Privacy

In effect since 21 August 2026 · Bottlegram is published by Bulb Mode SRL Semplificata, Via Ancona 15, 60035 Jesi (AN), Italy · VAT IT02730980428

This page does not know who you are. Neither does the sea. What follows is the whole of it, written to be read.

The short version

Bottlegram never asks your name, your email address, your phone number, your contacts or your location in order to use it. There is no signup form. When you first open the app, an anonymous account is created for you — a random identifier, and nothing attached to it. There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking of any kind, in the app or on this site.

There is exactly one place where you may choose to give a name and an email address: the “Write to us” form in the Wreck Emporium, and only so that we can write back. Both fields are optional, the message is sent whether you fill them or not, and nothing you write there is ever connected to your letters or to your account in the app.

What the sea keeps

To carry letters between strangers, the sea has to remember a few things:

• An anonymous account — a random identifier created on your first launch. It is not linked to your name, email, or any identity, because none was ever asked.
• Your beach and your language — the stretch of coast you were cast on, and the language you write in, so the tide can favour letters you will understand.
• Your letters — what you write and what you receive, with the times of throwing, landfall and reading. Letters are the app; without them there is nothing to deliver.
• Reports and blocks — if you report a letter to the Sea or block a correspondent, that is remembered, so the tide never brings you together again.
• What you own — whether you have bought the sextant, the bonfire, the seal you press on your letters, or the other things from the Wreck Emporium. Purchases go through Apple; we never see your payment details, only that the purchase happened.
• What you write to us — if you use the “Write to us” form, we keep your message, the app version and the language it was written in, plus the name and email address you chose to leave, if you left any. It is kept so a bug can be chased and a question answered, and it is the only place in Bottlegram where an email address exists at all.

The nicknames you give a correspondent stay on your device. They are your private marginalia; the sea never sees them.

Your own wax seal is different, and it is worth being plain about it: the emblem and colour you choose in the Emporium are kept by the sea and travel on the letters you send, because their whole purpose is that other castaways can recognise you across messages. Everyone who reads a letter of yours sees your seal. It says nothing about who you are — it is a drawing — but it is not private.

What the sea never asks

Your location is never read. The weather on your beach is real, but it is the weather of the beach — the app asks a weather service (Open-Meteo) about the sky over a shore you are not on, using the beach's coordinates, not yours. Notifications are scheduled locally on your device by the app itself; there is no push server watching you.

Who else touches a letter

A few services do narrow work under our instruction, and each sees only what its work requires:

• Supabase hosts the sea — the database where accounts and letters live.
• Google Translate translates a letter when you ask it to, and sees that letter's text to do so.
• Anthropic writes the letters of the spirits of the sea. Some castaways are not people: they are spirits, and their correspondences are marked as such in the app. When you write to a spirit, your letters in that correspondence are processed by an AI model (Claude) so the spirit can answer.
• Apple handles every purchase. Payment happens entirely on their side.
• Resend delivers the messages sent from the “Write to us” form to our mailbox, and sees what that message contains — including the name and address you chose to leave. It never touches your letters.

One more pair of eyes, and it is human: when a letter is reported, a person reads it — that letter and that correspondence, nothing else — to decide whether the sea keeps its writer. This happens within a day of the report.

Leaving the sea

You can delete your account from inside the app, in the Wreck Emporium. It is immediate and it is complete: your account, your letters, your correspondences, your reports and blocks — all of it leaves the sea, including your letters on the sands of those who received them. There is no archive and no way back; a new launch of the app is a new castaway.

Deleting the app without leaving the sea removes everything from your device, but your beach waits for you in the sea until you return or leave it properly.

Your rights

Whatever the law of your shore grants you — access, correction, erasure, objection — you can exercise by writing to the lighthouse. Erasure you can also do yourself, in the app, without asking anyone. Because accounts are anonymous, we can only act on the account you write from or describe to us; we cannot look anyone up by name, because we do not have names.

Children

Bottlegram is a place where strangers write to strangers, and it is not directed at children. It is not for anyone under 13, and the app asks your date of birth before it lets you in.

Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Nothing will ever be collected quietly that this page does not say out loud.