The privacy promise
What you read in Timber, and what’s on your clipboard, are yours. They are never shared, sold, or used for ads, and nothing leaves your phone unless you ask. That holds because Timber turns reading into listening on your iPhone: today the text is pulled, summarized, translated and spoken right here. This is the whole promise, in plain words.
What Timber promises
The one that matters most, stated first: the content you read in Timber is yours and stays yours.
No sign-up, no login, no email. Open Timber and listen. The core reader is free, and stays free.
If you turn it on, your library and settings ride your own private iCloud across your devices, and nowhere else.
Extra voices download to this iPhone. They sound more natural and keep working offline.
† If any of these change, this is the first place you’ll see it.
What Timber will never do
Three flat refusals. Not goals, not someday. Things Timber will never do, full stop:
share or sell what you read, or use it for ads. And never send what you read, or your clipboard, anywhere you did not ask it to go.
hand your voice recordings to anyone else as training data.
sell or share what you read with advertisers or third parties.
How the claim holds up
Timber Tabs · on your Mac
Timber Tabs is the Mac app that turns your open browser tabs into a listening queue for Timber. It is held to the same rule as the app on your phone: what you are reading is nobody’s business but yours. Your tab list never reaches a server of ours. We don’t have one to send it to.
So the same line holds on the desktop: nothing about your tabs, not a title and not an address, is ever sent to us. Save the file and it is yours to put anywhere. Send it through your own private iCloud, and only when you ask.
The honest version
Because it wouldn’t be true, and you deserve the true version. Timber does talk to the network. When you paste a link, browse a free book, or refresh a feed, it fetches that one thing for you. A few Home sections, like top stories, fetch their own headlines when they appear, and purchases are checked with the App Store. None of those requests carries anything you read.
There’s one more thing that leaves, and we’d rather say it out loud: if you turn on iCloud sync, your saved library (titles, addresses, and the article text itself) travels to your own private iCloud, so it can meet you on your other devices. That trip goes to Apple, at your request, into an account that is yours. It never comes to us. Leave sync off and it never happens at all.
And here’s the part that matters: the article text it reads back to you is processed on your phone. Fetching a page is not the same as uploading what you read. Today, the words you listen to are spoken on your phone, not handed to a server to be turned into speech. Your clipboard is the same story: Timber only ever looks at it when you hand it over, and never reads it behind your back.
So we don’t say “nothing ever leaves your phone,” because some things do, at your request, and they go to you, never to us. We say the line we can actually keep: what you read won’t be shared. We’d rather make one promise we can prove than a bigger one we can’t.