Privacy Policy for Deets

Last updated: 24 September 2026

This policy covers the Deets apps for macOS, iOS, iPadOS and watchOS (“the app”), published by Michael Shear. It explains what the app reads, what it stores, where that is stored, and who can reach it — which, in every case, is you.

Your contacts

Deets is a reader for the address book you already have. On first run it asks permission to access Contacts, and from then on it reads from Apple's Contacts database on your device — the same one Contacts.app uses. Apart from the on-device cache described below, it keeps no copy of your address book, does not upload it anywhere, and has no mechanism by which it could.

If you grant limited access rather than full access, the app works over the subset you shared and takes care not to treat everybody else as deleted.

When you edit a contact, the change is written straight back to Apple Contacts. Deets writes only the specific fields you changed, against a freshly read copy of the record, so an edit made elsewhere in the meantime is not overwritten. It never reads or writes the Notes field of a contact.

Denying or revoking Contacts permission is always available to you in System Settings (macOS) or Settings (iOS, iPadOS, watchOS). If you revoke it, the app clears the address book from memory and deletes its local cache.

What the app stores on your device

• A cache of the address book, written as a file inside the app's own App Group container. It exists so that the search window opens instantly instead of waiting to re-read every contact, and so the widgets and watch complications have something to draw. It is rebuilt from Apple Contacts and deleted outright if access is withdrawn.
• Your settings: which contacts you have marked as favourites, which contact you designated as your own card, the order you prefer contact fields in (globally and per contact), which fields you pinned or hid, your accent colour, light/dark preference, background, text size, keyboard shortcuts, and whether the window hides when it loses focus.

That is the entirety of it. The app does not store or transmit your name, email address or any account information — there is no account; device or advertising identifiers; location data; analytics, telemetry, usage statistics or crash reports of any kind; or your photos, calendars, messages or browsing history.

Contact photographs are deliberately not fetched at all. The app's interface shows names, not faces.

iCloud sync, and what is actually in it

Your settings follow you between your own devices through Apple's iCloud key-value storage, inside your own Apple Account. This is worth being precise about, because it is the only thing the app puts anywhere other than your device:

• Your accent colour and your global field order travel as themselves.
• Your favourites, your per-contact field preferences and your My Card pointer travel as one-way digests, not as contact details. A contact is identified by a truncated SHA-256 hash derived from its email address, phone number or name; a pinned field is identified the same way. No email address, phone number or contact name appears in what is synced. A device reaching the same digest from its own copy of the same contact is how a favourite recognises the same person on your phone as on your Mac.

This runs inside your Apple Account, at your instruction. The developer has no access to it, no credentials for it, and no way to read or analyse it. Apple's handling of it is governed by Apple's privacy policy. If you are not signed in to iCloud, nothing syncs at all; the app keeps working, and your settings simply stay on that device.

Network access

The app makes no network requests, contains no networking code, and holds no entitlement that would let it make one. There is no server to talk to, and never has been.

No build of the app declares a network entitlement on any platform. The macOS build carried the system's network-client entitlement early on, added for a link-sharing feature that was never built; nothing ever used it, and it was removed on 11 September 2026. If a feature that genuinely needs the network is ever added, this page will say so before it ships.

The Mac app's purchase check is not an exception to this: it goes through Apple's StoreKit framework, which the operating system runs on the app's behalf (see Purchases).

Purchases

Deets is free on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. On the Mac it offers a free 14-day trial and a one-time purchase, both as ordinary App Store in-app purchases. They are handled entirely by Apple. The developer never receives your name, Apple Account, payment details or any other personal information from them — only the aggregated, anonymous sales figures Apple gives every developer.

To know whether the trial is running or the purchase has been made, the Mac app asks the system's StoreKit framework, which reads Apple's own signed record of your purchases. That concerns your purchase only — never your contacts. The app keeps no record of it itself. The iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch apps never ask.

Adding a contact from a card or a photo

Deets can read a business card — scanned with the camera or chosen from your photos on iPhone and iPad, dropped or pasted onto the window on the Mac, pasted as text, or opened as a vCard file — and turn it into a contact for you to check before saving.

All of that happens on your device. Text recognition uses Apple's Vision framework; interpreting the recognised text into name, title, company and numbers uses Apple's on-device foundation models, falling back to local pattern matching where those are unavailable. No image, no text and no part of a card is ever sent to a server, an AI service or anyone else. This was a deliberate design decision: an earlier app of mine sent card images to a cloud model, and that approach was specifically rejected here.

Nothing is saved to your address book until you review it and choose to save.

Sharing a contact

Deets can show a contact as a QR code or copy it as plain text. The QR code is generated on your device and displayed on your screen; it is not uploaded, registered or shortened, and no server is involved in producing or reading it. What you do with the result is up to you.

Widgets, complications, Shortcuts and Siri

The widgets and watch complications read the same local cache described above. The widget extension has no Contacts permission of its own and never asks for one.

Shortcuts actions and Siri phrases likewise read only that local cache. Your contacts are deliberately not donated to system-wide search indexing, which would duplicate the index the system already builds from Contacts itself.

Third parties

There are none. The app bundles no third-party analytics, advertising, attribution, crash-reporting or tracking libraries. No data about you or your contacts is shared with any third party, because none is ever sent anywhere. Apple is not a third party in this sense — it is the platform your own Contacts database and Apple Account run on.

Tracking

The app does not track you, across apps or websites or at all, and contains no tracking domains. Nothing about your use of it is ever measured or reported.

Your control over your data

• Revoke or narrow Contacts access at any time in System Settings (macOS) or Settings (iOS, iPadOS, watchOS). The app clears its copy and deletes its cache.
• Sign out of iCloud to stop your settings syncing. Everything keeps working locally.
• Edit or delete any contact — in Deets or in Apple's Contacts app. They are the same records; Deets has no separate store to get out of step.
• Uninstall the app, which removes its cache and settings from that device. Your address book is untouched, because it was never the app's to begin with.

There is nothing to request from the developer, because there is nothing held by the developer.

Children's privacy

The app is not directed to children under 13, and does not knowingly collect personal information from anyone of any age — it collects none at all.

Changes to this policy

If the app's data handling ever changes, this page changes with it: the updated policy will be posted at this URL and the “last updated” date above revised.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about Deets generally: shearm@mac.com. General help is on the support page.