Privacy
In effect 21 October 2026
The short version
We store your email address, the material you are learning (including any real people you choose to add), the mnemonics you write, and the record of which things you got right — because the last one is what decides when to ask you again.
We do not sell it or advertise against it. We do measure how the site is used, through a service called HeyCatch: which pages are visited and what is clicked, and, if you are signed in, who you are. There are no tracking cookies. Details below.
You can delete all of it yourself, whenever you want.
Made and hosted in Canada — the server is in Ontario. Four things cross the border: email, paying, signing in with Google or Microsoft if you choose it, and usage statistics. Details below.
This policy covers BetterMemory only. Everything below describes what the service actually does today — not what it might do later. If that changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.
What we store
Your account
Your email address, the name you choose to be called, and a hashed version of your password. The password itself is never stored and cannot be worked back out of the hash — which is also why we can reset a password but never tell you your old one.
If you sign in with Google or Microsoft instead, there is no password here at all. We receive three things from them and keep only those: an account identifier that means nothing outside this service, your email address, and your display name. We do not receive, and cannot ask for, anything else — not your contacts, not your files, not your calendar. You can set a password later and disconnect them, and we will not let you remove the last way into your own account.
Your email address is used to confirm the address is yours, to let you reset your password, and for messages about your own account — including when a subscription starts, is cancelled, ends, or a payment fails. It is not used for marketing.
What you are learning
The material you work on and the mnemonics you write for it. On the names track that can include people you have actually met and chosen to add. For each one we keep only what you type: their first name, their last name if you give it, a few words about where you met, which feature of their face caught your eye (picked from a short list, such as “nose” or “ears”), what their name sounds like to you, and the picture you made up. There is no way to upload a photo of anyone, by design.
A word about other people
Some of what you save here is information about someone else — a person who is not using BetterMemory and has not agreed to anything.
Treat it the way you would treat a private notebook. Put in what you need to remember someone and nothing more, and do not record anything about a person that they would object to you writing down.
You can delete one person at any time from your list of people you have met; their name, every picture you made for them and their review history go together.
On our side: this is never shown to other users, never used to build a profile of anybody, never shared, and never matched against what other users have saved. If someone contacts us about information another user has stored about them, we will deal with it honestly and case by case.
Your review history
Which items you were asked about, how you graded yourself, and when. This is not analytics. It is the input to the scheduling that decides when to show you something again, and without it the product does not work — a technique for encoding things is only half of remembering them.
Ordinary server logs
The web server records requests in the normal way, including IP addresses, and we keep short-lived counters of failed sign-in attempts so that an automated attack on someone's account can be slowed down. These are operational records, not a profile of you, and they are not linked to what you are learning.
What we do not do
- No advertising. There are no ads and no ad networks.
- No tracking for advertising. We measure how the site is used (see HeyCatch below), but none of it is used to target ads or to follow you to other sites, and no tracking cookies are set.
- No selling or sharing. Your data is not sold, rented, or handed to anyone for their own purposes.
- No training on your content. The mnemonics you write are yours; they are not used to build anything else.
Who else touches your data
Resend delivers our email, so it necessarily receives your address and the contents of the messages we send you — account confirmations, password resets and notices about your subscription. It processes them on our instruction and for nothing else.
Google and Microsoft, but only if you choose to sign in with them. Doing so tells that company you have an account here and when you signed in, which is unavoidable — it is how the sign-in works. It is also the whole of it: they get nothing about what you are learning, what you write, or how you are doing. If you would rather they did not know, use an email address and a password instead; everything in the service works exactly the same either way.
Stripe handles payments. When you subscribe, you are sent to a page Stripe runs, and you enter your card details there — they never touch our server and we never see them. Stripe tells us only that a subscription started, what plan it is, whether it is paid, and when it renews. We keep that, and an identifier Stripe uses for you. We do not receive your card number, and we could not charge you outside the plan you chose even if we wanted to.
Your email address goes to Stripe so they can send receipts and reach you about a payment that failed. If you cancel, you do that on a Stripe page too. Stripe keeps its own records of the payment for as long as its rules and the law require, which is separate from us and outlives deleting your BetterMemory account — we cannot erase a payment record on their side, and neither can they, for a while. Deleting your BetterMemory account cancels your subscription with Stripe first, immediately, so nothing further is charged.
