Privacy policy
Last updated 5 November 2026.
LetFlyAway is an iPhone app for anonymous letters. You write what you can't say out loud, let it fly away, and a stranger somewhere may catch it and reply once. It is built so that we know as little about you as possible. This page says what we do keep, why, who helps us run the service, how long things are kept, and how to delete everything.
The short version
- We never ask for or store your name, email address, phone number, age, birthday, gender or precise location.
- Your Apple or Google sign-in is kept only as a keyed hash. Inside LetFlyAway you are a random ID, and other people never see even that.
- We keep the letters and replies you send, so they can be delivered, checked for safety and translated.
- No adverts, no tracking, no selling data. This website sets no cookies.
- You can delete your account and everything in it from the app, at any time.
Who we are
LetFlyAway is made and run by an individual developer in the United Kingdom, called "the developer of LetFlyAway", "we" or "us" on this page. We are the controller of the personal data described here.
Contact for anything about privacy: hsk.coder@gmail.com.
What we keep and why
Even without your name, the things below can be personal data under UK GDPR, because they belong to one account. So we treat them that way.
| What | Details | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Account | A random internal ID; whether you signed in with Apple or Google; a keyed hash (HMAC-SHA256) of the account number Apple or Google gives us for LetFlyAway; when you joined and when you were last active. If Apple or Google also send your name or email address, we ignore them and never store them. | To sign you in, keep your letters apart from everyone else's, and make bans work. |
| Settings | Your app language; your country, taken from your iPhone's region setting (country only); the scene you picked; your time zone. | To translate letters into your language, show readers a broad hint such as "from somewhere far east", deliver letters that a Pro writer sent to your country, and reset your daily letters at your own midnight. |
| Letters and replies you send | The text; the fold style; the tags you pick and the tags and warnings our checks add; the result of the safety check; for Pro letters, the country you sent it to; when it was sent; how many people opened it and replied. This includes letters that were not delivered. | To deliver your letter and its replies. This is the service. |
| Photos, voice notes and videos (Pro) | The files you add, their size and length, and the transcript of a voice note or video. The transcript is made on your iPhone, not by us. For checking, we also take still frames from a video (one a second, at most 60). Location data is removed from photos on your phone before upload. | To check them for safety and deliver them with your letter. |
| Translations | Machine translations of letters, replies and transcripts into a reader's language, saved so the next reader in that language doesn't need a new one. | So people in any country can read each other. |
| What you read | Which letters landed for you and which you opened, passed or replied to, and your counts for today. | So you never see a letter again after passing or replying, and to apply the free daily limits. |
| Reports and blocks | Reports you make (which letter or reply, the reason, and an optional note of up to 300 characters) and, because reporting also blocks, the internal ID of the writer you no longer want to hear from. Reports other people make about your letters or replies. | To keep LetFlyAway safe and to deal with what readers report. |
| Bans | If an account is banned: the sign-in hash above, the letter or reply that led to it, and a hash of the device's DeviceCheck token (see below). | So a banned person can't come straight back by deleting the app or the account. |
| Device | Your push notification token from Apple, and a DeviceCheck token. DeviceCheck is an Apple service that lets an app mark a device with two yes/no bits; it does not tell us who you are or which device it is. We use one bit, meaning "banned". | To tell you "Someone caught your letter." (a push never contains any text of a letter or reply), and to keep banned devices out. |
| Subscription | Whether you have Pro and until when, and the identifiers Apple gives us for your subscription. Apple is the seller and handles payment; we never see your card or billing details. | To give you Pro while you pay for it. |
| Sign-in sessions | A hash of each sign-in session token (never the token itself), valid for 30 days. | To keep you signed in safely. |
| Technical logs | The time of each request, the address requested, the result, how long it took, and errors. Logs never contain letter or reply text, sign-in tokens or your IP address. To stop abuse, the server counts recent requests per IP address in memory only; those counts are never written down. For each paid check or translation we log its size and cost, never its content. | To keep the service running, secure and affordable. |
If you email us, we have your email address and what you wrote, and use them only to answer you.
Sensitive things in letters
Letters are often about health, love, faith, family or other sensitive parts of life. We never ask for this. If you write about it, we process it only because you chose to send it out to readers, and only to check, translate and deliver it. Please don't put anything in a letter that could identify you or anyone else (see the terms).
What we never collect
- Your name, email address or phone number.
- Your age or birthday. LetFlyAway is for adults: the age check happens on your iPhone, through Apple's age range feature or your own answer, and only the yes or no stays on the phone. Nothing about your age is sent to us.
- Your gender.
- Your precise location. The app doesn't ask for location; country comes from your phone's region setting.
- Your contacts or photo library (only the photos you choose to add to a letter).
- Advertising identifiers, or anything that tracks you across other apps and websites.
Some checks happen only on your iPhone and are never sent to us: the warning about phone numbers, emails, links and @handles while you write, and the warning when a photo seems to show a face or a readable name.
Who can see what
- Readers see your letter (translated into their language), its tags and warnings, its fold style and a broad hint of where it came from, such as "from somewhere far east". They never see your ID, your country name or anything else about you.
- The writer of a letter you reply to sees your reply, translated. Nothing else.
- The developer looks at letters and replies only when readers report them, to decide what to do. The developer can reach the server to keep it running, but does not browse letters.
- Service providers listed below process what they need to do their job for us.
- Authorities: we may share data if the law requires it, for example a valid order from the police or a court, or to protect someone from serious harm. Because we know so little about you, there is little we could share.
We don't sell data, show adverts, or let anyone use your letters to train AI models.
Our legal reasons
- Contract: your account, settings, letters, replies, media, translations, what you read, your device's push token and your subscription are needed to provide LetFlyAway as described in the terms.
