Privacy policy
Last updated 13 October 2026. Operator: Semantig Tech Pte. Ltd., reachable at semantigai@gmail.com.
The short version
Knowingo keeps the things it needs to give you back the book you were reading: where you stopped, what you highlighted, how much XP you have, which two languages you chose, and whether your subscription is active. It has no advertising, no advertising identifier, and no third party analytics or advertising software inside the app.
What we collect
Knowingo is available on iPhone, on Android through Google Play, and on the web at read.knowingo.online. One account works in all three. You sign in with Apple, with Google, or with your email address.
From Sign in with Apple
Apple gives us an account identifier so we can recognise you on your next visit. Apple may also pass your name and an email address, and only the first time you authorise the app. If you use Apple's private relay address, that relay address is all we ever see. On Android, Sign in with Apple opens Apple's own page in a browser tab. We never receive your Apple password.
From Sign in with Google
Google gives us your name, your email address, a link to your Google profile photo and an account identifier, so we can recognise you on your next visit. On Android, the app asks Google's Credential Manager on your phone for them, and opens Google's own page in a browser tab when the phone cannot. Your Google photo becomes your avatar only if you choose it. We never receive your Google password.
From signing in with your email address
We keep your email address and send a one time code to it, which Resend delivers. If you set a password, we keep it only as a one way hash, never the password itself.
What you create by reading
- Your position in a book, and which parts you have completed.
- The blocks you highlighted.
- Your XP total.
- Your interface language and your preferred book language, which are two separate settings.
- The language level you last chose for each book.
- How long you read each day in each book or paper edition.
- Your App Store storefront country and whether your name shows on the weekly burn board.
- Your book reviews, the reviews you mark helpful, and the reviews you report.
About your subscription
When you buy Knowingo Reading in the iPhone app, Apple performs the transaction. We receive a transaction identifier and the result of verifying it with Apple, so that the app can open the content you paid for. We never see your card, your billing address or your Apple account balance.
When you buy it in the Android app, Google Play performs the transaction and bills you. The app names your Knowingo account identifier on the purchase, so that Google Play's record can be matched to your account. We receive the purchase token Google Play issues, the product and plan, the subscription's state, its start and expiry dates, the latest order ID and whether it renews. We verify each purchase with Google before we store it with your account. Google then tells us when the subscription renews, is cancelled, expires or is refunded, and we update the stored record. When Google confirms a full refund of the latest payment, reading ends and we stop the subscription from renewing. Your card and your other payment details stay with Google, and we never see them.
When you buy it on the web, Stripe performs the transaction. We receive the plan, the subscription's state and renewal date, the amount charged, the card brand and its last four digits, and a link to each receipt, so the account page can show them and we can email you about your subscription. We never see the full card number.
What we do not collect
- No advertising identifier, and no advertising network.
- No third party analytics software inside the app.
- No contacts, no photo library, no location. The microphone only while you ask a book a question out loud, after you allow it.
- No tracking of you across other companies' apps or websites.
App activity and troubleshooting
When you are signed in, Knowingo records limited activity to understand how the App is used and resolve problems with reading, narration and membership. These records include session observations, language and interest onboarding steps, the public books or papers shown or opened, edition selections, reader opening results, confirmed active reading intervals, actual narration playback intervals, paywall and purchase requests, and safe operation error categories. They include a random installation identifier scoped to your account, a random session identifier, App build, operating system major version, the time observed on your device and the time received by our server. Our server attaches the signed in account and separately confirms chapter completion, payment verification and effective access.
Search records contain a query length category and result count, never your search words. Activity records do not contain private document titles or text, highlight text, dictionary sentences, questions or answers, authentication tokens, payment credentials, signed media links, screenshots, recordings, precise location or activity in other apps. Anonymous sign in failure reports contain only daily counts by sign in method, result and App build. We do not connect those anonymous attempts to a later signed in account, and they do not represent unique people.
Activity collection runs asynchronously. Offline records are kept on your device for up to seven days, with a bounded queue, and may arrive late or be dropped. Administrators can inspect your received activity to resolve support issues. A missing record does not prove that an action did not happen. Narration playback and foreground reading may overlap and are not added together. Existing reading time includes foreground narration and continues to follow its existing rules.
Raw activity records are retained for 90 days. Account daily activity and collection health summaries are retained for 13 months. The first and latest receipt dates remain with your account so that expired history can be distinguished from activity that was never received. Deleting your account removes its activity records, sessions, receipt metadata and daily summaries, and the App clears that account’s local queue. The existing anonymous administrative audit record remains separate. This collection is first party and is not used to track you across apps or websites or to provide advertising profiles.
Reading time and brain burn
When you are signed in, Knowingo records how long you read while a book or paper is open on screen and you are active, including while you listen to narration. We store the seconds read for each UTC day and each book or paper edition on our servers, so the figure follows you across devices. Kilocalories are calculated from this time and are not stored separately.
We use reading time to show you your own weekly, monthly and overall reading and brain burn, and to rank the weekly burn board. Other readers never see which books or papers you read or for how long. Deleting your account deletes your reading time.
