WishKeep — privacy

Last updated: 2026-08-24

The short version

WishKeep has no accounts and no sign-up, and your wishes are not kept on anybody's server. They live on your phone and, if you leave it switched on, in your own iCloud Drive. There are exactly two exceptions, and both of them are described below: a list you publish yourself, and anonymous usage counts.

What stays on the phone

Titles, prices, links, notes, priorities, photos, folders and lists are written to the app's own storage on the device. Nothing about them is sent anywhere by itself.

A copy of the same data goes to your iCloud Drive so that a lost or replaced phone does not take the list with it. That copy sits in your Apple account, under your Apple ID, and the developer of this app can neither read it nor reach it. Switching iCloud off for WishKeep in the phone's settings stops it. A backup file you export goes wherever you send it, and from that point it is yours to look after.

A list you publish

Publishing happens only when you tap it, on one list at a time. What travels is that list: item titles, prices, links, notes, priorities, the list's name, the few words you wrote to your guests, and the photos unless you switched them off before publishing. It is stored on Cloudflare (a Worker and an R2 bucket) and served at an address that cannot be guessed.

The page is not protected by a password: anyone the link reaches can read it, on purpose or by being forwarded. It stops working ninety days after the last time you published it, and “Withdraw the link” deletes the list and its pictures right away. Cached copies at the edge of the network may answer for a few days longer.

Guests of a published page

A guest is never asked for a name, an email or an account. Marking a present as taken puts one random identifier in a cookie, and that identifier does one thing: it lets the page tell your own reservations from everybody else's. Nothing else is stored about a guest, and the owner of the list is never shown who took what — the owner can at most be shown that something was taken, and even that is a switch they choose.

Shops and search engines

When you paste a link, the app opens that page from your device to read the title, the price and the picture. When an item has a name but no picture, the app asks a search engine (DuckDuckGo, and Bing after it) about that name. Those sites see a request from your device, exactly as they would if you had opened the page in a browser. Nothing from your wishlist is sent to them beyond the address or the words you gave.

Which search engine is asked, and how its answer is read, is not fixed inside the app: about once an hour it asks WishKeep's own server for those settings, so that a search engine rearranging its pages does not leave the feature broken until the next update reaches the App Store. That request carries nothing — not your list, not a word from it, not an identifier. The server sees what any visit to any website shows: an IP address and the time.

Photos

Access to the photo library is used for one thing: putting a picture on a card. Reading the text on a screenshot and recognizing what is in a photo both happen on the device itself, through Apple's Vision framework, and no picture leaves the phone for it. A photo is uploaded only as part of a list you publish with pictures switched on.

Usage statistics

The app counts what it does — items added and by which route, whether reading a page or searching for a picture worked and how long it took, purchases, deletions, how many results a search returned, settings changed, backups, publications — and sends those counts to TelemetryDeck, which reports them without identifying a device.

Nothing that identifies a wish is ever recorded: no titles, no links, no prices, no notes, not even a shop's hostname, and never the address of a published list. Only categories, outcomes, counts and durations. There is no advertising in the app, no advertising identifier is read, and nothing is sold or handed to anybody else.

What you can do about all this

Deleting the app removes the list and the pictures from the phone. The copy in iCloud is deleted from iCloud Drive, where it sits under your own account. A published list is taken down by “Withdraw the link” and disappears by itself once its ninety days are up. If you would like anything else removed, or want to know what is held about you, write — there is nothing here to look up in a database, and the answer will be the one on this page.