What Moonlight knows about you

Who this covers

This policy applies to the Moonlight iPhone app, published by Darryl Fong. It is written in plain language on purpose; if something here is unclear, ask and it will be fixed rather than explained.

What is stored, and where

Your words, books, reading progress, review schedule, streak and settings are written to the app's own storage on your iPhone. Nothing is uploaded. Nothing is backed up to a service run by Moonlight, because no such service exists.

If you have iCloud Backup switched on, iOS may include the app's data in your device backup, the same as any other app. That backup is between you and Apple.

There is no sign-in, no profile, no email address, no advertising identifier, and no usage tracking. Moonlight contains no third-party SDKs — no analytics, no crash reporting, no ad network.

Permissions, and what each one does

Microphone

Captures the word you say, so it can be looked up. Audio is not recorded to a file and not kept after the word is recognised.

Speech

Turns that audio into text using Apple's Speech framework. Moonlight asks for on-device recognition, so in normal use nothing leaves your iPhone. If on-device recognition is unavailable — an unsupported language or device — iOS may process the audio on Apple's servers instead, under Apple's privacy policy. Moonlight never sees or stores that audio either way.

Camera

Reads words off a page. Text recognition runs on the device. The image is not saved and not sent anywhere.

Photos

Same, for a picture you have already taken. Moonlight reads the one image you pick and nothing else in your library.

Notifications

Review reminders, scheduled locally by your iPhone. No push server is involved.

Each permission is requested only when you first use the feature that needs it, and declining one leaves everything else working.

When Moonlight uses the network

Definitions, review and capture all work with no connection at all. There are exactly two things that reach the internet, and both happen only because you asked for them:

• Looking up a book. When you search for a title to add to your library, the words you typed are sent to Open Library, and to Google Books if Open Library has no match, to get back a cover, author and page count. Only the search text is sent — no identifier, and nothing about you or your words.
• Fetching a book cover image from Open Library, once you have chosen the book.

Those services will see the request the way any website sees a visit, including your IP address. Their own policies apply: Internet Archive / Open Library and Google. Moonlight sends them nothing else, ever.

Looking up a word with Apple's built-in dictionaries hands the word to iOS, which resolves it from dictionaries already downloaded to your device. It does not go to Moonlight.

Getting your data out, and deleting it

Profile → Export writes your whole word bank to a CSV file and hands it to the iOS share sheet. Where it goes from there is entirely your choice; Moonlight does not send it anywhere on its own.

To delete everything, delete the app. All of it lives inside the app's own storage, so removing the app removes it. There is no account to close, and nothing of yours is held anywhere for us to delete on request.

Children

Moonlight collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. It is not directed at children under 13, but it holds nothing that would identify a user if one used it.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of Moonlight adds anything that changes what is described here — optional sync, for instance — this page will be updated before that version ships, and the change will be called out in the app. The effective date at the top always reflects the current version.

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