Privacy Policy

Effective October 13, 2026

Bramble turns conversations you choose into interactive stories you can play. That means handling some of the most personal data there is, so this policy explains exactly what we collect, what we do with it, who else touches it, and how to have it deleted.

Bramble is operated by Bramble World, Inc. (“Bramble”, “we”, “us”). This policy covers the Bramble app for Mac and the website at brambleworld.com. Questions go to great@brambleworld.com.

The short version

• Nothing leaves your Mac until you pick a conversation to send. Bramble reads your messages on your Mac only to show you your conversations and prepare the one you choose.
• A conversation you send is encrypted, kept for at most 30 minutes while a story is written from it, and then deleted. Your messages are never saved in our database.
• Phone numbers and email addresses in that conversation are replaced with random codes on your Mac before it is sent.
• We keep the story: the characters, events and relationships an AI model wrote from your conversation, and the choices you make while playing.
• We don’t sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
• Email us and we’ll delete your account and everything in it.

What we collect, and why

Your account

When you sign up we collect your email address and, if you use one, your password, or the details Apple shares when you use Sign in with Apple. Sign-in is run by our authentication provider, Clerk, which stores your password in hashed form; we never see it. We keep a copy of your email address with your account so we can recognise you and contact you about your account. Clerk also records sign-in activity, such as your device, browser and IP address, to keep your account secure.

Messages and contacts on your Mac

With the access you grant (Full Disk Access for Messages, and Contacts), Bramble reads your Messages history and contact names on your Mac to list your conversations and show who is in them. This stays on your Mac. Bramble also keeps a few things there for itself: a key used to create the random codes described below, and a list of which conversations you’ve imported.

Conversations you choose to send

When you choose a conversation, Bramble sends us, for that conversation only:

• the text of each message and when it was sent;
• whether you sent it; and
• the name each person has in your Contacts (or a placeholder such as “Person A” if they aren’t in your Contacts).

Before anything is sent, your Mac replaces phone numbers and email addresses with random codes, so these never reach us. Photos and other attachments are not sent.

What we receive is encrypted in transit and stored encrypted (AES-256) in temporary storage for at most 30 minutes. Only the process that writes your story can read it. It sends the conversation to our AI provider, OpenAI, to write the story, and the conversation is deleted when that’s done (or when the 30 minutes run out, whichever comes first). Your messages are never written to our database, and never to our logs.

Your stories

From each conversation, an AI model writes a story, and we keep that. It includes:

• characters based on the people in the conversation, with the names you have for them;
• descriptions of them and their relationships, written by the model;
• events, with the dates they happened, and recurring references;
• and as you play, the scenes the model writes, the choices you’re offered and the ones you make.

Because stories are written from real conversations, they can describe real people and real things that happened, including sensitive things if your conversation was about them. The model writes them in its own words; it is instructed never to quote your messages. We also keep a one-way scrambled form of each person’s random code, so the same person is recognised across your conversations without us knowing who they are. These stories are what Bramble is, so we keep them for as long as you have an account.

Usage data and crash reports

Unless you turn it off, the app sends usage events (for example, which onboarding screen you reached, or that you made the second of three choices) to PostHog, and crash reports (what the app was doing when it crashed, your Mac model, macOS version and Bramble version) to Sentry. Our server also records a few events, such as that a story finished being written and how long it took. These are tied to a random account ID, not your name or email, and never include your messages, the names of people in them, or your stories. Turn them off in Bramble’s Settings, with “Share anonymous usage data and crash reports”; that stops both the app and our server from sending them.

Updates and downloads

Bramble is downloaded from, and checks for updates at, GitHub. Like any website, GitHub receives your IP address and the version of Bramble you have when it does.

Our website

brambleworld.com doesn’t use analytics or advertising cookies. Our hosting providers keep standard server logs, including IP addresses. If something breaks on the site, we record the error, without your IP address.

Who else handles your data

We use these providers to run Bramble. Each gets only what it needs:

• OpenAI: writes stories. It receives the conversations you send (to create a story) and the story so far (to write each scene). Under OpenAI’s terms for its API, it doesn’t train its models on this data; it may keep it for up to 30 days to detect abuse.
• Clerk: sign-in and account security.
• Amazon Web Services: hosts our website, our servers and our database, in the United States.
• PostHog and Sentry: usage data and crash reports, as described above.
• GitHub: hosts app downloads and updates.

We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t share it for targeted advertising. We would disclose information if the law requires it, to protect people from harm, or as part of a merger or sale of the company, in which case this policy would continue to apply to it.

People in your conversations

Your conversations include other people. When you send one, we process what it says about them, and the stories keep a model-written version of it, under the name you have for them. We never receive their phone numbers or email addresses. Stories are only shown to the account that created them. If you think you’re in someone’s Bramble story and want something removed, email great@brambleworld.com. Because we never receive phone numbers or email addresses, we may need help from the person who imported the conversation to find it.

How long we keep it

• Conversations you send: at most 30 minutes.
• Your account and stories: until you ask us to delete them.
• Download-page IP addresses: 15 minutes.
• Usage data and crash reports: for as long as our providers keep them for us, after which they’re deleted automatically.
• Database backups: deleted on a rolling schedule, within 35 days.

Deleting your account

Email great@brambleworld.com from the address you use for Bramble and ask us to delete your account. Within 30 days we’ll delete your account, your stories and everything else we hold about you in our database, your Clerk account, and your usage data in PostHog, and confirm when it’s done. Copies in our database backups disappear as those backups expire. Deleting your account does not delete anything on your Mac; to remove that, delete the app.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, or to delete it, and you can stop usage data and crash reports at any time in Settings. Email great@brambleworld.com; we’ll answer within 30 days and won’t treat you differently for asking.

If you’re in the European Economic Area or the UK, we rely on these legal bases: to provide the service you asked for (your account, the stories you create), your consent (sending a conversation, which you choose each time, and which you can withdraw by deleting your account), and our legitimate interests (keeping Bramble secure, understanding how it’s used, and processing information about the other people in your conversations so we can make your stories). You can object to processing based on legitimate interests, and you can complain to your local data protection authority.

If you’re in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have the rights above to know, access, correct and delete. We don’t sell or share personal information as those laws define it.

Where your data is processed

Bramble is run from the United States, and our providers process data there. If you use Bramble from elsewhere, your data is transferred to the United States.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit, conversations are encrypted while they’re briefly stored, and access to our systems is limited to the people who run Bramble. No system is perfectly secure, but we’ll tell you promptly, as the law requires, if a breach affects your data.

Children

Bramble is not for anyone under 16. We don’t knowingly collect data from anyone younger, and we’ll delete an account we learn belongs to someone under 16.

Changes

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top. If a change matters to how your data is used, we’ll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Bramble World, Inc., great@brambleworld.com. See also our Terms of Service.