The weekly burn board
Every signed in reader who reads in a given week is ranked on one weekly board shared by all readers. Other readers see your rank, your name masked to its first and last character with three asterisks between them (for example J***n), your avatar, your country or region, and the kilocalories you burned that week. The board never shows which books or papers you read and carries no account identifier.
Your avatar is the mascot friend you chose, or your Google profile photo if you chose to use it. Your country or region is your App Store storefront country, which the app saves to your profile. It does not come from your device location.
To keep your name off the board, turn off the switch that shows your name, on the board or in Settings under Reading. Your row then shows a generic label in place of your name, and your rank still counts. The board also includes virtual readers generated by Knowingo. They are not real people.
Book reviews
After you finish a book you may rate it from one to five stars, choose tags, and add optional text of up to 500 characters. A review also shows a country or region, your App Store storefront country by default, which you can change or hide before you post. You can edit or delete your review at any time.
Other signed in readers see your rating, tags, text, region and the date, with your masked name and your avatar. They never see your full name, your email address or your account identifier. Readers can mark a review helpful or report it. We record who marked a review helpful and who reported it so that each reader counts once. Reports go to our moderation queue, where we may hide or remove a review, and review text is checked against a list of blocked words before it is published.
When a reader asks for a translation of a review, its text and the target language are sent to a third party AI model provider, which returns the translation. No account identifier is sent. We store the translation with the review so the same text is not sent again.
Deleting your account deletes your reviews, your helpful marks and your reports.
Asking a book a question
When you ask a question about a book, your question, the earlier questions and answers of that conversation, our summary of the book with its notes, and passages of the book found for your question are sent to third party AI providers to find those passages and write the answer. We keep each question and answer without your name, account or device, to see where readers get stuck and what answers cost. We count how many questions your account asks each day, to apply the daily limit.
When you ask a question about a book out loud while listening, after you allow the microphone, the app records from your tap until your question is sent, at most 30 seconds, and sends the sound from your phone straight to a third party AI model provider, which turns it into text; we never receive or keep the recording. The text is then handled as any question, and we note that it was spoken. The spoken answer is made by sending its text to the same provider. We count how many of these voice requests your account makes each day, to apply a daily limit.
Reviews from other websites
Some reviews on book pages come from public reviews on Apple Books, Google Play Books and Douban. We store each with the reviewer's name masked in the same way, the rating, text, date, language, region and helpful count, and the reviewer's public profile photo when the source shows one, copied into our own storage. We never store or show the reviewer's full name. If you wrote one of these reviews and want it removed, email semantigai@gmail.com.
Why we keep each thing
Every item above exists to deliver the service you asked for. Reading position and highlights are the product. Language preferences decide what the library can show you. Subscription status decides what the app may open. We do not keep a category of data because it might be interesting later.
Who else handles it
- Apple. Sign in, payment, subscription state and refund notifications.
- Google. Sign in with Google, and for subscriptions bought in the Android app, Google Play billing: payment, purchase verification, subscription state, and notifications of renewals, cancellations and refunds.
- Stripe. Payment, receipts and subscription state for subscriptions bought on the web.
- Resend. Sends the sign in codes and the subscription emails to your email address.
- Supabase. Our hosting provider, which stores the account record and reading data on our behalf under contract.
- A third party AI model provider. Translates review text when a reader asks for it, and finds passages and writes the answer when a reader asks a question about a book, and turns a spoken question into text and reads the answer aloud.
- Nobody else. Your data is not sold, not rented, and not shared for advertising. If a law or a valid legal order ever compels disclosure, we comply with the order and no more.
Images and offline copies
Pictures inside a protected book are held only in memory while you read. They are cleared when you sign out, when a subscription lapses, or when access is withdrawn. The first version keeps no long term offline copy of protected content on your device.
How long we keep it
Your reading data stays while your account exists, because that is what makes the app usable when you come back. Delete the account and we remove the account record and the reading data attached to it. A few records outlive it by design: the order IDs of refunded Google Play purchases, kept with Google's purchase token and no account so that each refund is still honoured; the payment records Stripe keeps for accounting; and the questions asked of a book, which were never stored with an account.
Deleting your account
You can delete your Knowingo account in any of three ways.
- In the app, on iPhone or Android. Open Settings from the Me tab, choose Delete account at the bottom, and confirm. The account is deleted at once.
- On the web. Sign in at read.knowingo.online, open Settings from Me, and choose Delete account.
- By email. Write to semantigai@gmail.com from the address on the account and ask for deletion.
Deleting removes your account record, your reading position and completed parts, highlights, XP, language settings, reading time, reviews, helpful marks and reports, activity records, and the stored records of your subscriptions. A subscription bought on the web is cancelled as part of the deletion. Deletion cannot be undone. The records listed under how long we keep it stay, without your account.
One thing to know first: deleting the account does not cancel an Apple or Google Play subscription. Apple and Google own those billing relationships, so cancel the subscription first: in your Apple account settings, or in Google Play under Payments and subscriptions. Then delete the account.
Children
Knowingo is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly keep data about them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.
Your rights
You may ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Write to semantigai@gmail.com and we answer within 30 days.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who touches it, we update the date at the top of this page and describe the change here rather than replacing the text silently.