Cardetta Privacy Policy

1. Who this policy is for

This policy covers the Cardetta iPhone app. Our website is covered separately by the Mirentha privacy policy.

Cardetta is published by Mirentha Ltd (“Mirentha”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in England and Wales (company number 17207914), registered office 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ. For anything in this policy, contact privacy@mirentha.com.

2. What Cardetta collects

Nothing. Cardetta does not ask you to create an account, does not ask for your name, email address or phone number, and contains no analytics, attribution, advertising or crash-reporting SDK of any kind. No data reaches us from the app, so we process no personal data in connection with your use of it.

Your study material is often the most revealing thing on a phone — what you are learning, what you keep forgetting, how well you are doing. None of it is ours to look at, and the app is built so that it could not be.

3. What the app stores, and where

Everything is held in the app's own private storage on your iPhone, and the parts that sync (section 4) are mirrored in your private iCloud database:

Decks and cards. Names, the front and back of every card as you wrote or imported them, including formatting and cloze deletions; for a card you imported, the original text and tags it arrived with, and which note in the Anki deck it came from, so a later import can find it again; whether a card is suspended; when each deck and card was made; and each deck's icon and settings: its exam date and when you set it, desired retention and daily new-card allowance.

Images and audio. Stored as ordinary files in the app's own container rather than in the database, under names the app generates. Audio you record for a card is written straight there, and an SVG picture also gets a PNG copy, because iOS can't show SVG. Because they are files rather than records, they are not part of sync; only a note that a card has a picture or clip syncs with the card, which is how another iPhone knows to say it isn't there. Deleting a card or deck on this iPhone deletes its files. When a card is deleted on another iPhone instead, its files here are no longer used; in case the card comes back, Cardetta moves them to a holding folder inside the app and deletes them for good after 60 days.

Your review history. Every grade you have given and when, whether an exam date brought the card forward, and the scheduling state the FSRS algorithm derives from it: stability, difficulty, the interval and the next due date. This is what the app shows you on the Why this card, today sheet.

Exports. When you export a deck, the file is built in a temporary folder so the share sheet can hand it on. Finished exports are deleted every time the app launches. If the app is closed in the middle of an export, the half-built copy can be left in that folder.

Imports. The copy of a file that iOS hands over from Mail, Messages or AirDrop is deleted once it has been read, and anything unpacked from an Anki package is cleared when the import ends, or at the next launch.

Two preferences. Whether you have seen the introduction, and whether card audio plays by itself. They are kept on this iPhone and are not synced.

A count for the rating prompt. From version 1.1, how many study sessions you have finished with at least one card answered, and the version of the app that last asked Apple to show its rating prompt, so that Cardetta asks no more than once a version and never before your third session. It is a number and a version number with nothing about your cards in it, and like the preferences it is kept on this iPhone and is not synced.

Widgets. So that Cardetta’s Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets can show today’s numbers, the app writes a small summary to a folder it shares only with its own widgets on the same iPhone: the dates of today and the next two study days and, for each deck, an identifier, its name and icon, how many cards it holds, how many are due on each of those days, its exam date, and how many cards are not yet seen. It holds no card content, and it is not synced.

If you back up your iPhone, to iCloud or to a computer, the backup includes what Cardetta keeps here, apart from the temporary files. Deleting the app removes all of it from that device. What has already synced stays in your iCloud database until you delete it from another device or remove Cardetta's data in iCloud settings.

4. iCloud sync

Settings tells you the truth about this, and it is the answer that counts. Open Cardetta, go to Settings, and look at the iCloud row: it says whether this copy is syncing, not signed in, restricted, out of iCloud space, unable to reach iCloud, or storing decks on this iPhone only. There is no switch to throw inside Cardetta; sync depends on the Apple Account signed in on your device.

When it is syncing, your decks, cards, deck settings and review history are mirrored through the private database of your own iCloud account, which is what lets them appear on another iPhone signed in to the same Apple Account. Sync is between you and Apple; we are not in it. That data is held by Apple under Apple's privacy policy and Apple's iCloud terms. Mirentha has no access to it, cannot read it, and cannot recover it for you. Nothing is ever written to a public or shared database.

When it is not syncing, because you are signed out of iCloud, iCloud is restricted on the device, or Cardetta's iCloud store could not be opened, Cardetta works exactly as it does otherwise, on this iPhone alone, and opens no connection of its own beyond the App Store check described below. When iCloud is full, nothing goes up from this iPhone until there is space, but changes made on your other iPhone still come down; and when iCloud can't be reached for a while, Cardetta keeps working and syncs when it can.

