Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated 2026-07-24

What is There & Then?

A place to capture your memories — type or speak a short note and it's saved with the time and place it happened, so you can find it later.

How do I get in?

There & Then is invite-only while in beta.

It says there's no account for my email.

You probably picked a different account than the one you signed up with — the sign-in chooser lists every account you're signed into, and work and personal addresses look alike. Try again and pick the address you joined with. Your memories are safe: they're tied to the account you created, not to your device or browser.

Can I sign in with Apple?

Yes — Google and Apple both work. You can have both on one account, and adding the second is worth the minute it takes: there is no password here, so if you lose access to your only sign-in method, nobody can get you back in. Add one from Account once you are signed in.

I already have an account, but signing in with Apple didn't recognise me.

Two different things cause this, and the fix is the same for both.

If you chose Hide My Email, Apple gave us a relay address ([email protected]) rather than your real one — so as far as we can tell, that is a person we have never met. If you signed up with Google, Apple simply has no way to know that.

Either way: sign in the way you did before, then add Apple from Account. That connects the two properly, and afterwards either one gets you in. We deliberately do not join them up automatically just because the email addresses match — knowing an address is not the same as owning the account, and treating it as proof would be a way in for anyone who later picked up an address you used to use.

Who can see my notes?

Only you — unless you deliberately share one. Notes are isolated per user and enforced in the database (Postgres row-level security), not just by the application. If you move a note into a shared space, the members of that space can see it too; shared notes always carry a badge showing which space they're in and who wrote them, and you can pull yours back to private anytime. See the honest caveat below about encryption.

How does sharing work?

First you connect as friends (mutual request and accept). Then anyone can create a space — a shared collection — and invite their friends into it. Sharing a memory means moving it into a space from its edit screen; it stays yours (only you can edit or delete it), members can read it, and you can move it back to private whenever you like. Leaving a space (or the space being deleted) automatically returns your notes to your private vault. Unfriending someone doesn't remove them from spaces you both joined — membership is managed per space.

Who can see my email address?

People you are friends with can see the email address on your account — the one you actually sign in with, not necessarily the one an invite was sent to. It appears only once you have both accepted; a friend request that is still pending never shows the sender's or the recipient's address. If you invited someone and they joined, you can see the address they signed up with, because they chose to accept an invite you sent them personally — the reverse isn't true, so joining with someone's invite doesn't show you theirs. Unfriending ends the connection and stops your address being shown to them. Nobody else on There & Then can look you up and see your address, and we never show it outside the app. If you signed in with Apple and chose Hide My Email, what your friends see is the relay address Apple gave us, not your real one — see the next answer.

What is that @privaterelay.appleid.com address, and why does my friend have no name?

That's an Apple relay address. When someone signs in with Apple and chooses Hide My Email, Apple never hands us their real address — it gives us a forwarding address unique to this app. Anything we send to it reaches them; we never learn where it lands, and neither does anyone else here. It's a genuinely private way to use There & Then, and everything works normally through it: invites, friend requests and notifications all arrive.

The trade-off shows up in your friends list. A relay address is a random string, so it reads as nothing, and an account created that way starts with a name taken from that same string. (Apple sends a person's real name only once, at the very first sign-in, and we don't capture it yet — so there's nothing better for us to use.) Two friends who both chose Hide My Email look much alike.

So you can name any friend yourself. In Friends, the pencil beside their name lets you call them whatever you like. That name is yours alone: they never see it, it doesn't touch their account, and clearing it puts their own name back. It works for every friend, not only Apple ones.

What you can't do yet is fix the name on your own account — that's on our list. If you'd rather your friends saw a readable address, add your real one under Account, confirm it from the email we send, and make it primary; that's the address friends see, and keeping Hide My Email as a way to sign in costs you nothing.

Is my data encrypted?

Your connection is encrypted in transit (HTTPS), and your data is stored on infrastructure that's encrypted at rest. Beyond that, the content of your notes is encrypted at the application level too, so it sits in our database as ciphertext rather than readable text. And to be straight with you: it is not end-to-end encrypted, because that would break search and maps. Our systems can access your notes to run those features, and your location history is readable by our systems. We're not a zero-knowledge service, and we'd rather say so.

Do you sell my data or run ads?

No, and no.

Does AI read my notes?

Only in a limited, on-request way. The search index that lets you look through your memories is built by a model we run on our own servers, so no outside company receives your notes to build it. When you use the Ask feature, only the few notes relevant to your question — their text, timestamps, and any location labels, plus your question — are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic, to compose the answer. That happens only when you use Ask; we send only what's needed (never your whole account); and under our agreement Anthropic does not use that content to train its models and retains it only briefly for security. Nothing is sent to any AI provider when you're just capturing or browsing notes.

Can I tag or categorize my notes?

