Privacy Policy

The short version

Owlka is a desktop app for your Mac or Windows PC and a companion app for your iPhone. Your conversations, code, and memory live on your own desktop. The two apps talk through an encrypted relay that we cannot read. We do not sell or share your data. We do not run advertising trackers. We do not use anything you build to train any model.

Owlka wraps your own Claude subscription on your desktop. Owlka does not resell Anthropic. You bring your own Claude Pro or Max subscription, and your desktop talks to Anthropic directly under your own login. We never see your Claude traffic.

To keep your account and to send you notifications, we do hold a small amount of account data on our server when you choose to sign in with Apple: your name and email. The detail is below.

What Owlka collects

We try to collect as little as possible. The full list is:

Your name and email, if you sign in with Apple. Signing in is optional. You can use Owlka by tapping “Not now” and pairing a Mac without an account. If you do sign in with Apple, Apple gives us your name and email, and we store them on our relay server so we can keep your account, route push notifications to your devices, and let you manage or delete the account. This is linked to your account identity. It is not used for advertising and is never sold or shared for marketing.
Device identifiers for pairing. When you pair your phone with a desktop, Owlka generates a random identifier for each device and a public key for each pairing. We use these to route encrypted packets to the right device. They are random, reset if you re-pair or reinstall, and are not derived from your name or your Apple ID.
Usage analytics. On by default, in every version of the app.Owlka can record which screens and features you use (for example that the chat screen was opened), tagged with a random per-install identifier and the app version, so we can see which parts of the app people actually use. These events never contain your messages, your files, or your commands, only fixed screen and feature names. The first time you open the app we show a notice telling you this is on, with a one-tap off switch. You can change it at any time under More, then Account & Subscription, and we keep these events for 90 days.
Crash and diagnostic reports, opt-in and off by default.If you turn on “Share diagnostics” in Settings, Owlka will upload crash and hang reports and a redacted debug log to our relay so we can fix bugs. This is off unless you switch it on. Separately, so we can help when you report a specific problem, our support team can request a one-off pull of your redacted debug log from your device; that log is scrubbed of message content by the operating system’s logging privacy rules and never contains your message text, file contents, or tool output. You can see and control the diagnostics setting in Settings.
Connection metadata. Our encrypted relay records connection metadata so we can keep the service running and measure load on it. The relay cannot decrypt sealed packets. Message contents, file contents, tool arguments, and tool output are end-to-end encrypted and never visible to us. What we record is: the public-key identifiers of the devices currently connecting (the per-pair keys you generated when you paired, never your name or your Apple ID), the IP address of each connection, the byte size of each sealed packet, and the timing of packets. We use this for service reliability, load measurement, and abuse detection.
Support correspondence. If you contact us through the in-app support form or email support@owlka.com, we keep that thread, including your name, email, and any logs you choose to attach, so we can help you.
Payment details: none, today.Owlka costs £4.99 a month or £49.99 a year after a free first 30 days, but billing is not switched on yet, so we currently collect no payment information of any kind. When billing does start it will run through this website rather than through Apple, and we will update this policy with a new “Last updated” date, naming our payment processor, before any charge is taken.

What Owlka does not collect

Message content. Every message between your phone and your desktop is end-to-end encrypted with keys that only your devices hold. The relay carries sealed bytes. We cannot read them.
Speech audio.Owlka does not transcribe speech on your device. If you use Owlka’s microphone button, the recording is sent to ElevenLabs and transcribed there. This is possible only once you have added your own ElevenLabs API key on your desktop; with no key the button is greyed out and your microphone is never opened. From the iPhone app the recording travels end-to-end encrypted to your own paired Mac, which passes it to ElevenLabs using your key; from the desktop app it goes straight to ElevenLabs. When Owlka speaks a reply aloud, the text of that reply is sent to ElevenLabs as well. Our relay cannot read any of it and Owlka never receives the recording or the transcript. ElevenLabs acts as a processor reached by your own machine with your own key, under its own terms.
Location. Owlka never accesses your location. The app contains no location code and asks for no location permission, so there is nothing to collect, send, or store.
Your Anthropic login.Owlka never sees, copies, or stores your Claude login. It lives where the Claude desktop tools put it on your machine, under your operating system’s user permissions.
Your code, files, or project memory. All of that lives on your own desktop. We never copy any of it to a server.
Third-party advertising or tracking pixels. Owlka runs none. We do not use third-party analytics that identify you personally, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

Per-pair partitioning

Owlka is built around the idea that one desktop can pair with many phones, and one phone can pair with many desktops. A household Mac mini might be paired with two people’s phones. One person’s phone might be paired with both a home desktop and a work laptop. Each phone-and-desktop pair is a separate boundary.