To hear about changes made on your other device, iCloud sends Cardetta a silent push. That is a wake-up from Apple, not a notification: nothing is shown to you, no notification permission is requested, and no token of yours is held anywhere but Apple.

Beyond iCloud, the only other connection Cardetta opens is to the App Store, to sell Cardetta Unlimited and to check or restore your subscription; that exchange carries nothing about your decks. The links in Settings and on the subscription screen open mirentha.com in Safari. There is no Mirentha server anywhere in the app: importing, studying, editing and exporting all work in aeroplane mode, and syncing simply resumes when a connection returns. If you want a portable copy that does not depend on iCloud, export the deck — see section 6.

5. Importing decks

Anki packages, CSV, TSV and pasted text are all parsed on your device, by our own code working through the operating system's own file and database libraries. Nothing is sent anywhere to be parsed, no lookup service is consulted, and no media referenced by a deck is fetched from anywhere. Cardetta shows you the first rows it parsed and the total before anything goes into your decks, and nothing does until you tap Import.

If a deck you import contains someone else's material, that material's own terms and any copyright in it are your responsibility, not ours — see the licence terms.

6. Exporting, and the share sheet

Exporting produces an .apkg or .csv file and hands it to the iOS share sheet. Nothing is sent until you choose a destination, and where it goes from there is governed by whichever app or service you pick, under that party's own privacy policy. Cardetta sees nothing of what happens next. An export contains your cards and, in the case of .apkg, the pictures and recordings on this iPhone, the cards' review history and scheduling, whether each is suspended, when each was made and which Anki note it came from, the deck's icon, exam date and settings, and the app's version and the time of the export. Pictures go out as they are kept on the card (a photo you added in a format such as HEIC is kept as a JPEG, with the same details), so a photo can carry details saved in the file, such as when and where it was taken. Treat the file as you would any document with your study data in it.

7. Permissions the app asks for

Microphone. Requested the first time you tap Record in the card editor, and used only to record audio for a card. Recordings are written into the app's own storage on your device. They don't sync, but they go into any .apkg export you make (section 6) and into your iPhone's own backup, if you make one. You can decline and use Cardetta fully without ever recording anything, and you can change your mind in Settings › Apps › Cardetta.

Images. Cardetta uses the system photo picker, which runs outside the app. The app is handed only the specific pictures you choose and never gets access to your photo library, which is why iOS does not ask you for permission.

Cardetta asks for nothing else. It does not request your camera, location, contacts, calendars, health data, speech recognition or notifications (the silent iCloud wake-ups in section 4 need none), and it contains no tracking permission request because it does not track.

8. Subscribing

Cardetta is free to download. If you subscribe to Cardetta Unlimited, Apple sells the subscription, takes the payment for it and for each renewal, and records it against your Apple Account rather than against your phone. The app asks Apple, on your iPhone, only about your Cardetta Unlimited subscription: whether it is active, which plan it is, whether it is in its free week, when it renews or ends and whether it will renew, whether a payment needs attention, and whether a free week is still open to you. It uses the answers to unlock the app and to describe your subscription in Settings and on the subscription screen, and sends none of them to us. We never see your payment details, your billing address or your Apple Account.

Apple also processes your download as the operator of the App Store, and, if you have opted in to sharing analytics with developers, may give us aggregated statistics such as crash counts and device types. That data comes from Apple, which states that the analytics it collects don't identify you personally, and is governed by Apple's privacy policy.

9. Children

Cardetta is a study tool and may well be used by school-age students. It collects no data from anyone, including children: there is no account to create, nothing reaches us, and there is no messaging, no social feature, no user-generated content from other people and no advertising anywhere in it.

10. Your rights

UK GDPR gives you rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection over personal data held about you. Because Cardetta sends us no personal data, we hold none in connection with the app, and there is nothing for you to access or erase with us. Portability is served by the app itself: export any deck as .apkg or .csv, one tap, no account. Deleting the app removes everything it held on that device; what is in your iCloud database is yours to manage in iCloud settings, as with any app's iCloud data.

If you write to us about Cardetta, with the support form or by email, we hold your message and contact details in order to reply, on the basis of our legitimate interest in answering support enquiries; that is covered by the Mirentha privacy policy. You can ask us to delete the correspondence at any time at privacy@mirentha.com, and you have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office: ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

11. Changes to this policy

If a future version of Cardetta ever collects anything, or changes what syncs, this policy will be updated before that version ships and the change will be described here rather than buried in a version number. The date at the top always reflects the current text.

12. Contact

Mirentha Ltd, 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, WC2H 9JQ, United Kingdom. Privacy questions: privacy@mirentha.com. For help using the app, write to us with the form on the Cardetta support page.