Privacy policy

Last updated 9 November 2026

Pester is run by Tyler Swinburne, a sole trader trading as Pester (ABN 22 600 200 576), based in Melbourne, Australia. In this policy "we" and "us" means Pester. We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

The short version: Pester is built to keep as little about you as possible. Your tasks, receipts and reminders stay on your iPhone.

The Pester iPhone app

What stays on your phone

• Your tasks, plans, notes and follow-up reminders.
• Receipts and photos you add to the receipt vault. These are stored in the app's private folder and are encrypted by iOS when your phone is locked.

We can't see any of this, and it's deleted if you delete the app.

What is sent to our servers

• An anonymous app ID. The app signs in anonymously using Google Firebase so we can stop the service being abused. There's no name, email or password attached to it.
• Text you choose to send. When you ask Pester to plan a task or check a message for scams, the text you typed or pasted is sent to our server (Google Cloud, Melbourne region) and then to our AI provider, Anthropic, to produce the answer. We don't store or log that text. Please don't include card numbers, passwords or one-time codes.
• Daily usage counts. We count how many requests each anonymous app ID makes each day so we can apply fair-use limits.

Emails and calls

When Pester writes an email for you, it opens in your own email app and is sent from your own account. Pester doesn't see the replies. Phone scripts stay on your phone.

This website

If you join the beta, we collect your email address and the date you signed up. We use it only to tell you about the Pester beta and launch. We store it in Google Firebase (Melbourne region). To stop abuse we also keep a one-way scrambled (hashed) version of your IP address for a day.

This site doesn't use advertising or tracking cookies. Fonts are loaded from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address when the page loads.

Who we share information with

• Google (Firebase and Google Cloud) hosts our server, database and website. Our data is kept in Google's Melbourne region.
• Anthropic provides the AI that writes plans and checks for scams. Anthropic is based in the United States, so text you choose to send is processed overseas. Under its commercial terms Anthropic doesn't use this data to train its models.

We don't sell your information or share it with advertisers.

Access, correction and deletion

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, including removing you from the beta list. Email hello@pester.com.au and we'll reply within 30 days.

Security

Information is sent over encrypted connections. Our database can only be read by our own server, not by the app or the public.

Complaints

If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, email hello@pester.com.au first. If we don't resolve it, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

Changes

If we change how Pester handles your information, we'll update this page and the date at the top. For bigger changes we'll tell you in the app or by email.