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: anyone signed in to Zircel.
"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 place reminder fires with Zircel closed: your phone does the watching, and Zircel learns only that the reminder fired, not where you are.
If you block someone, neither of you sees the other's Notes or profile.
Messages in a Circle's chat are read by its members and kept 30 days, unless the Circle's owner changes that.
A comment you send under a Note is read only by that Note's owner.
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.
The owner of a Circle you read sees Insights - how many people read it, which Notes are opened and saved, what was searched for and not found. 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 only when you use an AI feature:
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 this Circle" 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.
You can delete your account at the bottom of this page.
Everything Zircel holds about you - your profile, Circles, Notes, stars, reminders and more - as one file.
Log in to download yours.