You don't have to — and that's the whole point. Tagging is busywork: stop, invent a label, stay consistent for years, and hope today's tag matches how you'll actually search tomorrow. There & Then flips that around. It understands what you wrote — the meaning, the moment, the place — so you just capture and move on. Ask "what did I note about that little coffee place in Key West?" or "what have I been working on lately?" and it surfaces the right memories by what they mean, not by whether you remembered to tag them. It also sorts your notes into categories for you automatically, so you get clean at-a-glance views — like a breakdown of your memories by category — without lifting a finger (and you can nudge any it gets wrong). We skip manual, custom tags on purpose: they're the old way of taming a pile of notes, and the AI already does that job better — no upkeep, no stale labels, nothing to maintain.

Can I add photos to my memories?

Yes — up to four per memory, from your camera or library. Photos are encrypted the same way your words are before they're stored, and we strip location metadata from the image file itself. Photos attached to a shared-space memory are visible to that space's members.

For now, photos are reference only — they're kept as part of the memory for you to look back on, but their contents aren't read, analyzed, or indexed, so they don't feed search or Ask. Those still work off what you wrote. We expect that to change in the future — reading what's in a photo and adding it to your search index — and if we do, we'll update our FAQ and privacy policy first.

Who hears it when I dictate a note?

Not us. The microphone button uses your web browser's own speech recognition, and There & Then only ever receives the finished text — we never get, store, or keep the audio. Your browser may send your voice to the company that makes it to be converted to text: for example Google in Chrome, Microsoft in Edge, or Apple in Safari, which may do it on your device instead. That is covered by that company's terms, not ours. If you'd rather keep your voice to yourself, type the note instead. Some browsers, such as Firefox, don't offer speech recognition at all, so the microphone won't work there.

What about my location?

Attaching location is what lets There & Then build a map of your memories. Coordinates and timestamps are stored and readable by our systems, and when a map loads, Google (our maps provider) receives the location being shown.

Can I export or delete everything?

Yes — your data is yours, both ways, self-serve. Tap "Export my data" at the bottom of the app to download all of your memories as a file, anytime. Tap "Delete my account" (same place) to permanently erase your account and every memory — it shows you exactly what will go, offers you the download first, and asks you to type DELETE, because there is no undo. Individual memories can be deleted from their edit screen.

What happens to shared spaces if I delete my account?

The rule is who wrote it, not where it sits. Your notes are yours wherever you put them, so a note you moved into someone else's space goes when you go, and the other members lose it. Any space you own is deleted with your account — but every note other people put in it is returned to their own private vault first. Deleting your account never deletes anyone else's memories. Spaces you merely joined carry on without you.

We don't offer a "leave my notes behind" option, and that's deliberate: it would scatter memories with no owner across other people's spaces, with nobody able to edit or remove them. Handing a space over to someone else before you go is a better answer, and it's something we intend to build.

What if I lose access to my sign-in?

Your memories live in your account on our servers, not locked to a single device — so losing a device doesn't mean losing your memories. You won't be locked out of your own history.

Can I sign in with more than one account?

Yes. Open Account from the menu and add another way to sign in, or add another email address. Whichever you use, you land in the same There & Then account with the same memories. Adding a second sign-in method is worth doing: if you ever lose access to one, the other still works.

I removed a sign-in method, but its email address is still on my account.

That's deliberate — they're two separate things. A sign-in method is a way of proving who you are; an email address is how people find you and how we reach you. Removing one doesn't remove the other, so you can drop a sign-in method you no longer use while keeping the address friends know you by.

If you want the address gone too, remove it separately on the Account screen. Until you do, it still counts as yours — so you can't send yourself an invite at it, and signing in with a new method that reports the same address will recognise the account.

I want to redo my Sign in with Apple, or change my Hide My Email choice.

Unlinking Apple here doesn't reset anything on Apple's side — Apple remembers that you authorised There & Then and which address you chose to share, so signing in again just repeats that choice without asking. To start fresh, revoke the app with Apple first:

Settings → your name → Sign in with Apple → There and Then → Stop using Apple ID.

The next sign-in then asks again, including whether to hide your email. Note that Apple may reissue the same relay address it gave you before rather than a new one.

I accidentally created two accounts.

If the second account is empty, delete it from the footer of that account, then add the sign-in method to your original account from the Account screen. That is the clean fix, and it is the reason adding a second sign-in method to the account you keep is worth doing straight away.

If you have already saved memories to both accounts, don't delete either — deleting is permanent and those memories would go with it. We cannot currently combine two accounts into one, and you also can't move a sign-in method across: each way of signing in belongs to the account it was first used on. So for now, keep both and use each account's own sign-in to reach its memories. Get in touch and we'll help you work out the best way forward.

Is this a company?

No — There & Then is a personal project, currently in invite-only beta.

How do I reach you?

Use the contact form.