Privacy Policy

Each of the following is opt-in. Hamdam works without granting any of them; enabling one simply lets that part of the reflection experience use the relevant signal.

1.1 Health data (HealthKit)

With permission, Hamdam reads:

• Resting heart rate and heart rate variability (HRV SDNN)
• Sleep analysis
• Blood oxygen saturation
• Step count, exercise minutes, and active energy burned
• Menstrual flow, only if you separately enable cycle awareness

With permission, Hamdam writes State of Mind entries to Apple Health when you enable mood logging. These signals shape today's reflection qualitatively: a gentle nudge in tone, not a score or a chart. They stay on your device. Cycle awareness is a separate opt-in from the other health signals, and is never displayed anywhere in the Hamdam interface.

1.2 Calendar data (EventKit)

With permission, Hamdam reads free/busy time only, never event titles, descriptions, attendees, or locations. Separately, with its own permission, Hamdam can write optional reflection blocks and cultural moment reminders to your calendar. Every event Hamdam creates is written to a dedicated “Hamdam” calendar and prefixed “Hamdam:” so you can always tell it apart. Hamdam recognises its own events by that calendar's identifier rather than by matching the title text, so renaming an event never puts it out of Hamdam's reach, and never brings one of your own events within it. Hamdam never modifies any event it didn't create. Reading and writing calendar data are separate opt-ins. Enabling one does not enable the other.

1.3 Location and weather

Location is only used when you enable weather or cultural moment features. Weather comes through Apple's WeatherKit, using your location to theme today's reflection. Hamdam does not store your location and does not share it with anyone.

1.4 iCloud synchronisation

iCloud synchronisation of your reflections requires a Hamdam Plus subscription. If you have Plus and sync is on (it is on by default once you have Plus), your journal entries, favourites, letters to your future self, Garden habits and streak sync between your own devices through Apple's CloudKit Private Database, scoped to your Apple ID. Separately, for every reader signed in to iCloud, free or Plus, Hamdam keeps two small things in your own iCloud account. The first is a copy of your settings in Apple's iCloud key-value storage, so they come back if you delete the app and install it again. That copy holds your preferences and the answers you gave when you set Hamdam up, such as your name, how you would like to be greeted, where you were born and where you live. It never holds your reflections, your moods, your portrait or anything from Apple Health. The second is a small copy in your CloudKit Private Database that lets your Apple Watch show what your iPhone shows: your ten most recent reflections (what you wrote, your note, your mood and the verse), your favourite verses, your streak, whether you have Hamdam Plus, your language, the current weather, where you were born and where you live, the dates your family remembers, your progress in the riddle, your archive of daily picks, and the shape of today's Garden plan. It holds nothing from Apple Health. Hamdam does not run servers that receive any of this data. If you delete your iCloud data or sign out, the synced Hamdam data goes with it. Your family, if you share one or join one, is kept differently, as described in 1.10.

The birthday you give in About You is kept on your device and in your private iCloud settings, so it comes back if you install Hamdam again. It is not shared with your family: relatives see only what is on the person cards in Roots, so a birthday you type on your own card there is one they can see.

1.5 Persian poetry content

The verses in Hamdam, from Hafez, Rumi, Saadi, Khayyam, Parvin Etesami, Ferdowsi and Nezami, are curated by Hamdam and sourced from the public domain via Ganjoor.net with attribution. The core library of 700 verses is built into the app itself and needs no network connection to read. Separately, the devices of Hamdam Plus subscribers check a pool of additional verses stored in a CloudKit Public Database. Free users never fetch that pool. All of this content is read-only for users and contains no data about you.

1.6 Today's picks (iTunes Search API)

Today's picks, in Hamdam's Garden, refresh once a day with books and podcasts from Apple's public catalogue. These requests go from your device directly to Apple, never through a Hamdam server, and no identifier tied to you is sent with them.

1.7 AI-generated reflections (Apple Intelligence)

When Apple Intelligence is switched on in Hamdam's Settings and your iPhone supports it, Hamdam uses Apple's Foundation Models on your device to write the daily reflection, to draft a short story from a family recording for you to correct, and to write a few short lines around the app. This works in English only. No text and no personal data leaves your device for this. In Farsi, and on devices without Apple Intelligence, Hamdam uses its own written library instead. A model never chooses a poem.

1.8 Family recordings (Ask an Elder)

When you record someone in Ask an Elder, Hamdam uses the microphone, with your permission, only while you are recording. The words are transcribed on your iPhone by Apple's speech recognition. The first time you transcribe in a language, iOS may download Apple's speech model for that language, but the audio itself is never sent anywhere to be transcribed. A recording made on Apple Watch is transcribed once it reaches your iPhone. The recording and its transcript are kept on your device, in your own iCloud if you use iCloud sync, and in your family's shared iCloud space if you share your family or join one. Neither is ever sent to us. Voice reflections are transcribed the same way, on your iPhone, with Apple's speech frameworks.

1.9 Written stories

If Apple Intelligence is available on your iPhone and switched on in Hamdam's Settings, Hamdam can turn a transcript into a short written story using Apple's on-device model. Stories are drafted this way only in English, while Hamdam is set to English; in Farsi, the transcript itself becomes the story. Nothing leaves your device for this. The draft opens for you to edit, is labelled as written by your phone, and is saved only if you choose to keep it.

