Privacy policy

This policy says what Caute (“we”, “us”), made by Axionary Labs, does with information about you and with what you save in it. What you save is encrypted at rest, but Caute’s servers can read it, because finding things for you means reading them. This policy says exactly what that involves.

What you give us

• Your account: your email address. You sign in with an emailed link or a passkey; we keep a passkey’s public key, never a password. If your team signs you in through its own Google Workspace or Microsoft Entra, that company tells us your address when you sign in, and we keep the client secret your team gave us, encrypted, until they remove it.
• What you save: web pages, files, photos, recordings, emails you forward, notes you write, chats you import, and the tags, highlights and links you add.
• Payments: handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card number; Stripe tells us your plan and whether it is paid.

What we record as you use it

• Sign-ins: for each signed-in browser or device, when it signed in, its IP address and browser name, for security.
• Usage: counts of what you use against your plan, such as storage, minutes transcribed and questions asked.
• Access by apps: when a connected app, an AI assistant or a token you made reads or writes your library, we log what it did, so you can see it in Settings.
• Search history: when you open a search result, which search it was and where the result ranked, so search can learn what you find useful. Only you can see it, it is kept for 180 days, and Settings lets you delete it at any time.
• Questions you ask: each question you ask Caute, with its answer and the results it cited, so you can open it again on any of your devices. Only you can see them, Caute keeps your newest 200, and you can remove one or all of them at any time. An answer is never shown from a card you can no longer open.
• Server logs: requests and errors, without what you saved in them, kept only briefly by our hosting provider.

The app uses one cookie, to keep you signed in, set only on app.getcaute.com. This website and the app run no analytics or advertising scripts and load nothing from third parties.

What Caute does with what you save

To make things findable, Caute reads them: it extracts their text, reads scanned pages and pictures (OCR), transcribes recordings, and turns passages into numbers that represent their meaning (embeddings). Searching, ranking results, reading text in images and transcription all run on our own servers.

Some features use a language model provided by Google (Gemini): short summaries and titles, descriptions of pictures, reading the words on a scanned page or photo that our own text reader couldn’t read well, answers in Ask, briefs, and names for the tags Caute proposes. For those, the relevant text or picture is sent to Google to produce the result. Google processes it on our behalf under terms that don’t allow it to train its models on your content. We never use what you save to train AI models, ours or anyone’s.

Axionary also runs processors you may connect, on Pro+ and Team: the DOI finder, the receipt reader and the deadline finder. Each is a connected app that reads new cards in the spaces you choose and suggests details for them, which change nothing until you keep them. The receipt reader and the deadline finder send the first part of a card’s text to Gemini, under the same terms, but only when a quick check on our own servers finds it looks like a receipt or names a deadline; the DOI finder sends only the DOI, to doi.org. They keep no text from your cards, and disconnecting one in Settings stops it at once.

On Pro+ and Team you can choose to add your own key for Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT models, and Ask and briefs then use it instead of ours. This is your choice and at your own risk. What they send, your question and the passages from your cards that answer it, goes to that company under your key and your own agreement with them, not ours, so the commitments above about our AI provider don’t cover it: on Google’s free tier, for example, Google may use it to improve its products. Summaries, titles, picture descriptions and proposed tag names still use our provider, and nothing in a space kept away from AI is sent with your key either. We keep your key encrypted, use it only for your workspace’s answers, never show it again after you add it, and delete it when you remove it.

You can keep any space away from AI. Nothing in it is then sent to a language model, and no connected app, agent or personal token can see it or save into it. It is still searchable, and its pictures and recordings are still read, on our own servers. On your iPhone, you can choose to have a question answered by the model built into the phone, from the cards and notes kept on it: nothing leaves the phone, a space kept away from AI can be included, and those answers are never sent to your account.

When you save a link, our servers fetch that page, so the site sees a request from Caute rather than from you. A YouTube video’s captions are fetched the same way, and so are the pictures in an email you save, once, when it is saved, so its sender never learns when or where you read it.

A saved YouTube video plays in its card, from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player. Nothing is loaded from YouTube until you press play. Then your browser or the app talks to YouTube directly, as it would on YouTube’s own site, and YouTube learns that you watched it under its own privacy policy. It is told that the request came from Caute, not which card.

How it is protected

• Everything you save is private to you unless you put it in a shared space.
• Files are encrypted at rest with a separate key for each space; those keys are protected by a key management service (AWS KMS).
• The text, indexes and embeddings Caute searches live in our database, which is encrypted on disk and protected by access controls that keep each person’s data separate. They are readable by the database itself, because search needs them.
• Nobody at Caute looks at your library in the ordinary course of running it. Access for an investigation you ask for, or one the law requires, is limited, approved and logged.
• All connections use TLS.

Who else is involved

We use these providers to run Caute. Each processes data only to provide its service to us. The full list, with what each handles, is on our subprocessors page.

• Fly.io runs our servers (United States).
• Crunchy Data hosts our database, on AWS (United States).
• Cloudflare stores encrypted files (R2), runs our domain names, and receives email sent to your Caute address.
• Amazon Web Services holds our encryption keys (KMS).
• Google provides the language model for summaries, titles, picture descriptions, Ask, briefs, proposed tag names, and the receipt reader and deadline finder if you connect them (Gemini).
• Resend sends our emails, such as sign-in links. If you turn on the weekly digest, it also carries the digest: the titles of things you saved and the words you highlighted, never their text.
• Stripe processes payments.
• Sentry receives reports when something in Caute breaks: where in our code it happened, never what you saved.

We don’t sell your information, share it for advertising, or use it to profile you.

Apps and assistants you connect

If you connect an app or an AI assistant to Caute, it can reach only the spaces and actions you approve on the consent screen. What it does with what it reads is governed by its own privacy policy. You can see what each one has done, and disconnect it, in Settings.

The browser extension

The extension sends something to Caute only when you use it: the page you catch, as your browser shows it, with its address, title and any selected text; a link or image you save; or what you search for. It doesn’t read or record the pages you visit otherwise. It keeps your sign-in on your device and sends it only to Caute.

Keeping and deleting

• What you save is kept until you delete it, or delete your account. If a paid plan ends, nothing is deleted.
• Deleting something removes it and everything derived from it at once.
• Deleting your account removes your personal library, your account and every way into it. What you saved into a team’s shared spaces stays with that team.
• Database backups are kept for 10 days, so deleted data is gone from them within 10 days.
• An export you make is kept for 7 days, then deleted.

Your choices and rights

• Get a copy: Settings → Export or delete → Export everything gives you a zip of everything you’ve saved, with your notes as Markdown.
• Delete: Settings → Export or delete → Delete my account.
• Correct: edit titles, notes and your details in the app.
• Limit: delete your search history or your questions, disconnect apps, or ask us to stop a kind of processing.

Depending on where you live, you may have further rights, such as to object to processing or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to us to use any of them.

Where data is kept

Our servers and database are in the United States, and stored files are held by Cloudflare. If you use Caute from elsewhere, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States.

Children

Caute is not for children under 13. If you think a child has given us information, tell us and we’ll delete it.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll email you and say so in the app before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions or requests: privacy@axionarylabs.com.