HeyCatch, a United States company, measures how the site is used, so we can see how people find it and where they get stuck. A script from HeyCatch records the pages you visit, the buttons and links you press, where your visit came from, and your browser and device type. For what you press, it records the label on it, so this can include words shown on the page, which sometimes means a name or an image you are learning. The screens for people you have added yourself (their list, the form you fill in, and their cards when you review) are switched off for this, so nothing you press there is recorded. The page address it does record carries only a number for that person, never their name. It does not record what you type into a form.
It keeps a random identifier in your browser so that repeat visits count as one person. If you have an account, it also receives your account number, your email address, your name and the date you joined, so that it can tell us who signed up and how they use the site. Links in our emails that carry a one-time code (a password reset, confirming your address) have that code removed before anything is sent. If your browser sends Do Not Track, none of this happens.
How long we keep it, and how to get rid of it
Unlike a one-off tool, this service is built around your work persisting — so nothing here is deleted on a timer. Your account and its contents are kept until you delete them.
You can delete your account and everything in it yourself, at any time, from your account page — no email, no waiting on us. It removes your email address, your saved material (including the people you added), your mnemonics, your review history, and any connected Google or Microsoft sign-in. Before you confirm, the page shows you the count of each of those things, so you can see exactly what is about to go. You can also delete a single person you added, from your list of people you have met.
It is immediate, and we cannot undo it. Our nightly backups still hold a copy for a while afterwards. They are kept for 30 days on our server and on a second machine we run, both in Ontario, so the last backup that could contain your account is gone within about two months. Backups are only ever used to recover from a failure; if we ever had to restore one, we would delete your account again. If you would rather ask a person, the contact address below still works. Server logs age out on their own within a few weeks.
Keeping it safe
The site is served over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt. Email confirmation and password reset links are stored only as hashes, so reading the database does not yield a working link, and each one expires and can be used once. Changing your password signs out every other device.
No system is perfect and anyone claiming otherwise is overselling. If something goes wrong in a way that affects you, we will tell you.
Where your data lives
BetterMemory is made and hosted in Canada. It is built and run from Ontario, and the server holding your account, your saved material and your review history is physically in Ontario, and so are its backups. That data is not replicated to a foreign cloud and does not leave the country.
There are four exceptions, and they are worth stating plainly rather than burying, because a claim like the one above is only worth anything if it is exact.
Email leaves Canada. We send account mail through Resend, a
United States company, which delivers via infrastructure in the US
(us-east-1). So your email address, and the contents of the
messages we send you, are processed there.
Paying leaves Canada. Stripe is a United States company. If you subscribe, your card details go to them directly and your email address and subscription record are processed there. Billing in Canadian dollars does not change that — the money is ours and Canadian, the processing is not.
Signing in with Google or Microsoft leaves Canada, if you choose to use it. The sign-in itself happens on that company's servers, which are American, so the fact that you have an account here and the time you signed in are known to them and processed there. Nothing about what you are learning goes with it. Using an email address and a password instead keeps the whole of it inside the country, and the service is identical either way.
Usage statistics leave Canada. HeyCatch is a United States company and processes them there. That covers the pages you visit and what you press, including the labels described above, and, if you have an account, your email address and name.
Everything else — the material you are learning, the mnemonics you wrote, what you got right and when — stays on the Ontario server, apart from any words that appear on something you press. That exception never covers the people you added yourself: those screens are not measured at all.
Your rights
BetterMemory is run from Ontario, Canada. Canadian federal privacy law (PIPEDA) gives you the right to ask what personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected if it is wrong, and to withdraw consent. You can also delete it outright — yourself, from your account page, or by asking us — and download a copy of all of it, from your account page.
Ask using the contact address below and we will answer. If you are in the UK or EU, the equivalent rights under the GDPR are honoured in the same way.
Children
This is not built for children and we do not create accounts for anyone under 14: signing up asks for a birth month and year, and refuses anyone younger. If you believe a child has signed up anyway, tell us and the account will be removed.
Changes to this policy
If what we do changes, this page is updated and the date at the top moves with it. Changes that materially affect what we collect or who sees it will be emailed to account holders rather than quietly posted.
Contact
Privacy questions, access requests, and deletion requests all go to hello@bettermemory.ca, and are handled by Jeff Brand, who operates BetterMemory. Mail to that address is forwarded to his own inbox, which is hosted in the United States, so what you write to us does leave Canada.