1.10 Sharing your family

You can invite family members through Apple's own iCloud sharing, so Hamdam never sees their email address or phone number. The people you invite can see and add to the family you share: its people, stories, words of wisdom, recorded voices, places, traditions and photos. They cannot see your reflections or favourites, which stay in your own private storage. A shared family is held in the iCloud account of the person who started it, and we cannot read it. If you join someone else's family, what you add to it is kept in their iCloud rather than yours.

1.11 Family messages

Messages between family members, written or spoken, are encrypted on the sender's device before they are uploaded, and only the sender and the person they were sent to can open them. We cannot read them, and nor can anyone else in the family. So that conversations can be delivered and kept in order, who sent each message, to whom and when is stored without that encryption in the family's shared iCloud space, alongside each member's public key. The private key that opens your messages is kept in your iCloud Keychain, so your own devices can read your conversations, and it is never given to us.

Family messages also have a filter for offensive language, which looks at the words themselves and runs entirely on your device; it sends nothing anywhere. A message you receive that contains a listed word is covered until you tap it, and sending one asks you to confirm first. The filter is on by default and can be switched off with Filter offensive language in Messages.

You can block a family member or report a message from any conversation. Reporting first shows you what the report says. Only if you tap to email it does an email to developer@hamdam.com.au open in your own mail app, carrying the reported message's words, the sender's name, when it was sent, and the sender's and the message's identifiers; you add anything else, and nothing is sent unless you send it. The message is then hidden for you. We act on reports promptly.

1.12 Ask Hamdam

Ask Hamdam answers your questions on your iPhone, from what is already on it. The answers are written on your device by Apple Intelligence or, in Farsi and on an iPhone without Apple Intelligence, by Hamdam's own on-device model, a version of Google's Gemma. That model is an optional download of about 2 GB that you start yourself, and Apple serves it, not us. Your questions, the answers and what Ask remembers are not sent to us or to anyone else. Ask remembers something only when you tell it to, or when you tap to keep a suggestion it has shown you, and you can see everything it remembers and forget any of it. That memory is kept on your iPhone alone and is left out of your iCloud backup unless you turn on Include in iCloud backup. Ask never reads your family messages; if it suggests one, it opens in family messages for you to edit and send yourself. When you ask Hamdam to remind you of something, it opens Apple's own event editor filled in with your words. Hamdam asks for no calendar or reminders permission for this and saves nothing itself; the event is saved only if you tap Add.

Every answer a model wrote carries a small Hamdam AI label. Report this answer shows you exactly what would be sent, which is the question and the answer and nothing else. Only if you tap Email the report does an email to developer@hamdam.com.au open in your own Mail app, and nothing is sent unless you tap Send there.

• No user accounts, and no email collection at signup
• No dedicated crash-reporting or analytics SDK. The only crash data collected is Apple's own built-in iOS crash reporting via App Store Connect, aggregated and anonymised
• No advertising SDKs: no AdMob, Meta Pixel, or tracking pixels
• No behavioural tracking and no user profiling
• No selling of data, ever
• No Hamdam-owned backend servers receiving user data
• No newsletter and no marketing automation
• No cross-app tracking
• No SDK collecting personal data on Hamdam's behalf
• No cookies, because this website is fully static
• No third-party font loading: fonts are hosted locally, with no requests to Google Fonts or any other font CDN

2.1 What this website does collect

This website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views. It records aggregate, cookieless page counts only. It sets no cookie, it does not track you across sites, and it cannot identify you. Hamdam uses none of Firebase, Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Google Analytics.

This applies to the website alone. The Hamdam app carries no analytics of any kind.

The signals described in Section 1, where you've enabled them, are used only to:

• Shape the tone and content of today's reflection

They are never used:

• For advertising
• To train AI models outside your device
• Shared with third parties
• Sold, under any circumstance

• Locally, on your device, using Apple's SwiftData framework
• In the cloud, only in your own iCloud account: for every reader signed in to iCloud, a copy of your settings and a small copy for your Apple Watch that includes your ten most recent reflections; and all your reflections if you have Hamdam Plus and sync is on
• For a family you share or join, in the iCloud account of the person who started it
• Never on a Hamdam-owned server

Data is retained until you delete it, as Section 7 explains. Uninstalling Hamdam removes what is on that device, but not what is held in iCloud.

Hamdam is built on Apple's frameworks: iCloud, HealthKit, EventKit, WeatherKit, StoreKit, MusicKit (Apple Music), and Foundation Models. Apple's own privacy policies govern how these frameworks handle data on Apple's side. Ganjoor.net is credited as the public-domain source of Persian poetry text. No data is exchanged with Ganjoor.net at runtime. The iTunes Search API is an Apple public API, called directly from your device. Two of these frameworks load images as they display them: Apple Music artwork in the mini player, and the WeatherKit attribution mark shown beside a forecast. Both come from Apple's own servers.

