Athene
for iPhone and iPadPrivacy Policy
Athene for iPhone and iPad · Effective 21 September 2026
The short version. Athene has no user accounts and no server of its own. It collects no personal information, contains no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising identifier and no third-party SDKs. Your books, your reading position, your highlights and your notes stay on your device. The only computers Athene ever contacts are ones you choose: a calibre server, your own model server, or an AI provider you supply a key for.
Who is responsible
Athene is made by Aditya Sreedhar, an independent developer. This policy covers the Athene app for iOS and iPadOS and this website. Questions go to athene@theadipost.com.
What Athene stores, and where
Everything below is kept in Athene’s own storage on your device. None of it is transmitted to the developer, because there is no developer-operated server to transmit it to.
- Your books. EPUB and PDF files you add, and the covers, chapter text and layout caches derived from them.
- Your reading. Which book is open, your position in it, bookmarks, highlights and notes.
- Your settings. Typeface, type size, margins, page-turn style, reading theme, library arrangement and collections.
- Server details you enter. The address and username for your calibre server, and the address of an Ollama server if you configure one, are kept in the app’s own settings storage inside its sandboxed container. Secrets are not. Your calibre password and, if you supply one, the Owl’s provider key are held in the iOS Keychain, marked to this device only, never in an iCloud Keychain and never in an unencrypted backup. All of it is sent only to the server you named.
Deleting the app removes all of it. There is no copy anywhere else.
What leaves your device
Athene makes network connections in three situations, all of them started by you.
- You connect to a calibre library
- Your username and password for that server, and ordinary requests to browse and download books, go to the calibre-web or OPDS server whose address you typed in. Athene talks to that server directly. Nothing is relayed through the developer or any third party.
- You ask the Owl a question, having configured an Ollama server
- Your question and the passage of the book you asked about go to the Ollama server whose address you typed in, normally a machine on your own network. Athene talks to that server directly; nothing is relayed through the developer. If you have not chosen this setting, this connection is never made.
- You ask the Owl a question, having supplied your own API key
- Your question and the passage of the book you asked about go to the provider you picked (Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenRouter), together with your API key so that provider can identify the request as yours. Athene sends this straight to the provider; nothing is relayed through the developer, who never sees your question, your books or your key. What the provider does with it afterwards, including how long it is kept, is governed by that provider’s own privacy policy and the terms of the account your key belongs to. Your key is stored in the iOS Keychain on your device and is sent nowhere else.
Athene makes no other connections. It does not phone home on launch, does not check for updates, and does not fetch remote configuration, advertisements or content of any kind. If Athene ever sells something, the purchase would be handled entirely by Apple’s App Store under Apple’s privacy policy; Athene would learn only whether the purchase is valid.
The Owl and Apple Intelligence
When the Owl uses Apple Intelligence, which is how it is set up until you change it, the text of your question and the passage it is about stay on your device and are not transmitted anywhere. Apple’s on-device foundation models are covered by Apple’s own privacy terms.
The Owl has two other settings, and both send that text off your device: your own Ollama server, or an AI provider you supply an API key for. Both are listed above. Athene names which one is answering on the line above every reply, and asks you to confirm before the first time it sends anything to either.
Local network
iOS asks for permission before an app can talk to devices on your local network. Athene asks for it because your calibre or Ollama server is usually on your local network. Athene uses that permission only to reach the addresses you typed in; it does not scan the network or discover other devices.
What Athene does not do
- No accounts, sign-in, or profile of any kind.
- No analytics, telemetry, usage measurement or crash reporting.
- No advertising, no advertising identifier (IDFA), no tracking across apps or websites, and nothing shared with data brokers.
- No third-party SDKs collecting anything.
- No sale or sharing of personal information. Athene has none to sell.
Children
Athene is suitable for readers of any age and collects no personal information from anyone, including children under 13. Because nothing is collected, there is nothing to request the deletion of.
Your rights
Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights of access, correction, deletion and portability over personal data a company holds about you. Athene holds none: the developer has no database, no logs and no record that you exist. Data on your own device is yours; you can inspect, export or erase it by using the app, or remove all of it at once by deleting the app.
This website
This site is a set of static pages. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads nothing from anyone else’s servers. The host processes standard server request information as part of delivering the page.
Changes
If this policy changes, the revised version is posted here with a new effective date. Material changes to how Athene handles information will also be described in the App Store release notes for the version that introduces them.