All Collections
About RemNote
Privacy of Your Notes
Privacy of Your Notes

Your notes always belong to you, and access to them is limited to very specific, necessary situations.

Soren Bjornstad avatar
Written by Soren Bjornstad
Updated over a week ago

RemNote recognizes that you can only make full use of a note-taking app if you trust your data will be safe and private. We take your privacy very seriously.

This article is a human-friendly summary and not a legal guarantee; the privacy policy governs.

Can RemNote staff see my notes?

No human at RemNote will ever look at your notes unless you explicitly give us permission to, using one of the following methods:

  • Enabling the Support Access setting for a synced knowledge base to help us resolve a problem. This access will be automatically revoked 60 days after you turn it on.

  • Sending us an exported copy of all or part of your notes to help us resolve a problem.

  • Explicitly sharing a document with the RemNote Community, or sharing a document as unlisted and giving us the link.

We restrict access to the systems that store your notes to a very small number of people, and anybody violating this policy would be subject to immediate termination.

We don’t currently offer end-to-end encryption (which would make it fundamentally impossible for us to see your notes, rather than merely very difficult and against policy), but it’s something we’re considering in the future.

We may collect statistics on your performance on spaced-repetition flashcards in order to tune our algorithms and make learning more effective for everyone. This may involve humans looking at your learning statistics. However, these will not include the actual text on your flashcards – only metadata like when you reviewed them and how hard you said they were.

Can third parties see my notes?

In a handful of situations, we send small amounts of your data to our partners in order to provide services to you. The exact list may be updated from time to time:

  • When you paste a link to a website, DuckDuckGo’s favicon service receives the domain name (e.g., google.com) of the link you pasted and sends back the icon for that website. DuckDuckGo does not track you or store these domain names, and it doesn’t receive the name of the specific page on that site you’re looking at.

  • When you upload a document that is not a PDF (e.g., a .docx file), we send a copy to CloudConvert to convert it to a PDF so you can annotate it. CloudConvert deletes all copies of the file within 24 hours of completing conversion; you can read their full privacy policy for details. To be extra safe, we also ask for your permission before sending files to CloudConvert when you’re using a local knowledge base.

  • When you use certain AI features, snippets of your notes will be sent to OpenAI for processing. You can review OpenAI’s privacy policy. If you aren’t comfortable with OpenAI’s tools seeing parts of your notes, you can turn off the Enable AI Features option in Settings > Flashcards and these features will not be available for your account.

We will never sell or monetize any of your data – you own your notes, and we earn money through subscription fees, not by making you the product.

RemNote plugins are a slightly different matter; they may share data with third parties not listed here, potentially including the text of your notes. However, we don't approve plugins that lack a good reason for such data-sharing, and we require that all plugins that share data clearly explain who is getting what data on their details page (access this page by clicking on the plugin in Settings > Plugins and Themes). If you're working with sensitive information in your knowledge base, you should read that details page for any plugins you install to understand what they might do with your data.

Can other users see my notes?

Your notes are not visible to any other RemNote users except for in the following (hopefully obvious) situations:

  • When you explicitly share documents using the Share function.

    • You can choose to share documents publicly, in which case they will be listed on your RemNote profile page and searchable within the Shared Flashcards area of RemNote and through web search engines. Or you can share them as unlisted, in which case they will not be searchable and someone will need to have the (long and randomly generated, not guessable) URL in order to view them.

    • Other users cannot modify notes you share using the Share function under any circumstances.

Can I keep my notes off RemNote’s servers entirely?

Yes! If you’re working with data that’s too sensitive to take even the risks above, you can use a local knowledge base. No data in a local knowledge base is ever sent to our servers.

Of course, the tradeoff is that you won't be able to access local knowledge bases on other devices, and you'll need to take responsibility for making your own off-site backups.

Is my data encrypted?

Data is encrypted at rest on our servers, and is encrypted over the wire with SSL/TLS, per industry standard practices. We host your data in MongoDB Atlas, using AWS as the underlying data store.

As noted above, we don’t currently offer end-to-end encryption, but we’re considering that as an extra layer of protection in the future.

Privacy Hub & Privacy Policy

If you have further questions, you may also wish to visit our Privacy Hub and review the Privacy Policy.

Did this answer your question?