written to shares/{uid}/{share-id}/, which the rules make readable by anyone who has the address and writable only by you. That is the point of the feature, and Sharing a note describes what lands there. Firebase App Check attests that requests come from a genuine copy of the app. Provider API keys live in Google Secret Manager and are never in the app binary. No system is perfect — if you think your account is compromised, email us and we will act on it.

Your choices and your rights

Turn off analysis. You › Analysis › “AI analysis for new grabs”. Grabs still save and sync; nothing goes to Gemini.

Stop sharing a note. Open the note and choose Stop sharing. The published copy is deleted and the link stops working for everyone, straight away. Anything already downloaded from the page while it was up cannot be recalled.

Delete your grabs. You › Data & Privacy › Reset / Delete All. This clears your library — grabs, pictures, recordings, and any notes you had published — and keeps your account.

Delete your account. You › Account › Delete Account. This removes your account and everything filed under it: your profile, your grabs, their media, and every note you had published. It cannot be undone.

Disconnect GitHub. You › GitHub › Disconnect GitHub, and remove the app's installation from your GitHub settings.

Depending on where you live you may also have the right to access a copy of your data, correct it, restrict or object to how we use it, take it elsewhere, or withdraw consent. Email support@goingmerry.xyz and we will handle it. We may need to confirm you are the account holder first.

Our legal bases, for readers in the EEA and UK: performing our contract with you (running the app and storing your grabs), your consent (sending grabs for AI analysis, and a nearby reminder, which iOS asks you about), and our legitimate interest in keeping the service working and secure and in understanding how it is used.

Children

Grabd is for people aged 13 and over — 16 and over in the EEA. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will say so in the app or by email before it takes effect, and the date at the top will move.

Contact

Going Merry — support@goingmerry.xyz