Privacy Policy

Lector is a text-to-speech reader that does its work on your device. This policy is short because the honest answer to most privacy questions about Lector is that the data never leaves your phone.

What Lector collects

Nothing. Lector has no accounts, no analytics, no advertising, and no server of its own. Nothing you read, type, import, or listen to is transmitted to us, because there is no “us” to transmit it to — no backend receives anything.

Where your content lives

Documents you import, text you type, your reading positions, bookmarks, and settings are stored on your device, in Lector’s own storage. Audio files you export are written to Lector’s folder on your device and appear in the Files app; they leave the phone only when you share them somewhere yourself. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

What happens on the network

Only what you ask for, and never your content. Every request below starts with something you did, goes straight to the site named, and carries nothing about you:

• If you share a web address to Lector, or add a web page by typing its address, your device fetches that page directly from the website that hosts it, so the article can be extracted and read on the device. The site you contact learns what any website learns from a visit; Lector adds nothing and reports nothing.
• If you use the Project Gutenberg browser, your device asks www.gutenberg.org for its catalog and, when you choose a book, downloads it from there. Gutenberg receives your search words and the book you request, the same as visiting their website. No other site is contacted.
• If you add an ebook server — Calibre-Web on your own NAS, say, or any catalog that speaks OPDS — your device contacts that server, and only that server, while you browse it: the shelves you open, the words you search for, and the books you download. If the server needs a sign-in, your user name and password are kept in your device’s Keychain, sent only to that server, and deleted when you remove the server. Lector has no server of its own in between.
• Voices are downloaded by iOS itself, in Settings, from Apple. Lector does not download voices and does not tell anyone which voices you use.

What the system sees

Summaries and Reader’s Digest editions are written by Apple Intelligence’s on-device model; the document is not sent anywhere to be summarized. Scanned PDFs are recognized with Apple’s on-device text recognition. Speech is produced by Apple’s on-device speech synthesis. While reading aloud, the document title and progress are shown to iOS for the Lock Screen, Control Center, and Dynamic Island controls, and cleared when reading stops. That information stays on the device. Siri and Shortcuts actions run inside the app on your phone.

Tracking

None. Lector contains no tracking, no third-party SDKs, and no advertising identifiers, and its App Store listing reads “Data Not Collected” because that is simply true.

Changes and contact

If Lector’s data handling ever changes, this policy will change first, and the app’s release notes will say so plainly. Questions: collverab3@gmail.com.