Privacy
Privacy Policy
The short version
- Your documents stay on your iPhone. We never receive them.
- The voices run on your iPhone. Nothing you listen to is uploaded.
- No account, no analytics, no advertising, no tracking.
- Apple handles purchases. We never see your payment details.
Tellbird is an iPhone app made by Lifehack Media ("we", "us"). This policy explains what happens to your information when you use Tellbird. We wrote it to match what the app actually does.
What we collect
Nothing. Tellbird has no account and no sign-in, and it contains no analytics, advertising or tracking code. The app does not send us your documents, what you listen to, how you use the app, or any identifier for you or your device.
Your documents
PDFs, text files, scans, photos of pages, pasted text and web articles you add are stored in Tellbird's private storage on your iPhone. The audio Tellbird makes from them is cached on your iPhone too. None of it is uploaded to us or anyone else. Deleting the app removes everything Tellbird stored.
When you send something to Tellbird with the Share button, the Share extension hands it to the app through storage on your iPhone that only Tellbird can read.
Voices
Tellbird's voices, Ava and the Pro voices, are a speech model that comes inside the app when you install it from the App Store. Speech is generated on your iPhone. Tellbird does not download voices from any server, and no text is sent anywhere to be turned into speech. That is why reading works offline.
Scans and photos
Tellbird uses the camera only when you choose to scan pages. Text in scans and photos is recognised on your iPhone with Apple's on-device text recognition. When you add a photo, Tellbird uses Apple's photo picker, so it only gets the photos you pick, not your library.
Web articles
When you add a web link, Tellbird loads that page directly from the website, the same way a browser would, and keeps the article's text on your iPhone. It loads the page in a private session that does not keep cookies afterwards. We are not in the middle: the request goes from your iPhone to that website.
As with any visit in a browser, the website, and any services the page itself loads, can see your IP address and the page requested. Their own privacy policies apply. Links to lifehack.org articles are loaded from lifehack.org, which Lifehack Media runs; its website privacy policy covers that visit.
Purchases
Tellbird Pro subscriptions are sold and processed by Apple through the App Store. Apple handles payment, billing, renewals and refunds. Tellbird asks Apple on your iPhone whether you have an active subscription; we never receive your name, Apple ID, email address or payment details. Apple gives developers sales and subscription reports, which do not identify you to us.
Diagnostics
Tellbird keeps a small diagnostic log on your iPhone to help with playback problems. It is never sent anywhere. If you turn on "Share with App Developers" in your iPhone's Analytics settings, Apple may share crash reports with us. That is Apple's setting and is covered by Apple's privacy policy; you can turn it off at any time.
Children
Tellbird collects no personal information from anyone, including children.
Changes
If Tellbird ever starts handling data differently, we will update this page and its effective date before the change ships.