What Owlka keeps per pair: your Owlka memory, the accounts you connect through Owlka and the credentials for them, and the per-pair settings and skills Owlka stores itself. Each of those is filed under the pair it belongs to. The first person’s phone sees their own memory and their own connected accounts. The second person’s phone sees theirs. Switching active desktops on the phone switches that context to the pair you switched to.

Two limits on that, stated plainly because they are how the software actually behaves today.

Anything that is simply a file on the desktop is shared by everyone who uses that desktop.Claude runs on your computer as your computer’s user. Your projects, your code, your Claude configuration, and Claude’s own memory and skills are ordinary files under your operating system account, so every pair on that machine reaches the same ones. Owlka partitions the records Owlka keeps. It does not, and cannot, partition your hard disk. If two people share a desktop, treat that desktop as shared.
If Owlka cannot work out which pair a session belongs to, it falls back to a shared default rather than stopping. In that case the session reads and writes a single default memory store instead of a pair-specific one, so a session that lost its pair identity can see memory written by another session that also lost its pair identity on the same desktop. It fails open, not closed. We chose availability over isolation there, and you should know it.

There is no cross-pair sharing control. Owlka has no setting that lets a desktop owner grant one pair access to another pair’s memory or connected accounts, and no such feature ships today.

Who else is involved

Owlka relies on a small number of named providers to deliver the product. Each one sees only the slice of data its job requires.

Apple. Apple distributes the iPhone app and provides Sign in with Apple. When you sign in, Apple confirms your identity and passes us your name and email. Apple also delivers our push notifications. If we ever switch on a paid subscription, Apple will handle billing under its own privacy policy.
Cloudflare. Cloudflare fronts the encrypted relay. It sees connection metadata such as IP addresses and timing, plus sealed bytes it cannot decrypt.
Our relay host, Hetzner. A single small server rented from Hetzner Online GmbH in Nuremberg, Germany. It shuttles sealed packets between phones and desktops and stores the account data described above (name, email, device tokens, session tokens). It cannot read packet contents.
ElevenLabs.Only if you have added your own ElevenLabs API key on your desktop. Your desktop then uses ElevenLabs to transcribe what you say and to speak replies aloud; the key stays on your desktop. Your audio reaches ElevenLabs via your own machine and your own account, not via Owlka’s servers.
Vercel. Vercel hosts owlka.com. It logs standard request metadata for the public pages.
Your chosen Claude subscription. Your desktop talks to Anthropic directly under your own Anthropic account. Your usage is governed by your own agreement with Anthropic. Anthropic is not an Owlka sub-processor, because none of your Claude traffic ever passes through us.

How long we keep things

We delete on a schedule rather than keeping things indefinitely. The periods below are the ones our servers actually enforce.

Your account (name, email, device tokens, session token): for as long as you have an Owlka account. We do not put a timer on it because it is what keeps your account working, and we do not currently delete dormant accounts on a schedule. Delete your account and it is removed from our live database straight away. We also take encrypted backups of that database and keep them for about 28 days, so a deleted account can persist in a backup for up to that long before the backup itself expires.
Device pairing identifiers: until you unpair or delete your account. Re-pairing generates new ones and the old ones stop being used.
Usage analytics events: 90 days. Deleted automatically after that.
Crash reports: we keep the most recent 500. Older ones are dropped as new ones arrive.
Diagnostic log uploads: 30 days.This covers both the ones you send by switching on “Share diagnostics” and the one-off pulls you agree to when you report a problem.
Connection metadata (device public-key identifiers, IP address, packet size, timing): 90 days.
Relay server logs: 14 days.
A sealed message waiting for a device that is offline: deleted as soon as it is delivered, and in any case after 31 days. We cannot read it while it waits.
Support correspondence: kept until we delete it by hand. We are not going to claim a tidy period here, because nothing automatically expires it today. If you have written to us, or sent us diagnostic logs through the support form, assume we still hold that thread. Ask us to delete it and we will.

