Mnemose Privacy Policy
Last updated 11 November 2026
The short version. Your photographs stay in your Google Drive. We relay them to the people you choose and we do not keep copies. We do not sell your data, we do not show advertising, and we do not profile you. If Mnemose disappeared tomorrow, your originals would still be yours.
What we do store is the information needed to make sharing work: your Google account details, who you are connected to, which albums are shared with whom, and the comments people write.
Mnemose is a private photo-sharing app for families and small groups. This policy explains what information the app collects, why, and what you can do about it. It applies to the Mnemose mobile app and its backend service.
What we collect
| Information | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Your Google account identifier, email address, name and profile picture URL | To sign you in and to show your name and picture to people you share with |
| A Google Drive authorisation token, encrypted — album owners only | So the app can put photographs into your Drive and read them back for the people you shared with |
| Photograph records: a Google Drive file reference, file type, size, dimensions and the date the photo was taken | To display albums without downloading every photograph first |
| Your connections, your circles, and which albums are shared with whom | This is what decides who may see what |
| Comments you write, and short excerpts of them shown in notifications | To show conversations on photographs |
| Sign-in sessions, invitation codes (stored only as a one-way hash), and a record of photographs moved between albums | Security, and so a failed action leaves a trace we can investigate |
What we deliberately do not collect
- Location. Photographs often carry GPS coordinates. We read only the dimensions and the date, and discard everything else before storing anything. The original file in your Drive keeps its full information; our database never sees where a photograph was taken.
- Tracking and advertising. The app does not use the advertising identifier and does not track you across other companies' apps or websites.
- Crash reports and usage statistics. The app does not contain any analytics or crash-reporting service today. We may add one later (Google Firebase) to find crashes and learn which features are used. If we do, it will collect only technical and usage information: device model, operating system version, app version, crash details, and which screens and buttons are used. It will never receive your photographs, comment text, album names or contacts, it will not use the advertising identifier, and we will list it under Service providers below.
- Your contacts, calendar, messages or other files. We never ask for them.
Where your photographs actually live
This is the part that makes Mnemose different, so it is worth being precise.
Photographs are stored in the Google Drive of whoever owns the album, inside a folder the app creates. They are not stored on our servers.
When someone you shared with opens an album, our server fetches the photograph from the owner's Drive and passes it through to that person. We do this rather than sharing the Drive folder itself, because it means access can be genuinely enforced and genuinely revoked — when you remove someone, they stop being served, immediately. We pass those bytes through; we do not retain them.
The app also creates small and medium-sized versions of each photograph so that browsing is fast. These are stored alongside the original, in the same owner's Drive — not in our own storage.
Being honest about what this does and does not protect
Mnemose is not end-to-end encrypted. Your photographs are readable by Google, as any file in Google Drive is, and in principle by us, because our server handles them in order to relay them. What we promise is ownership and no exploitation: the originals are yours, they stay in your account, and we do not mine, sell, profile or advertise against any of it. We would rather say that plainly than claim a secrecy we cannot deliver.
Google user data, and the limits on our access
Mnemose requests a single, narrow Google Drive permission: drive.file. Google
enforces this on their side, per file. It means the app can only ever see files it created itself —
every other file in your Drive is invisible to us, and would remain invisible even
if our systems were compromised. We never request full Drive access, and we do not use the Google
file picker.
Mnemose's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Who can see your information
- People you share an album with can see the photographs in it, the comments on them, and the names and pictures of the other people who can see that album. An album works like a room: the people in it know who else is there.
- Scanning someone's invitation code connects you to them and shares nothing. Sharing is always a separate, deliberate act afterwards.
- Nobody else. There is no public profile, no discovery, no search for other users, and no feed assembled from people you have not chosen.
Service providers
We rely on three: Google (sign-in, and Drive storage of your photographs), Apple (Sign in with Apple, and subscription payments) and Amazon Web Services (hosting our server and database, in the Asia Pacific region). We do not share your information with anyone else, and we do not sell it to anyone, ever.
We may disclose information if we are legally required to. If that happens we will tell the people affected, unless we are prohibited from doing so.
Keeping it, and deleting it
- Deleting a photograph deletes it for real. It is removed from Google Drive permanently. There is no "remove from album but keep the file", and there is no undo. The app says so before you confirm.
- Comments and album structure are kept for as long as the album exists.
- Uninstalling the app does not delete anything, in your Drive or in our database. If you want your data gone, ask us — see below.
Revoking our access to your Drive
You can withdraw the app's Drive permission at any time from your Google account, under Third-party apps with account access. Photographs stop being served immediately. Your files stay in your Drive, untouched; you can move or delete them yourself.
Deleting your account and data
You can ask us to delete your Mnemose account and the data described above at any time. The full process, what is removed and what is not, is set out on our account deletion page.
Security
Connections between the app and our servers use HTTPS. Your Google Drive authorisation token is encrypted before it is stored, using AES-256-GCM, so that a copy of our database alone does not expose it. Access to every photograph is checked on every single request, against a single authorisation routine, rather than being cached or assumed.
No system is perfect, and we do not claim otherwise. What we can say is that the amount of sensitive material we hold is deliberately small — the photographs are not ours to lose.
Children
Mnemose is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. Photographs of children may of course appear in a family album; those photographs belong to the account holder who uploaded them and are governed by this policy like any other.
International transfers
Our servers are in the Asia Pacific (Singapore) region. If you use Mnemose from elsewhere, your information is transferred and processed there.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how your information is handled, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions, deletion requests, or anything else about your privacy: bubufff@gmail.com