Our privacy policy is seventeen syllables.
There is a long version, too — the one our lawyer made us write — but the short version is the truer one. Read it once and you've read it all.
Your library / lives on your machine, not ours. /
We don't watch you read.
The longer, less poetic version
We have built Lexis to function with no network connection at all, and that is the default state of the app. The only times Lexis touches the internet are when you ask it to: importing a book from Project Gutenberg, fetching a research result, looking up a translation, downloading a software update. Each of those actions makes a single request to the relevant service, and Lexis tells you which one in the status bar before sending it.
What we do not collect
- What books you have. We do not know.
- What you read, how long, how often. We do not know.
- What you highlighted, noted, or thought about. We do not know.
- Where you are. We do not know.
- Your name, your machine, your operating system, your IP address. We do not know.
- How many people are using Lexis right now. (Truly. We get told, by letter.)
What we do collect
- An email address, if and only if you write to us or if you provide it at download to receive updates, or news. We use it to write back, and we keep your letter so we can remember the conversation. You can ask us to forget at any time and we will.
- A payment record, if you paid us, kept by Stripe (our payment processor) and our accountant. We see the country and amount; we do not see the card.
- An order address, if you ordered the printed manual or a postcard. Used to post the thing; deleted six months later.
Cookies on this website
None. Open the developer tools and check.
Update server
When the app checks for an update — only if you've enabled that, in Preferences — it asks our update server "is there a new version?" and the server replies. The server log keeps the IP address for fourteen days for spam protection, then deletes it. No version, identifier, or user-agent string is recorded.
Online lookups
When you press R for a research lookup, Lexis sends your selected text to arXiv or OpenAlex (your choice in Preferences). They are bound by their own privacy policies, which we link to in the app. When you press D or E for a dictionary or etymology, Lexis uses local data — no network is involved.
If we ever change this
We will tell you, in writing, in the app, on the next launch — not buried in a banner.