Privacy
Last updated October 2026
The short version.
Quotidia stores your email address, a name you choose, your learning history, and a note of which screens you open. It has no advertising and no tracking pixels. Nothing it records about how you use it is ever sent anywhere else. There is one exception, and it is named below: a single email, two weeks after you join, is copied to Trustpilot so they can invite you to review. You can delete everything yourself, from Settings, at any time.
Who is responsible
Seb Moon, a sole trader trading as Quotidia Café, at The Incubator, Holywell Building, Holywell Way, Loughborough LE11 3UZ, United Kingdom, is the data controller for UK GDPR purposes. You can write to contact@quotidiacafe.com, use the contact form, or use the support form in the app.
What is collected, and why
| Data | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | Signing in, password reset, and a few emails about your account: two welcome emails in your first two days, one at two weeks, and one before your trial ends | Until you delete your account |
| Password | Stored only as a scrypt hash, the password itself is never saved and cannot be recovered | Until you delete your account |
| Display name | Shown on your own dashboard. Any name will do; it need not be real | Until you delete your account |
| Learning history | Which words you've seen, how you rated them, when, and how long you took to answer. This is what makes the scheduling work, and the timing is also what tells Quotidia whether it is showing you words you already know | Until you delete your account |
| Puzzle progress | So a finished puzzle stays finished across devices | Until you delete your account |
| Sign-in sessions | Keeping you signed in. Records a device description and the last time it was used | One year, or until you sign out |
| Notification subscription | Only if you switch reminders on. A token issued by your browser's push service | Until you turn reminders off |
| Support messages | So a reply is possible. Includes your email and browser description | Two years |
| Address confirmation | A one-time link proving the address reaches you, so that a forgotten password has a way back. Nothing is withheld before you use it | The link, 24 hours. The fact it was confirmed, until you delete your account |
| Failed sign-in attempts | To stop somebody guessing passwords against your account. Records the email address that was tried and a one-way hash of the network address it came from, never the address itself, which means it cannot be read back out or matched to you later | One hour |
| How you found Quotidia Café | If you arrived through a campus poster, flyer or card: which of five audiences the link was for (for example “returners”) and which kind of print it was, from a fixed list. If you arrived through a link in a post online (quotidiacafe.com/c/ and a short code), which post that was. To learn which posters and posts are worth repeating. Never where you were, when you scanned or tapped, or anything about your device | Until you delete your account |
| Your trial dates | When your free trial started and when it ends, so the app can tell you how long is left and pause review when it is over | Until you delete your account |
| A founding place | If you take a founding-rate or Founding Supporter place: which one, its price, and whether it is reserved, being paid for, or paid. To count the places and keep the price you were offered | Until you delete your account |
| Your plan | If you subscribe or buy a lifetime: your Stripe customer and subscription references, which plan, its status, and when it renews or ends. Never a card number, that goes to Stripe alone | Until you delete your account; records of payments are kept for as long as UK tax law requires business records to be kept |
Backups
Every night a copy of the database is taken so that the service can be recovered if something goes badly wrong. It is encrypted before it leaves, with a key only Seb Moon holds, and stored with Cloudflare in the European Union, which cannot read it. Daily copies are deleted after 30 days and a monthly copy after a year. So if you delete your account, it is removed from the live service at once, but can remain inside those encrypted copies until they expire, up to a year. They are opened only to recover the service, never to look anything up.
If you use the contact form
The contact form is open to people without an account, so it asks for the things a reply needs: a name, an email address, and, only if you offer it, a phone number. They are stored with your message, used to answer you, and nothing else. No list, no newsletter. Say so in the message and they are deleted once the conversation is finished.
If you gave your details at a stall
When I talk to people about Quotidia in person, I sometimes show a code that opens a short form: your first name, your email, the language you are learning, what gets in the way, and your goal in your own words. Your name and email are kept only if you tick the box asking for a follow-up. Without the tick, only the language, the problem and the goal are kept, with nothing to say whose they are.
With the tick, I send you one email about Quotidia a few minutes later, after reading it myself. It is sent through Resend. Its button goes through a link that notes whether it was pressed, and if you later make an account with the same address, I can see that the follow-up led to it, and whether you went on to pay. There is no hidden image to tell me whether you opened it.
Every follow-up links to a page showing exactly what you gave, where one tap stops emails and another deletes all of it. Otherwise it is deleted after six months. If you made an account, what you typed is removed after six months and only the dates are kept. The legal basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time from that page, by replying, or through the contact form.
The one judgement Quotidia makes about you
Roughly once a fortnight, Quotidia looks at your own review history and works out whether the words it is showing you are ones you already know. It uses four things, all of them already listed above: how often you get settled cards right, how often you mark a brand-new word as easy, how quickly you answer, and how much has settled so far.
If all four say the same thing, it offers to introduce more new words a day. That is the entire consequence. A suggestion, on the screen at the end of a session, which you can decline and which then stays quiet for a month. It never changes anything on its own, it is not a grade or a level, and it is not shared with anyone or used for anything else.
It is mentioned here because it is the only place the app forms an opinion about you rather than simply recording what you did, and that seems worth saying out loud even though nothing turns on it.
Which screens you open
When you open a screen, Quotidia writes down one line: which screen, and when. That is the whole record. It exists so that one person can tell which parts of this are used and which are ignored, and it is read in aggregate. The question it answers is “does anybody find the puzzles”, not “what did you do on Tuesday”.
