The fine print. Privacy
Last updated October 6, 2026
This Chapter is a private camera for one event. The whole product only works if the photos stay yours, so this page is written to be read rather than to protect us.
The short version
Nothing automated ever looks at your photos. No system of ours inspects them, and they are never sent to another company to be scanned, rated, or trained on.
Your photos are encrypted before they are stored, and they stay sealed until the reveal time the host chose.
There are no advertising trackers, no analytics scripts, and no cookies on this site. We do not sell or share your information with anyone for their own purposes.
Guests do not need an account. A guest gives a first name and nothing else: no email address, no phone number.
What we hold about a host
Your email address, so we can sign you in and write to you about your chapters. It is stored encrypted; what we keep alongside it, to find your account when you sign in, is a one-way hash rather than the address itself.
Your chapters: their titles, dates, times, look, and settings.
Sign-in records. When you ask for a sign-in link, and while you stay signed in, we keep a record so we can spot somebody attacking the account. Your network address and your device are recorded only as one-way hashes; we cannot read either back out.
What we hold about a guest
The name you type when you join, so the host can tell whose photos are whose, and the time each photo was taken. Nothing else about you is asked for. If you allow notifications in the iPhone app, we also keep a notification token so we can send them. Joining a chapter creates no account and needs no email address.
The photos you take in that chapter, encrypted, in that chapter only.
If you join in a web browser, the page keeps your name, your place in the chapter, and any photos that have not finished sending, in that browser on your phone and nowhere else. It uses no cookies. Clearing the browser’s website data removes them.
The photos themselves
Every photo a guest takes is encrypted with AES-256-GCM under a key belonging to that one chapter, before it is written to storage. A photo from your chapter cannot be read with a key from anybody else’s. The exception is the cover photo and the invitation card a host chooses: they appear on the invitation link, so they are stored as they are and shown to anyone who holds that link.
Until the reveal moment, nothing serves the photo back at all: not to guests, and not to us in the ordinary course of running the service.
How long we keep it
Photos are kept for 365 days after the chapter’s final reveal, in a free chapter and a paid one alike.
Sign-in links expire within minutes of being sent and can only be used once. Records of sessions and of security events are kept while they are useful for protecting accounts, and then removed.
If you delete your account, we delete your chapters and their photos.
Who else is involved
Cloudflare stores the service and its data, and sends the sign-in emails. Data is held in Cloudflare’s network.
Apple, because the iPhone app and its guest camera are delivered through the App Store. Apple does not receive your photos from us.
Apple or Google, only if a host chooses to sign in with one of them in the iPhone app. That company confirms who you are to us. We do not send it your photos.
That is the entire list. Nobody receives your photos. There is no advertising network, no analytics provider, and no data broker in it.
Your rights over your own data
You can delete your account yourself, any time, from You > Account details > Delete account in the iPhone app. If you do not use the app, write to us from the address you signed in with and we will delete it.
To get a copy of everything we hold about you, or to have it corrected, write to hello@thischapter.app from the address you signed in with. We will do it within 30 days.
If you are in the UK or the European Union, those are your rights under the GDPR, and you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority. If you are in California, you have the equivalent rights under the CCPA. We do not sell personal information under any definition of the phrase.
Children
This Chapter is not for under-13s. You confirm your age when you join a chapter, and we do not knowingly keep information about anyone younger. If you believe a child’s information is here, write to us and we will remove it.
When this page changes
If we change anything that matters, we will change the date at the top and email hosts before the change takes effect. Adding anything that inspects a photo, or any advertising or analytics tracker, would be exactly such a change, and we do not intend to make it.
Questions about any of this: hello@thischapter.app.