- Legitimate interests: automatic safety checks, reports, blocks, bans, DeviceCheck, technical logs and abuse limits, to keep people safe and the service working. We have weighed these against your privacy and keep them as small as we can. You can object by email.
- Legal obligation: dealing with illegal content and complaints under the UK Online Safety Act, keeping records the law requires, and answering lawful requests.
Automatic checks
Every letter and reply is checked automatically before anyone sees it. The check decides whether it can fly, whether it carries a warning (such as "heavy"), and adds topic tags. If it can't be delivered, the app tells you what to change, and you can edit it and try again. If a letter talks about hurting yourself, the app first shows you where to find help, then lets you send it. Known child sexual abuse images are blocked automatically and the account and device are banned. Every other ban is decided by a person. If you think an automatic decision was wrong, email us and a person will look at it.
Who helps us run it
These companies process data for us under their business terms. They may only use it to provide their service to us.
| Provider | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Contabo | Hosting our server, database, backups and logs. | Germany (EU) |
| Cloudflare | Storing photos, voice notes and videos (Cloudflare R2), delivering them to readers through its network, and scanning them for known child sexual abuse images. Also DNS for letflyaway.com. | Files stored in Western Europe; delivered through Cloudflare's worldwide network. Cloudflare is a US company. |
| TypeSafe (jev) | The safety check and topic tags: it reads the text of letters and replies, transcripts, and the tags you picked. | To be confirmed; we will add it here. |
| Anthropic | Translating letters, replies and transcripts, and checking photos and video frames for safety. | United States |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, push notifications, DeviceCheck, and selling and renewing Pro through the App Store. | United States and worldwide |
| Sign-in, only if you choose Google. Google doesn't see your letters. | United States and worldwide |
None of these providers is told who you are by us. Apple and Google know their own account holders, under their own privacy policies; they don't see what you write in LetFlyAway.
Data outside the UK
Our server and database are in Germany. The UK recognises the EU as giving adequate protection, so no extra safeguard is needed for that. When data goes to the United States (for example a letter being translated), we rely on the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, and otherwise on the standard contractual clauses with the UK Addendum in that provider's data processing terms. You can ask us for details.
How long we keep it
- Letters: a letter flies for 30 days. After that it is no longer delivered to new readers, but it stays on our server, with its replies, media, transcripts and translations, until you delete your account. You can still see your letters and their replies in the app.
- Replies you sent: until you delete your account, or until the letter's writer deletes theirs (a reply goes with the letter it answers).
- Letters and replies that were blocked, removed or hidden: the same, until the account is deleted.
- What you read and your daily counts: until you delete your account.
- Sign-in sessions: 30 days; the expired hash is deleted a day later. Signing out ends a session at once.
- Push token: until you turn notifications off or sign out, it changes, or you delete your account.
- Reports you made: kept, so we keep a record of what was reported and what we did. When you delete your account they are kept without any link to you. Reports about a letter are deleted with that letter.
- Bans: while the ban stands, even if the banned account is deleted. This is the one thing we keep after deletion: the keyed sign-in hash and the device hash, which mean nothing without our secret key.
- Technical logs: each part of the service keeps at most 50 MB of logs; the oldest lines are overwritten as new ones come in. Because this goes by size, not date, we can't promise a number of days.
- Backups: we copy the database every day, before each server update and sometimes by hand, on our server in Germany. We keep the newest 14 of each kind, so daily copies go after two weeks; the others can be older. Backups are used only to restore the service after a failure.
- Inactive accounts are not deleted automatically yet. If you stop using LetFlyAway, you can delete your account in the app.
Deleting your account
In the app, go to Settings, then Delete account. It is immediate and can't be undone. It deletes your account, every letter you wrote (with all replies to them), every reply you sent, your photos, voice notes and videos, transcripts, translations, what you read, and your push token. If you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to end LetFlyAway's Sign in with Apple link.
What stays:
- Reports you made, with no link to you.
- A ban, if your account was banned (see above).
- Copies in backups, until those backups are replaced (at most about two weeks for daily copies).
- What readers already read. We can delete a letter from our server, but not from someone's memory.
Deleting your account does not cancel a Pro subscription; cancel it in your iPhone's Settings, under your name, then Subscriptions.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR (and the EU GDPR, if you live in the EU) you have the right to:
- see the personal data we hold about you and get a copy;
- have it corrected;
- have it deleted (the quickest way is Delete account in the app);
- restrict or object to how we use it;
- receive the data you gave us in a common format;
- ask for a person to look again at an automatic decision.
Your letters and their replies are in the app under your letters. For anything else, email hsk.coder@gmail.com. Because we don't know who you are, we may need to ask you something only the account holder could know, such as details of a letter you sent, before we can act. We answer within one month.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. If you live in the EU, you can also complain to your own country's data protection authority. We'd be grateful if you told us first, so we can try to put it right.
Adults only
LetFlyAway is only for people aged 18 or over. If you are under 18, please don't use it. If a letter or reply seems to come from a child, please report it in the app or email us, and we will remove it.
Security
Everything travels over HTTPS. Your sign-in is stored as a keyed hash, and session tokens only as hashes. Photos, voice notes and videos get long random names that say nothing about you or your other letters, and are not listed anywhere; anyone holding one of those links could open that file, so readers get them only inside the app. Secret keys live only on the server. Only the developer can reach the server and database. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach could affect you, we will tell the ICO and, where we can reach you through the app, you, as the law requires.
This website
letflyaway.com sets no cookies and uses no analytics, adverts, third-party fonts or scripts. The server that sends you these pages may keep short technical logs of requests (time, page, result, browser type), without your IP address.
Changes
If this policy changes, we will update the date at the top. For anything important, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.