Where the law requires us to keep something for longer, for example a record we need to defend a legal claim, we keep only that record and only for as long as the law requires.

Where your data is, and transfers out of the UK and EEA

The account data and relay metadata described above are stored on a single server in Nuremberg, Germany, rented from Hetzner Online GmbH. Germany is in the European Economic Area, so for readers in the EEA this is not an international transfer at all, and for readers in the United Kingdom it is covered by the UK’s adequacy regulations for the EEA.

Three of the providers named above may process data outside the UK and the EEA in the course of doing their job:

Cloudflare fronts the relay from whichever of its locations is nearest to you, so it may see your IP address and sealed bytes outside the UK and EEA.
Apple operates Sign in with Apple and the push notification service from its own global infrastructure, which includes the United States.
Vercel serves owlka.com, the public website, from a global network. This affects page requests only, not your account data or your messages.

Where those transfers happen, they rely on the transfer safeguards in each provider’s own terms, which is an adequacy decision where one applies and otherwise the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. You can ask us for the detail by emailing support@owlka.com. Your conversations, code, and memory are not part of any of this: they never leave your own devices.

Account deletion

You can delete your Owlka account from inside the app. On iPhone, open More, then Subscription. On Android, open More, then Account. On either, tap “Delete my account and data.” The app will:

Wipe the local data on your phone (cached messages, paired device records, keys in the iOS Keychain).
Delete your account on our relay, removing your stored name and email, your device public keys, your push device tokens, and your session tokens, and disconnecting any live session.
For Sign in with Apple accounts, revoke your Apple tokens with Apple’s token-revocation service so the sign-in grant is fully torn down.
There is no Owlka subscription to cancel today, because billing is not switched on. When it is, you will cancel from this website rather than in Apple Settings, since Owlka is not sold through in-app purchase.

Deletion always takes effect on your device even if a server step is briefly unreachable. If the in-app flow is unavailable, you can also email support@owlka.com and we will delete your account and relay-side records for you. Anything stored locally on your own desktop is yours to manage on your machine.

Data controller

The data controller for the personal data Owlka processes is Owlka Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (Company No. 17266868), registered office Singleton Court Business Park, Wonastow Road, Monmouth, Monmouthshire, NP25 5JA. For data-protection enquiries, email support@owlka.com.

Lawful bases we rely on (UK and EU GDPR)

Contract. Processing your account data (name, email) and device identifiers so we can deliver the account and the Service you have signed up for. When billing is switched on, the subscription and payment records needed to run it will be processed on this basis too.
Legitimate interests. Processing relay metadata to keep the relay working and to detect abuse, and handling support correspondence you send us. Also the usage analytics that every version of the app starts with switched on, described in the next bullet.
Consent.Crash and diagnostics reporting is off everywhere until you switch it on, and is processed only on your consent. Usage analytics works differently, and we will not claim consent where we do not have it: every version of the app starts with usage analytics switched on, so for anyone who has not switched it off we are relying on our legitimate interest in finding out which parts of the app people use and whether a build works, not on consent. You are told at first run, you can switch it off at any time under More, then Account & Subscription, and you can object to that processing by emailing us.
Legal obligation. Where we are required to retain or disclose data under applicable law.

Your rights under UK GDPR and EU GDPR

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to ask us to correct or delete it, to object to or restrict our processing of it, and to data portability. You also have the right to complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. To exercise any of these rights, email support@owlka.com. Because the conversation, code, and memory all live on your own desktop, the data we hold on you is limited to the items listed in “What Owlka collects” above.

Your rights under California privacy law (CCPA and CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have the right to know what personal information we collect about you, the right to request deletion, the right to correct inaccurate information, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. To make a request, email support@owlka.com. We will verify your request before acting on it and will respond within the timeframes the law sets.

Children

Owlka is not directed at children and is age-rated accordingly on the App Store. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13 (or under 16 where local law sets the higher floor). If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, email support@owlka.com and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, the “Last updated” date at the top of the page will change. Material changes will also be announced inside the app the next time you open it.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: support@owlka.com.