Privacy Policy

1. Overview & who we are

CogniPage is a privacy-first, offline-first desktop application that helps you remember what you read. This policy explains what data we handle, why, and the choices you have. We designed CogniPage so that your reading stays on your device by default, and only the minimum needed for cloud features ever leaves it.

CogniPage is a trade name of Kenaff Limited, registered in Scotland. Kenaff Limited is the data controller for the personal data described here. Registered details and contact routes are on our Company page.

2. How CogniPage sees what you read

CogniPage reads along with you, which means it needs access to what is on your screen. Because that is a significant thing to ask for, we set out precisely what it involves. A fuller technical account is in How capture works.

The permissions we request

• Accessibility (macOS) / UI Automation (Windows). The primary mechanism. Your operating system exposes a structured tree of the text an application is displaying — the same interface screen readers use — and CogniPage reads paragraphs from it.
• Screen Recording (macOS) / screen capture (Windows). Used to recognise text in windows that expose no readable text at all, such as image-only PDFs, and to capture the audio a specific application is playing during a watch-along. Images are processed in memory and discarded; no screenshot is ever saved or transmitted.
• Automation / Apple Events (macOS). Identifies which application and document is in front, so a captured paragraph is filed against the right material.
• Camera (optional). Used only if you choose to track a printed book. Frames are recognised on your device, the text is kept, and the image is discarded — no photograph of any page is stored or transmitted.

Each of these is granted by you, through your operating system, and can be withdrawn there at any time without uninstalling CogniPage.

You approve each source separately

Operating-system permission only makes capture possible; it does not start it. CogniPage then asks you about each thing it might read, and by default captures nothing until you answer:

• Per website or document — approval covers one origin or one file, not your whole browser and not other tabs.
• Per video — a watch-along is approved one piece of media at a time.
• Per application, only for apps that expose no identifiable document. Browsers never fall back to this.

You can review and revoke every approval from Settings in the app, or switch capture off entirely.

Watch-along audio

Where learning is spoken rather than written, CogniPage captures what is said by tapping the audio that one application you approved is already playing. Your microphone is never opened — CogniPage requests no microphone permission. Speech is transcribed entirely on your device, no audio is transmitted, and no audio file is written to disk. Only the resulting text is kept.

Detecting that you are reading

To tell reading from an idle screen, CogniPage asks your operating system how many seconds have passed since the last input of any kind. It never asks which key was pressed or where the pointer moved, and it does not record either.

3. What CogniPage never does

• Never records keystrokes.
• Never opens your microphone.
• Never stores screenshots or photographs of pages.
• Never captures passwords, credentials, or payment fields.
• Never bundles or installs other software, toolbars, browser extensions, or advertising.
• Never modifies your browser settings, search engine, home page, proxy configuration, certificates, or hosts file.
• Never adds itself to your login items or startup programs.
• Never sells your personal data, and never uses your content to train AI models.

4. What we collect

• Account data. Your name, email address, and a securely hashed password when you create an account.
• Subscription & billing data. Your plan, subscription status, and credit balance. Card details are handled entirely by our payment processor — we never see or store your full card number.
• Learning data. Flashcards, assessments, recall history, and analytics derived from your study activity, used to schedule reviews and assessments, detect where understanding slipped, recommend improvement, and show your progress.
• Reading content you choose to process. See the section below.
• Technical data. When you use a cloud feature, our servers record the request, the time, your account, and the outcome, so we can keep the service secure and diagnose faults. The desktop app also writes diagnostic logs to a folder on your own machine; these stay on your device — they are not transmitted to us, and your reading text is never written into them. If you contact support we may ask you to send one, which is entirely your choice.

5. Your reading content

Capture happens locally on your device. The paragraphs you read are stored in a database on that machine and are not uploaded as a matter of course.

Your reading text leaves your device in exactly two situations, both of which require an account and both of which you control:

• When you use an AI feature — generating flashcards, building an assessment, grading answers, or producing analytics such as your Mind Map, KWL chart, Forgetting Curve, or Retention Heatmap. The relevant text chunk is sent to our backend and to our AI provider solely to produce that result.
• When you enable sync — your materials and progress are synced so you can pick up on another device.

We do not use your reading content to train models, and we instruct our AI provider not to either. Raw reading text is never written to our analytics or logging systems.

6. How we use your data

• To provide core features: capture, AI flashcards and assessments, spaced recall, and analytics.
• To sync your materials and progress across your devices when you sign in.
• To manage your subscription, credits, and billing.
• To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, and fix problems.

7. Components downloaded after installation

The installer installs CogniPage and nothing else. Two components are fetched later, and only when the relevant feature is first used:

• An on-device speech-recognition model (roughly 180 MB), fetched the first time you switch on a watch-along, from the public Hugging Face repository for whisper.cpp. It is what allows transcription to happen on your machine rather than on a server. If you never use a watch-along it is never downloaded, and you can delete it from Settings.
• Microsoft Edge WebView2 on Windows, if your machine does not already have it — a Microsoft system component CogniPage uses to draw its own interface.

No third-party application is ever bundled with or installed alongside CogniPage.

8. Updates

CogniPage checks for a new version when it starts and shows you a banner if one is available. It does not install anything on its own — an update is downloaded and applied only after you choose to install it. An update check fetches a small version manifest from our servers and compares it locally; it sends nothing about you, your account, or your reading. Every update is cryptographically signed by us and verified before it is applied.

9. Cookies & consent

On our website we use cookies and similar local storage. We group them into three categories:

• Strictly necessary. Required for the site to function — for example keeping you signed in, protecting forms, and remembering your cookie choice. These are always active and don't track you, so they don't need consent.
• Analytics (optional). Help us understand anonymised usage so we can improve CogniPage. These are set only after you opt in.
• Marketing (optional). Used to measure our campaigns and show more relevant messaging. These are set only after you opt in.

When you first visit, a banner lets you accept all, reject all, or choose per category — with no non-essential cookies set until you consent. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time via the Cookie Settings link in the footer, and we re-ask for consent at least every six months.

The desktop application itself sets no cookies and contains no advertising or third-party tracking.

10. Sharing & processors

We do not sell your personal data. We share data only with service providers that help us run CogniPage, under contracts that limit their use of it:

• Payment processing for subscriptions and credit top-ups.
• AI processing to generate flashcards, assessments, grading, and analytics from the content you submit.
• Cloud hosting for the backend and synced data.

We may also disclose data where required by law.

11. Retention & deleting your data

We keep your account and learning data for as long as your account is active.

Cloud data. Email support@cognipage.io to have your account and all associated cloud data deleted.

Local data. Your captured reading lives in a database in CogniPage's application-data folder on your own machine. Uninstalling the application does not automatically remove that folder on every platform, so if you want every trace gone, delete it as well — the FAQ gives the exact location for macOS and Windows and step-by-step removal instructions.

12. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. To exercise any of these rights, email us at support@cognipage.io.

13. Security

Passwords are hashed, traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS, and access to production data is restricted. Data synced to your account is stored on our servers and is not end-to-end encrypted — we can technically access it in order to provide AI features, and we access it only to run and support the service. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your data with industry-standard safeguards and a local-first design that minimises what is exposed in the first place.

14. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Reach us any time at support@cognipage.io, or write to Kenaff Limited.