What we keep when you delete something

Most of our privacy policy is the easy kind: we do not train on your content, everything sits in the EU, analytics never sees a title or a search. Those are straightforward because they are refusals.

This one is not a refusal, so it needs more than a line.

The rule

When you upload a photograph or a document, we keep the original file for as long as your account exists – and deleting the item it produced does not delete it. Closing your account does.

That is the whole rule. It is in the privacy policy and it is stated in the app, and it is the sentence in this product that was hardest to write well.

Why keep it

Two reasons, both about your library being better later than it is now.

Extraction improves. The recipe we read off a photograph in September is read by a better parser in March. If we still have the photograph, your recipe can just get better, without you rephotographing a cookbook you may no longer own. If we threw the file away, that improvement is only available to things you save from then on.

A restored item comes back whole. Something in your trash can be recovered as what it was, pictures included, rather than as a husk.

Why this is a real cost, not a free win

Keeping originals means files accumulate that no item points at any more. You deleted the recipe; the photograph of the cookbook page stays. That is storage that only ever grows, and it is the honest version of what “we keep your uploads” means.

It is also the part that deserves scrutiny rather than a shrug. Holding data with no live purpose is exactly the thing data-protection law asks you to justify, and “it might be useful later” is a weaker justification than we would like. We have taken the permissive end deliberately, we have written it down rather than burying it, and it is on our own list of things to revisit once we know how much accumulates in practice.

What you can do about it right now

Delete your account and it all goes, within thirty days, files included. That is the button that actually means the thing people usually mean.

Export first, whenever you like. Your whole library, in a portable format, free on every plan. We would rather you left with everything than stayed because leaving was awkward.

Why we did not just say “we keep uploads”

Because that sentence is technically true and practically misleading. Somebody reading it assumes deleting the recipe deletes the photograph of their kitchen table, and it does not.

The difference between a policy that is accurate and one that is understood is usually a sentence like the one in bold at the top. If your mental model of what we hold is wrong, we have not disclosed anything – we have just protected ourselves.