Today is one of our favorites among the recently created holidays: Data Privacy Day. Started in Europe and later making its way to the US, Data Privacy Day is meant to encourage dialog, tools, and action around protecting personally identifiable information on the internet.

Protecting your user data is incredibly important to us, and it’s a philosophy we use throughout Bear’s design. While our emphasis on data privacy may limit our ability to build some features for now, we believe your notes are yours. That’s why:

• We cannot access your notes. Bear stores them on your device or, with Bear Pro, syncs them to your other devices via iCloud. Your notes never pass through our servers, largely because we don’t have any 😄
• You can encrypt notes and lock Bear. With Bear Pro, you can encrypt individual notes and lock Bear with your device passcode and Face/Touch ID. In short, this means that even if someone were to get their hands on your device or your Bear note database, they still couldn’t read encrypted notes without your passcode. Even we couldn’t get into them. They’re yours.
• We can’t see how you use Bear. There are no analytics in the app to watch which tags you create or how you use it. The only thing present is a 100-percent-anonymous crash log reporter, to help us diagnose and fix bugs.
• You control your notes. We don’t do lock-in. Bear stores your notes in open, portable formats like Markdown and TextBundle, depending on their contents. Notes can be exported to a variety of other formats, and the database can be accessed on a Mac even if Bear isn’t installed.
• The upcoming web app is still private. Technically, we’ll need a server to provide the actual app. But that app, once in your browser, will still talk directly to iCloud to read and edit your notes. We still won’t be able to access them, and we want it that way.

We celebrate #DataPrivacyDay, today and every day, with Bear. You can learn more about us as a company, our approach to building Bear, and our commitment to standards and privacy in The who, what, and why of Bear.

You can also let us know what you think on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, or directly at bear@shinyfrog.net.