How Zircel works, in plain words. The legal texts are the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service.
Private Circle: its members, and someone you invited while the invitation is waiting (a read-only look before they accept).
Public Circle: its members read all its Notes. Anyone can find it and see its 5 most useful Notes on its join page, even without an account.
Zircel's sample Circles (Ben's - a made-up person and his made-up places) can be read by anyone, even without an account. Nothing of yours is in them.
"My eyes only": only you, and anyone you share that one Note with.
A shared Note: the people you shared it with see that one Note, not the rest of its Circle.
These rules are enforced by the database itself, not only by the app's screens.
Your username. Your email address is never shown to anyone.
Your location is added to a Note only when you choose to add it - never in the background. Before your phone asks for location, Zircel says what it is for and asks you first. In the Android app you can allow location "all the time" so a location reminder fires with Zircel closed: your phone does the watching, and Zircel learns only that the reminder fired, not where you are.
Blocks made earlier still apply: neither person sees the other's Notes or profile.
Messages in a Circle's chat are read by its members and kept 365 days, unless the Circle's owner changes that.
Your Collections (how you group your Circles), stars and reminders are always private: nobody else sees them.
In a database in Ireland (Supabase), encrypted on disk. Everything between your device and Zircel travels encrypted (HTTPS). Photos are kept in private storage and shown through short-lived links.
Zircel is not end-to-end encrypted: the person who runs Zircel and the hosting companies can technically access stored data.
So your Circles open at once, your phone (or browser) keeps a copy of your Circles list, your Collections and the Notes of your Circles. It stays there after you log out, so the app opens fast when you come back; another account on the same phone can't read it. Deleting your account deletes it from the phone you delete it on, and so does clearing the browser's site data.
Zircel counts how a Circle is read - how many people read it, which Notes are opened, what was searched for and not found - for Insights, a page for the Circle's owner that is hidden for now. Only counts, never names, and only once 3 or more people did the same (2 for search words). The database keeps your part under a code it can't trace back to you.
Text is sent to AI when you use an AI feature, and for one thing Zircel does by itself:
AI requests go through OpenRouter, only to AI providers that say they neither store nor train on what they are sent. If OpenRouter can't answer, short requests go to Groq, set to keep nothing that is sent.
Place lookups: when you look up a place or name a location, the place text or coordinates go from Zircel's server to Google's place search or to OpenStreetMap to find place names - without your name or your phone's address. A pasted Google Maps link is sent to Google to find the place it points to. Map pictures load from OpenStreetMap straight into your browser.
AI off: a Circle's owner can turn off "Allow AI to search" in Edit Circle (the pen beside its name). Then no Note from that Circle is sent to AI at all; keyword search still works.
A deleted Note stays in Me > Deleted Notes for 30 days. It is kept 60 days in all, so the person who runs Zircel can still recover it, then it is removed for good - also when you delete it forever sooner.
A deleted Circle is kept 30 days for the person who runs Zircel, then removed for good.
To delete your account, see Delete your account below.
Everything Zircel holds about you - your profile, Circles, Notes, stars, reminders and more - as one file.
Log in to download yours.
In the app or at zircel.app: log in, then go to Me > Settings > Privacy Policy > Your data in Zircel and tap Delete account. You are asked twice; then it is done at once.
Can't log in? Email hello@zircel.app from the address you signed up with and ask us to delete your account. We delete it within 30 days.
What is deleted: your account and profile, your Notes and their photos, your comments and chat messages, your stars, reminders and Collections, and Circles that only you are in.
What stays: a Circle you own that other people are in passes to the member who joined it first. Notes you wrote in Circles that go on existing stay there for their other members, kept by Zircel instead of you. Notes you had deleted before are kept up to 60 days from when you deleted them, then removed for good. Provider backups and logs are kept for the providers' own limited time. The operator also keeps encrypted backup copies of the database for up to 90 days; when an account is deleted, its data drops out of these copies as older ones are removed.