OpenAloud

Privacy Policy

OpenAloud turns your books into speech on your own device. There is no account to create, nothing to sign in to, and nothing about what you read leaves your machine. This page is the specific, checkable version of that claim.

Last updated 2 September 2026.

The short version. Your books, your reading position, your highlights and any voice recording you make stay on your device. We collect a small amount of anonymous usage data — counts and timings, with no account, no cookie and no identifier that could point back to you — so we can tell whether the app is working. We do not sell data, we run no advertising, and we include no third-party trackers.

What never leaves your device

All of the following is stored locally and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else:

The books you open. EPUB, PDF and text files you import are held in local browser storage on the web, and in the app's own data folder on macOS and Android. Their contents are never uploaded.
What the app reads aloud. Speech is generated on your device. The text of a sentence is never sent anywhere to be spoken.
Your reading position, highlights, notes and reading streak.
Voice recordings. If you record a sample to create a custom narrator, the recording is processed on your device and is never uploaded. It is not sent to us, and it is not used to train anything.
Your settings, including chosen narrator, speed and theme.

What we do collect

One thing: anonymous product-usage analytics, sent to our own self-hosted instance at app.analite.dev. There is no third-party analytics provider involved. Each event carries:

which surface it came from (web, macOS, Android) and which in-app screen — for example /library or /read. Never a book title, file name or book identifier.
the name of the event and a small set of properties: for example that narration started, which narrator was used, or how many milliseconds passed before audio began.
the referring page, on the web only, so we can tell where visitors arrive from.
your browser's User-Agent string, from which we derive coarse browser, device type and operating-system labels.
a two-letter country code, which Cloudflare derives from your IP address at the network edge. The IP address itself is not stored.

There is no account, no login, no advertising identifier, and no cookie used for analytics. We cannot look up an individual person in this data, and we do not attempt to.

One honest detail rather than a blanket "no cookies" claim: visits are counted without cookies by reading a standard HTTP caching header (Last-Modified / If-Modified-Since) that your browser already sends. It contains no identifier and cannot be used to recognise you across sites, but it is client-side state, so we would rather name it than imply it does not exist.

What we do not collect

No names, email addresses, phone numbers or postal addresses.
No payment information. OpenAloud is free and has no in-app purchases.
No contacts, photos, calendars, location beyond country, or health data.
No advertising or cross-app tracking identifiers. We do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not share data with data brokers.
No titles, authors, file names or contents of anything you read.

Downloading the narrator voices

The desktop and Android apps download their speech models — about 165 MB — the first time you open them, from Hugging Face, at a pinned revision. That request goes to Hugging Face's servers, which will see your IP address as any file download would; it is subject to their privacy policy. The request contains nothing about you or your library. After the download completes, narration works with no network connection at all.

Microphone

The apps ask for microphone access only if you choose to record a sample to make a custom narrator. Recording happens on your device, the audio never leaves it, and declining the permission does not affect anything else in the app.

Children

OpenAloud is a reading app suitable for general audiences and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, of any age, because we do not collect personal information at all.

Your choices and your rights

Because the analytics contain no identifier, there is no profile of you for us to export, correct or delete — there is nothing tied to you in the first place. If you would like the app to stop reporting usage entirely, or you have a question about anything on this page, write to us and we will answer.

Everything the app stores about your reading is on your own device, so you can remove all of it at any time by deleting a book, clearing the app's data, or uninstalling the app.

Changes to this policy

If what we collect ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top is updated. Material changes will be noted on the OpenAloud home page as well.

Contact

OpenAloud is made by Ashish Chaudhari. For any privacy question or request, email chaudhari.ashish@live.com.