Privacy Policy
Athene for iPhone and iPad · Effective 8 September 2026
The short version. Athene has no user accounts and no server of its own. It collects no personal information, contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier and no third-party SDKs. Your books, your reading position, your highlights and your notes stay on your device. The only computers Athene ever contacts are ones you name yourself, plus Apple when you make a purchase.
Who is responsible
Athene is made by Aditya Sreedhar, an independent developer. This policy covers the Athene app for iOS and iPadOS and this website. Questions go to [email protected].
What Athene stores, and where
Everything below is kept in Athene's own storage on your device. None of it is transmitted to the developer, because there is no developer-operated server to transmit it to.
- Your books. EPUB and PDF files you add, and the covers, chapter text and layout caches derived from them.
- Your reading. Which book is open, your position in it, bookmarks, highlights and notes.
- Your settings. Typeface, type size, margins, page-turn style, reading light, library arrangement and collections.
- Server details you enter. The address, username and password for your calibre server, and the address of an Ollama server if you configure one. These are stored in the app's own settings storage inside its sandboxed container, and are sent only to the server you named. An API key, if you choose to supply one, is stored in the iOS Keychain instead.
- The Owl's downloaded model, if you choose to download one — a file in the app's container, and nothing else.
Deleting the app removes all of it. There is no copy anywhere else.
What leaves your device
Athene makes network connections in four situations, all of them started by you.
| When | Where it goes | What is sent |
|---|---|---|
| You connect to a calibre library | The calibre-web or OPDS server whose address you typed in | Your username and password for that server, and ordinary requests to browse and download books. Athene talks to that server directly. Nothing is relayed through the developer or any third party. |
| You ask the Owl a question, having configured an Ollama server | The Ollama server whose address you typed in — normally a machine on your own network | Your question and the passage of the book you asked about. If you have not configured a server, the Owl runs entirely on your device and this connection is never made. |
| You choose to download a language model for the Owl | huggingface.co |
An ordinary file download. No account, no identifier, and nothing about you or your books is included in the request. |
| You buy Athene Pro, or restore a purchase | Apple | Handled entirely by Apple's App Store. Athene never sees your payment details, your Apple Account or your name — only whether the purchase is valid. Apple's own privacy policy governs that transaction. |
Athene makes no other connections. It does not phone home on launch, does not check for updates, and does not fetch remote configuration, advertisements or content of any kind.
The Owl and Apple Intelligence
When the Owl uses Apple Intelligence, or a model you have downloaded into the app, the text of your question and the passage you asked about are processed on your device and are not transmitted anywhere. Apple's on-device foundation models are covered by Apple's own privacy terms. If — and only if — you point the Owl at your own Ollama server, that text is sent to that server, as described in the table above.
What Athene does not do
- No accounts, sign-in, or profile of any kind.
- No analytics, telemetry, usage measurement or crash reporting.
- No advertising, no advertising identifier (IDFA), no tracking across apps or websites, and nothing shared with data brokers.
- No third-party SDKs collecting anything.
- No sale or sharing of personal information — Athene has none to sell.
Children
Athene is suitable for readers of any age and collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13. Because nothing is collected, there is nothing to request the deletion of.
Your rights
Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights of access, correction, deletion and portability over personal data a company holds about you. Athene holds none: the developer has no database, no logs and no record that you exist. Data on your own device is yours — you can inspect, export or erase it by using the app, or remove all of it at once by deleting the app.
This website
This site is a set of static pages hosted on Cloudflare Pages. It sets no cookies and
runs no analytics. It loads typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes
a request to fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com; those
requests are governed by Google's privacy policy. Cloudflare processes standard server
request information as part of delivering the page.
Changes
If this policy changes, the revised version is posted here with a new effective date. Material changes to how Athene handles information will also be described in the App Store release notes for the version that introduces them.
Contact
Write to [email protected].