Deliberately absent from those lines: your IP address, your browser, the site you came from, your screen size, and anything else that could be combined into a fingerprint. There is no third-party script involved and nothing is sent anywhere, the lines are rows in the same database as the rest of your account, in the same country, and they are deleted with it. This is the reason the sentence above says no analyticsservice: there is measurement, and there is nobody else doing it.
What people read on the sign-up pages
On the page you sign up from (/join, which comes in a few versions, and the /for pages), Quotidia counts how long each part of the page was on your screen, in rough bands such as “5 to 15 seconds”, and whether you pressed Begin or the sign-up button. When you leave the page, one note of those counts is sent, and each one adds one to a running total. Nothing in it identifies you: no cookie, no account, no address and nothing stored in your browser, so two visits are two visits. It answers “does anybody read the section about the research”, and cannot answer anything about a person.
What is not collected
- No third-party analytics or tracking service, of any kind
- No advertising, and no data sold or shared for marketing
- No location data
- No card details, payments are taken by Stripe, and Quotidia Café never sees or stores a card number
- No microphone access. If you put a result on a photo, the photo is used on your phone and never uploaded, and the picture made from it carries no location
Cookies
Quotidia sets four cookies. All are strictly necessary and none is used for tracking: one holds your sign-in session, one records which language profile you last used, one remembers that you have passed the access code while the app is in its pilot, and one lasts fifteen minutes during a Google or Apple sign-in to make sure the reply comes back to the browser that started it. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
Some preferences (sound on or off, your chosen voice, which homepage blocks you've hidden, and whether you've dismissed a suggestion) are stored in your browser's local storage and never sent to the server.
One thing kept there is not a preference. When a card is rated and the connection drops, the rating waits in local storage until it can be sent, rather than being lost. It is your own review, held on your own device, and it goes to the server as soon as there is a connection, which is the whole reason it is kept. Nothing else queued there, and the queue empties itself.
Who processes it
| Service | Role | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting the application | United States |
| Neon | Database | European Union (Frankfurt) |
| Cloudflare | Storing the nightly backups, encrypted before they arrive, so Cloudflare cannot read them | European Union |
| Resend | Sending password-reset, welcome and support emails, and the campus follow-up if you asked for it | United States |
| Apple / Google push services | Delivering reminders, if you switch them on | Varies |
| Sentry | Error reports, so a crash can be found and fixed | European Union |
| Stripe | Taking payment, if you subscribe or buy a lifetime. Card details are given to Stripe and never reach Quotidia Café, which never sees or stores a card number | United States |
Lichess supplies the daily chess puzzle. That request is made by the server, and no information about you is sent with it.
Sentry is worth a sentence of its own, because an error reporter is usually where the promises above quietly stop being true. This one is configured not to send personal information, and then configured again to strip it: your email address, your network address, your cookies and the body of whatever request failed are all removed before anything leaves. Session recordings are off. The browser records nothing, so there is nothing to mask. What is left is the error and where in the code it happened.
The one thing sent to somebody else
Everyone in the table above works for Quotidia: they hold data on its instructions and do nothing else with it. Trustpilot is different, and the difference is worth spelling out rather than burying in a list.
Fourteen days after you create an account, Quotidia sends you one email. That email is blind-copied to Trustpilot, which is how their review invitations work, and it means Trustpilot receives your email address and uses it for their own purposes, as a company in its own right rather than as a supplier of ours. They will email you once to ask for a review. What you do about that is between you and them, and their privacy notice governs it.
It is one email, to everybody, at the same point. It is not conditional on anything you have done or said in the app, deliberately, because Trustpilot's rules require inviting everyone the same way, and because a review invitation sent only to people who seem happy is not worth having. If you would rather it did not happen, deleting your account before day fourteen prevents it, and so does telling me through the contact form.
Data sent outside the UK and EU
Two of the services above are in the United States: the hosting, and the email sender. Everything that is genuinely about you, your account, your words, your history, is in the database, which is in Frankfurt. The transfers that do happen are covered by the standard contractual clauses in those providers' data processing agreements, which is the safeguard UK and EU law asks for.
Legal basis
Your account and learning history are processed to perform the service you asked for. There is no account without them. Reminders are processed on your consent, which you give by switching them on and withdraw by switching them off. The campus follow-up is sent on your consent too, given by ticking the box and withdrawn from the link in the email.
The record of failed sign-in attempts, and the error reports, rest on legitimate interests: keeping accounts from being broken into, and keeping the app working. Both are kept to the minimum that does the job: an hour for the first, and no personal information at all in the second. You can object to processing carried out on that basis through the support form.
Your rights
Under UK and EU data protection law you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it in a form another service could read, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and object to anything being processed on the basis of legitimate interests.
Deletion is built in: Delete my account, in Settings, removes your account, profiles, learning history, puzzle progress and notification subscriptions immediately and permanently. There is no recovery, which is the point. For a copy of your data, ask through the support form.
If you think your data has been mishandled you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk. If you are in the European Union, you can complain to the data protection authority in the country where you live instead.
Children
Quotidia isn't designed for or aimed at children, and accounts shouldn't be created for them. The age at which somebody can agree to a service like this for themselves is 13 in the UK and between 13 and 16 across the EU, depending on the country.
Changes
If this changes in a way that affects you, the date at the top will change and the difference will be noted here.
Quotidia Café is a trading name of Seb Moon, a sole trader, The Incubator, Holywell Building, Holywell Way, Loughborough LE11 3UZ, United Kingdom. Questions about anything on this page: contact@quotidiacafe.com, or the support form inside the app.