The Last Bites

The Last 5 Years Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 11, 2026

The short version: The Last 5 Years collects no data. None. There is no account, no server, and nothing to log into. Everything is read on your iPhone and stays on your devices and in your own iCloud.

How the app works

Once a week, the app reads information already on your iPhone to build a private retrospective of the same week across the last five years. All of that reading and writing happens on your device, using Apple's own frameworks. We never see any of it.

What the app reads, and where it stays

  • Your photos and videos. The app reads your photo library to choose each week's most memorable pictures. It never modifies, deletes, or uploads them. The finished weekly "reel" stores only small references to the photos it picked; the photos themselves stay exactly where they were, in your library.
  • Your calendar. Event titles are scanned on-device so a rafting trip or a wedding can title a week. Routine entries (appointments, meetings, errands) are filtered out and ignored. Nothing is ever written to your calendar, and no event information leaves your device.
  • Your health data. Steps, workouts, heart rate, and (if you log it) State of Mind are read through Apple's HealthKit, on-device, only to give the week's story its texture. The app never writes to Health, and this data never leaves your device.
  • Your music library. The app looks at what you were playing or added during a past week so a song can resurface with the memory. Read-only, on-device.
  • Weather. Historical weather comes from Apple's WeatherKit. If WeatherKit is unavailable, the app asks the free, open Open-Meteo archive instead, sending only a date and an approximate location (rounded to about a kilometer). No identifiers, no account, nothing that says who or what is asking.
  • Apple Intelligence (optional). On supported devices you can have Apple's on-device model polish each caption. The model runs entirely on your iPhone, is shown only the same weekly facts the app already assembled, and is never shown your photos.
  • Your weekly reels. Each developed week is a small text file saved on your iPhone. By default it also backs up to your own private iCloud so your reels follow you to a new phone; you can turn that off in Settings at any time, and the app removes the iCloud copies.

What we don't do

  • No accounts, sign-ups, or logins.
  • No analytics, tracking, or advertising SDKs.
  • No servers of ours. The app has nothing to send data to.
  • No selling, sharing, or transferring of data to anyone, because we never have it.

Sharing

If you choose to share a memory card, the image is created on your phone and handed to Apple's standard share sheet. What happens next (posting to Instagram, sending a text) is between you and the app you share it to. Nothing is shared unless you tap share.

Children

The Last 5 Years is not directed at children under 13 and collects no data from anyone, of any age.

Changes

If this policy ever changes, the new version will be posted at this address with a new date at the top.

Contact

Questions? Email chris@insearchofacity.com.