Narrative Arc
Last updated: April 2026
Narrative Arc holds your life stories. Voice recordings of memories, the people you love, the moments that made you. That is the most personal content a person can create, and the privacy posture reflects that. The app runs on your device. Your stories never leave your phone or Mac unless you explicitly choose to share or export them.
Nothing is collected, transmitted, or stored on a server by default. Narrative Arc has no cloud requirement for any core feature. We do not collect analytics on your stories, your voice, your photos, your relationships, or your timeline. We do not run third-party analytics, advertising SDKs, crash-reporting services, or telemetry of any kind.
Speech recognition is on-device only, using Apple's Speech framework. We enforce requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true at the code level. If on-device recognition is unavailable for your locale, recording surfaces a clear error rather than silently falling back to a cloud service. Your audio recordings are stored privately on your device. They never leave your machine.
All story text, attached photos, and tagged-people data live in a private SQLite database in the app's sandboxed storage on your device. Photos you attach to stories are imported as resized copies into Narrative Arc's private storage. Your originals in your photo library are never moved or modified.
If a future version of Narrative Arc offers an encrypted backup option, it will be opt-in, never on by default. The default behavior is and will remain local-only.
When you export a memoir as a PDF, a video, or a web reader, you choose what gets shared. The output file goes wherever you direct it. Narrative Arc does not retain or transmit copies of your exports. Future cloud-published web readers will be opt-in per memoir, with explicit access controls.
If you grant Contacts access to import a person, the imported fields (name, email, phone, birthday, profile photo) are stored locally on your device alongside the rest of your Narrative Arc data. We do not retain or transmit your contact list. Microphone, Speech Recognition, Camera, and Photo Library permissions are requested only when needed for a feature you initiate, and you can revoke them in system Settings at any time.
If a future version of Narrative Arc supports family collaboration, contributors will join a specific memoir project by invitation only. Their contributions live in the project they're invited to and nowhere else. Cross-family linking, public sharing, or social-network-style discovery are not goals of this product.
Narrative Arc does not integrate with any third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking platform. The only third parties involved are Apple's first-party frameworks (Speech, Vision, PhotoKit, Contacts) for the on-device features described above.
Narrative Arc is designed for adults documenting their life stories. We do not knowingly collect data from children, and the product is not directed at children under 13.
If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted here with a revised "Last updated" date. Privacy-relevant changes will also be surfaced in the app.
Questions about this policy can be sent through the Contact page.