Hamdam reads poet biographies and cultural symbol descriptions from the Wikipedia REST API (en.wikipedia.org and fa.wikipedia.org), and the accompanying portrait images from upload.wikimedia.org. Your device sends only the title of the page being looked up. Nothing about you, your reflections, or your health is included in those requests.

The cultural symbol cards in Roots each show a photograph that Hamdam is licensed to display, and finding one takes your device to a few reference services. It askswww.wikidata.org which image is recorded for the subject, using a fixed identifier that ships inside the app. It then askscommons.wikimedia.org for that image's licence and credit, because a photograph cannot lawfully be shown without them, and loads the picture itself from upload.wikimedia.org. If Wikimedia holds nothing Hamdam may use, it asksapi.inaturalist.org for the same subject by its scientific name and loads any resulting photograph frominaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com, where iNaturalist serves its open data images. Every value sent is a fixed identifier or a species name compiled into the app. Nothing about you, your reflections, your journal, or your health is included, and no account or device identifier is attached. The dishes in Hamdam's food suggestions take their photographs from Wikimedia Commons in the same way, by a file name built into the app.

Nager.Date (date.nager.at) supplies public holiday dates so the Roots calendar can show the days that matter where you live. Your device sends a country code and a calendar year, and nothing else. The country code is derived on your device from the same location permission already used for weather; your coordinates are never sent to Nager.Date. The request carries no account, no device identifier, and no personal information, and Hamdam refreshes it at most once per calendar year.

The Kiosk in the Garden shows headlines from the publications you add to it. To do that, your device fetches each publication's news feed directly from that publisher, and loads the pictures that come with its headlines from wherever the feed says they are kept. When you add a publication by its web address, your device also reads that site's pages to find its feed. These requests carry no account, no identifier and nothing about you beyond what any visit to a website reveals, such as your IP address, and they keep no cookies. Headlines are held only while the Kiosk is open. An article you tap opens on the publisher's own page, which is a page you have chosen to visit.

In full, apart from the publications you choose for the Kiosk, the hosts Hamdam contacts that are not operated by Apple are: en.wikipedia.org, fa.wikipedia.org, upload.wikimedia.org, www.wikidata.org and commons.wikimedia.org, all run by the Wikimedia Foundation; api.inaturalist.org and inaturalist-open-data.s3.amazonaws.com, which serve iNaturalist's photographs; and date.nager.at. There are no others. Hamdam's on-device model for Ask Hamdam, if you choose to download it, comes from Apple. A link you tap that opens in your browser, such as an Apple Music search, the source credit under a photograph, Hamdam's support page or findahelpline.com, is a page you have chosen to visit rather than a request Hamdam makes.

Hamdam has no accounts, so there is no account to delete. To delete what you have written, go to Settings → Content → Delete my reflections, letters, habits and favourites in the app. This clears your reflections, including any older than the free tier lets you open, your letters to your future self, opened or still sealed, your Garden habits and their history, your favourites, and your streak history, both in local SwiftData storage and in their CloudKit Private Database copies, including the copy kept for your Apple Watch. Reflections are deleted first; if that fails, Hamdam stops, removes nothing else and tells you so. It does not remove your settings, such as your name and where you were born, or the rest of the Apple Watch copy described above; those are left where they are. Your Roots have their own button, Delete my Roots. To keep a copy of everything you wrote before deleting it, tap Prepare my export on the Privacy page in Settings: it builds one zip on your iPhone with your reflections, journal, letters, Roots people and stories, transcripts and the original recordings, and hands it to you through the share sheet. To remove everything Hamdam keeps in your iCloud, delete Hamdam's data from iCloud as described below. Signing out of iCloud on a device also removes Hamdam's synced data from that device.

Your family tree, recordings, stories and messages are not removed by that button, because they are kept in iCloud and, in a shared family, belong to everyone in it. To remove them, delete Hamdam's data from iCloud: on your iPhone, go to Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Hamdam. If you started a family, that removes it for everyone you shared it with; to stop sharing without deleting anything, use Stop Sharing on the family's sharing screen in Roots. If you joined someone else's family, what you added is held in their iCloud, and the person who shared it with you can remove you, which also removes that family from your devices.

• iOS Data Protection encrypts data at rest on your device
• Apple's end-to-end encryption applies to iCloud data where you've enabled it
• Family messages are encrypted on the sender's device, and only the sender and the recipient can open them
• The copy of your recent reflections kept in iCloud for your Apple Watch, and the reflections you write on Apple Watch on their way to your iPhone, are stored with CloudKit encryption, using keys from your own iCloud account
• Any network request Hamdam makes uses HTTPS/TLS

Hamdam is not intended for users under 13, and Hamdam does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. Hamdam is designed to be age-appropriate for users 13 and over.

If this policy changes materially, you'll be notified through an app update. Continuing to use Hamdam after a change means you accept the update. The effective date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

Email developer@hamdam.com.au.

Seyed Valiallah Azizollahi (sole trader) · ABN 74 389 481 503 · Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

If you raise a concern with Hamdam and it isn't resolved to your satisfaction, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) atoaic.gov.au.

This policy is governed by the laws of Queensland, Australia. The Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) apply to how Hamdam handles personal information.