Sown

Privacy Policy

Effective 25 September 2026 · Loadcircle Ltd

Sown is a private record of the people you keep. Everything you write stays on your phone. We do not receive it, and the app has no way to send it.

1. What the app stores, and where

When you use Sown, the app writes the following to its own private storage area on your device:

• the people you add, and the name you gave each of them;
• what you know about each person: the label you chose (for example Daughter, Allotment, Can't eat) and what you wrote against it;
• the date on which each of those facts was written down;
• your notes — what you did together — and the date and time of each;
• whether you have marked someone as resting, so that Sown leaves them out of the quiet list;
• whether the one-time unlock is active on this phone.

All of it is kept in a single file (sown-ledger.json) inside the app's private directory. Nothing is written anywhere else on your phone by Sown, and no other app can read that directory. The app asks for no storage permission, because it does not need one to write there.

2. What the app does not do

• No internet. The app does not hold the INTERNET permission, so it cannot open a network connection. Nothing you type can be transmitted anywhere, because there is no code path and no permission for it to travel by.
• No account. There is nothing to sign up for, no email address, no password, and no user identifier.
• No analytics or crash reporting. No usage data, no diagnostics and no device identifiers are collected or sent.
• No advertising. There are no ads and no advertising SDK, and the app does not use the advertising ID.
• No reading of your other data. Sown does not request or hold permission to read your contacts, your call log, your SMS messages, your photographs, your files or your location. The names in Sown are ones you type; they are not imported from anywhere.
• No cloud backup by the system. Android's automatic app backup is switched off in the app itself, so the platform's backup agent cannot copy your record off the device to a Google Drive account.
• No third-party services that collect data. Sown includes no analytics, advertising or attribution SDK. The only non-Google component it carries is AndroidX, which does not collect.

3. The backup file you write

Sown can write your whole record to a single file, and it is free to do that at any number of people and always will be. You choose the destination using the system's own file picker — for example your Downloads folder, or a cloud drive you have set up yourself. Two things follow, and they are worth being straight about:

• The file is plain, readable text. It is a JSON document containing everything in your record. It is not encrypted by the app, so keep it somewhere you trust, and treat it the way you would treat a written address book.
• Once written, the file is outside the app's control. It is handled by whatever app or service you chose to store it in. If you save it to a cloud service, that service's own privacy policy applies to it, not this one.

Restoring works the other way round: you pick a file, and Sown reads it. A file that is not one of ours is refused and nothing changes.

4. The one payment

Sown is free in full for up to 25 people, and one payment lifts that ceiling for good. There is no subscription and there will not be one. The payment is made through Google Play as an in-app purchase, so Google processes it under Google's own terms and privacy policy — we never see your card, your name, your address or your billing details.

The app itself holds the Play Billing component, which asks the Play Store on your own phone whether the purchase is owned. That is a conversation between the app and the store you installed it from, over the system's own IPC, and it tells the app one thing: whether the unlock belongs to this phone. The app sends nothing to us and receives nothing from us — not even for this. If you install Sown on a new phone, the store can tell it about a purchase you already made; the app writes down only that the unlock is active.

5. Deleting your data

You can forget a person inside the app, and everything written about them goes with them — the facts, the notes and the thread. There is no other copy inside the app, so that deletion is immediate and final. Clearing the app's data in your phone's settings, or uninstalling Sown, removes everything it has stored.

Because we never receive your record, there is nothing on a server for you to ask us to delete — but equally, we cannot recover your record for you if your phone is lost, damaged or reset. If it matters to you, use the backup, and keep that file somewhere you trust.

6. Children

Sown is a personal record-keeping tool. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from children — indeed we collect no information from anyone.

7. Your rights

Data protection law (including the UK GDPR) gives you rights over personal data held about you. We hold none: your record never reaches us. Note that the people you write about are your own record, kept by you on your own device, and it is you rather than us who is responsible for it. If you have a question about this, you are welcome to contact us at the address below, and you have the right to complain to your local data protection authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).

8. Changes to this policy

If a future version of Sown changes what it stores or where, this page will be updated before that version is released, and the effective date above will change. The version of this policy that applies to you is the one published here at the time you use the app.

9. Contact

Loadcircle Ltd, England and Wales · francis@loadcircle.co.uk