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Sown Echoes — Privacy Policy

Last Updated: 2026-05-07

1. Overview
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Sown Echoes, developed by ChengChe Lee, is an app that lets you actively capture your thoughts, values, and life experiences, building a digital legacy through a BIP-39 cryptographic identity.

In short: We do NOT collect personal data and we do NOT send any of your content to ChengChe Lee-operated servers. By default your records only flow between your own device and your own iCloud account; content leaves that boundary only when you actively choose to publish an open contribution, in which case it is de-identified and published under a pseudonym in the Human Wisdom Library under CC-BY-SA 4.0.

2. Data We Do NOT Collect
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This app does not collect:

  • Personally Identifiable Information (name, email, phone number)
  • Location data
  • Device identifiers
  • Usage analytics or tracking data

3. Where Your Data Lives
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On your device (the source of truth for everything):

  • BIP-39 Mnemonic: your Meme ID identity key
  • Voice and text records: all thoughts, values, and stories captured through entries and questionnaires
  • Speech-to-text results: Whisper or on-device Apple speech recognition output
  • Vector index: on-device cache used for digital-twin semantic retrieval
  • User settings: preference values

In your own iCloud account (end-to-end encrypted; neither ChengChe Lee nor any third party can access):

  • iCloud Keychain: your BIP-39 mnemonic syncs across Apple devices signed in to the same Apple ID, so you can recover your identity when migrating devices
  • CloudKit Private Database (via SwiftData): all records and questionnaire responses are automatically backed up to your private iCloud database

You can disable either of these at any time in iOS Settings → Apple ID → iCloud.

4. On-Device AI Features
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All AI inference runs on-device; content is never transmitted to any AI server:

  • Speech-to-text: choose between a local Whisper model or Apple’s built-in speech recognition (forced to requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true, i.e. on-device)
  • AI analysis, persona summaries, and digital-twin conversation: a three-tier fallback — Apple Foundation Models (iOS 26+, OS-built-in) when available; otherwise a local MLX language model (one-time download of Qwen3 / Gemma-3 / SmolLM3 etc., ~0.4–3 GB, user-initiated); otherwise a basic stub mode
  • BIP-39 identity generation: mnemonic generated locally on device, no external service

Model files are fetched from huggingface.co only when you explicitly choose to download. After the download all AI features work offline.

5. Data Export and Open Contributions
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The app provides two user-initiated ways to share your content:

  • Personal export (files on your device): under “Data Management” you can export personal backup (JSON), digital-twin data (JSON), and SFT/KTO training data (JSONL). Exports land as files on your device — you decide whether to share them.
  • Open contribution (CC-BY-SA 4.0): when you mark an entry as “Open” and confirm it under “My Contributions”, the content is de-identified (PII stripped), uploaded to Apple CloudKit Public Database, and subsequently mirrored by ChengChe Lee to the public Hugging Face dataset qqder/memelives-open-contributions under CC-BY-SA 4.0 for research and AI training. You can withdraw an entry from within the app at any time (already-published snapshots remain under their CC-BY-SA license).

6. Third-Party Services
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This app does NOT use any third-party analytics or advertising frameworks (no Google Analytics, no Facebook SDK, no ads). The app’s only outbound dependencies are huggingface.co (for model downloads) and Apple iCloud (for the user’s own backup) — both connect only when you trigger them or when iCloud is enabled in iOS.

7. Network Access
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The app initiates network connections in the following situations:

  • iCloud automatic sync (background, controlled by your iOS settings): syncs your mnemonic via iCloud Keychain and your records via CloudKit Private Database to your own iCloud account. Data is end-to-end encrypted and flows only between your Apple devices and your iCloud. You can disable this in iOS Settings.
  • Downloading AI models (user-initiated): when you choose to download Whisper or MLX language models, the app fetches the files from huggingface.co.
  • Open contribution upload (user-initiated): when you confirm an open contribution, the de-identified content is uploaded to Apple CloudKit Public Database (and subsequently mirrored offline by us to Hugging Face). See section 5.
  • External links: tapping links inside the app opens the system browser.

Outside of the cases above, the app does not initiate network connections.

8. Contact Us
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📧 qqder339@gmail.com
Subject: Sown Echoes Privacy Policy Inquiry