Privacy

Last updated 30 August 2026

memex.tools is built and run by one developer, not a company, and that developer is the data controller for everything described here. In this policy “memex”, “we” and “us” mean the developer, operating memex.tools. For anything on this page, including exercising your rights, write to hello@memex.tools.

This is a small service run by one person. This policy tries to say plainly what happens to your information rather than cover every eventuality in language nobody reads.

What we collect

When you ask for an invite. Your email address and whatever you write in the free-text field. Nothing else. We use it to decide who to invite and to send you an invitation. We keep it while the Early Access programme runs and delete it within thirty days of the programme ending. Ask us to delete it sooner and we will.

When you have an account. Your email address and the settings you choose. There is no password: you sign in through Google, GitHub, Microsoft or Apple, in which case we receive the account identifier and email address that provider gives us, or with a single-use link sent to your address.

Your notes. Everything you write, upload, or ask memex to fetch from a URL. Tags, links between notes, edit history, and deleted notes still inside their recovery window.

Operational logs. Ordinary web server and application logs, which include IP addresses and timestamps. The application log is kept for fourteen days. The web server log is rotated on the operating system’s own fourteen-day schedule rather than one memex sets.

Analytics, and what it sees. memex uses Google Analytics to count visits: how many people arrive, which pages they open, and roughly where in the world they are. It sets Google’s analytics cookies in your browser. What memex itself tells it is the KIND of page rather than the page — /notes/:id, not the note you are reading — and never a note’s title or its text. But Google’s own script reads the address bar whenever you move around inside the app, and the address bar holds the note’s number, what you searched for, and the tags you filtered by. So assume that which notes you opened and what you typed into the search box reach Google, and do not type into that box anything you would not type into Google’s. What is written inside a note does not. There is no advertising and no remarketing, and nothing about you is sold. Your browser also stores a few display preferences locally, such as theme and text size; those never reach us.

One consequence of memex holding your own writing: if a note you wrote embeds an image hosted somewhere else, your browser fetches that image from wherever you pointed it, and that site sees the request. That is your note doing what you told it to, not memex sending anything.

How your information is protected

Your connection to memex is encrypted in transit. Storage sits on Amazon’s infrastructure and inherits the encryption at rest that Amazon applies to its disks and buckets by default; the one thing memex encrypts itself, with a key it holds separately, is the bundle of credentials in each backup. The database dump and the note archives are not separately encrypted by memex on top of Amazon’s.

memex.tools has no passwords. You sign in with an account you already hold elsewhere — Google, GitHub, Microsoft or Apple — or with a single-use link sent to your address, which works once and expires in an hour. There is no password for us to store, lose or have taken. Access to the systems that run memex is limited to the developer.

If a security incident ever affects your information, we will email you promptly, tell you what happened and what we are doing about it, and notify authorities where the law requires.

Where it lives

On Amazon Web Services, in the US East (N. Virginia) region, us-east-1. If you are outside the United States, using memex means your information is stored and processed there. For transfers from the EU, the UK and Switzerland, memex relies on providers certified under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which Amazon Web Services, OpenAI and Google are.

Who else sees it

A small number of companies are involved in running memex. No one else receives your information, and none of them receives it for their own purposes.

Amazon Web Services. Hosting, storage and backups.

OpenAI. To make your notes searchable by meaning rather than by exact words, memex sends the text of a note to OpenAI to compute a numerical representation of it, called an embedding, which is stored alongside the note. This happens for every note, on every account. By default the call is paid for by memex’s own OpenAI account; if you supply your own OpenAI key for embeddings in Settings, it is paid for by yours instead, and the text goes to your account under your terms. OpenAI’s API terms state that content submitted through the API is not used to train their models. If this is not acceptable to you, memex is not the right tool, and we would rather you knew that before signing up than after.

Your own AI provider, only if you set one up. memex can write summaries and suggest tags for you, and it will only do that if you supply your own API key for OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. Then, and only then, memex sends note text to that provider under your account and their terms. Leave it unset and this never happens.

If we have sponsored your account. There is one exception to the paragraph above. The operator of memex.tools can switch summaries on for someone he knows, on memex’s own OpenAI account, and it is a decision only he can take from his own browser session — never an assistant you have connected, and never your own account. Where it is on, Settings says so on the Automation page, and supplying your own key takes the section back. Nobody is sponsored without knowing it.

Zyte, and the site itself. When you give memex a URL and ask it to fetch the page, the request goes out to that website. Where a page cannot be fetched directly, the request is routed through Zyte, a web-page capture service, which then sees the URL you asked for. By default the request is paid for by memex’s Zyte account; supply your own Zyte key and it is paid for by yours. This only happens for URLs you explicitly ask for. Memex does not crawl, follow links, or fetch anything you have not asked for.

The assistants you connect. When you connect ChatGPT, Claude, or any other assistant to memex, it can read the notes you have allowed it to read. What that assistant then does with the text on its own side is governed by its terms, not ours. We can speak for memex. We cannot speak for them.

Google Analytics. Which pages are opened and when, so we can tell whether the site works and where people give up. Google receives the page, your IP address — from which it derives an approximate location — and, as described above, the address of a page you move to inside the app, which carries a note’s number or a search term. It does not receive your notes or their titles. This is measurement only: memex runs no advertising features and no remarketing.

Postmark. Invitations and account emails are delivered through Postmark, which receives your email address and the message itself. Nothing else.

Sign-in providers. If you choose to sign in with Google, GitHub, Microsoft or Apple, that provider knows you signed in to memex. We receive only what is needed to identify your account.

What we never do

We do not sell your information. We do not share it with advertisers. We do not use your notes to train any AI model, our own or anybody else’s. We do not read your notes except where you have specifically asked for support and given permission, or where the law requires it.

Deleting things

A note. Delete it and it leaves your knowledge base immediately, but it is kept recoverable for thirty days in case you change your mind. After that its content is destroyed: the text and any summary are erased for good. What remains is a marker — the note’s title, where it lived, and the reason you gave for deleting it — kept so that links which pointed at it cannot silently re-attach to a different note later.

If you want something destroyed at once rather than after thirty days, that option is there, and it is irreversible.

Your account. Deleting your account is immediate and cannot be undone. There is no waiting period and no button that brings it back: your notes, your settings, your connections and your login are removed in one go. Export first, because we cannot get it back for you afterwards.

Backups. memex takes a nightly backup so that a broken server does not become a lost knowledge base. Copies held on the server itself are kept for fourteen days. The off-site copies have no fixed expiry, so something you deleted may still exist in a backup after it is gone from memex. Backups are never searched, never used to restore a deleted account, and never used for any purpose other than recovering the service after a failure.

Taking your things with you

Everything you put into memex can be exported as Markdown files, at any time, in one action. This is not a courtesy that could be withdrawn. It is a fixed property of how memex is built, and it applies to a single note or to the entire knowledge base.

If memex ever shuts down

You will get at least thirty days’ notice by email, and export will keep working until the end. Your knowledge base leaves with you, not with the service.

Your rights

Wherever you are, you can ask what we hold about you, correct it, export it, or have it deleted, by writing to hello@memex.tools.

If you are in the EU, the UK, or a US state with its own privacy law, you have those rights formally, and we will honour them. As a matter of practice, we extend the same treatment to everyone, wherever you live.

Children

Memex is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we will email you before it takes effect. The date at the top always shows the current version.