Privacy Policy

سياسة الخصوصية

Last Updated: August 12, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Elie Abou Zeidan stores, uses, and protects your information when you use the ADL application ("App"). ADL is built to run on as little personal information as possible: the App only holds what you provide yourself so that it can work, keeps it safe and encrypted, and uses it for nothing beyond providing the service to you. Your notes, your case folders and everything you keep in them — files, references, contracts — are end-to-end encrypted: they are encrypted on your device before they ever reach us, and we cannot read them. By using the App, you agree to the practices described in this Policy.

1 Information You Provide and How It Is Stored

We do not gather data about you in the background. Everything described below is information you enter yourself, or content you choose to save, so that the App can function. None of it is used for internal analytics, tracking, or profiling of any kind.

1.1 Account Information (provided by you at registration)

1.2 Signing In with Google or Apple (optional)

You may create your account, or sign in to it, using Sign in with Google or Sign in with Apple instead of receiving a one-time code by email. If you choose to:

1.3 Content You Choose to Save — End-to-End Encrypted

This content is stored so it can be synchronized securely across your devices. It belongs to you, and it is end-to-end encrypted: it is encrypted on your device with a key only you hold, and it reaches our servers only as unreadable ciphertext. We cannot read, search, analyze, or disclose it — not for support, not for product improvement, and not in response to a request from anyone else. Specifically, the following are encrypted before leaving your device:

That list is deliberate. Which laws and which rulings a named lawyer is researching, and under which case, is exactly the association end-to-end encryption exists to hide — so the reference itself is encrypted, not merely the file it sits beside.

Technical details are in Section 3.2, including the limited information that necessarily remains unencrypted so that synchronization can work at all.

1.4 Files and Images You Add to a Folder

A folder in ADL is meant to work as a case file, so you can attach documents to it: a PDF, a Word document, or an image — chosen from your files, picked from your photo library, or photographed with your camera. On paid plans, these are stored so that they reach your other devices and survive losing your phone.

The file is encrypted on your device before it is uploaded. Your device encrypts the file's contents, its original filename, and its file type, and then uploads that ciphertext directly to our storage provider. What exists on our systems is an opaque block of bytes. We cannot open it, preview it, index it, scan it, or convert it, and neither can our storage provider.

Because a stored file still has to be accounted for, a small amount of non-content information about it is visible to us and is described in Section 3.2: its size, a checksum of the encrypted bytes, which of your folders it sits in, and when it was added. Not its name, not its type, and not a single byte of what is inside it.

Your camera and photo library are read only at the moment you choose to add something, and never in the background; see Sections 4.4 and 4.5.

Photographs are stripped of their hidden metadata first. A photo normally carries an invisible record written by the camera: the date and time, the device, and — where the camera records it — the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken. Photographing a document at a client's home would otherwise embed that address in the file.

ADL removes that record on your device, before the image is encrypted and before anything is uploaded. It is deleted outright rather than hidden: the bytes are not present in the stored file at all. The picture itself is untouched by this step: the image data is copied through byte for byte, and only the descriptive records around it are discarded. This applies to every image, however you added it: photographed in the App, chosen from your photo library, or picked from your files.

It also protects you after the fact. Because the metadata is gone from the stored file, a file you later share out of the App to a colleague or a court carries no location or device history with it.

If an image cannot be cleaned, it is not uploaded and the App tells you so. We would rather refuse a file than store one carrying data we said we had removed. For that reason ADL accepts PDF, Word, JPEG, PNG and WebP files: TIFF images are not accepted, because that format's location data cannot be removed without rebuilding the image itself.

Your files are never sent to the AI Agent or to any AI provider. That is not a policy we could relax quietly: the files are ciphertext, so there is nothing an AI service could read even if it received them.

1.5 Stored Only on Your Device — Never Collected Online

The following exists only on your device. It is not collected, transmitted to, or stored on our servers:

Jurisprudence works differently, and we want to be exact about it. The collection of court rulings is served from our servers, so that every user reads the same, up-to-date text and corrections reach everyone at once. Browsing or searching rulings therefore sends your request — including the words you search for — to our servers. We use those requests for one thing: returning the results to you. We do not attach them to a profile, and we do not use them for analytics, advertising, or any assessment of you.

1.6 Authentication Tokens

Access tokens and refresh tokens used to keep you securely signed in. These are stored exclusively in your device's secure storage — iOS Keychain on Apple devices, Android Keystore on Android devices — and are never accessible to other apps.

1.7 AI Agent Conversations

Unlike your notes, folders, files, and contracts, AI conversations are not end-to-end encrypted. They cannot be: the AI Agent has to read your question on our servers in order to answer it and to look up the relevant Lebanese laws and rulings. They are protected instead by encryption in transit and at rest (Section 3.4).

Your stored conversation history is used for one purpose only: operating and enhancing the AI Agent for you. Concretely, that means letting you reopen past conversations across your devices, giving the Agent the context of the conversation you are currently having so its answers follow on properly, and improving the quality, accuracy, and referencing of the answers the App gives. It is not used for advertising, profiling, marketing, or analytics, is never sold or shared for anyone else's purposes, and is not used by our AI provider to train its models (see Section 5).

Messages you send to the AI Agent are processed by an AI service acting on our behalf, and by that service's own model provider, solely to generate your answer — both are named in Section 5. Your conversations are private to your account, are visible to no other user, and are permanently deleted when your account is deleted.

1.8 Reporting an AI Answer

The App lets you report an AI answer you find offensive, inaccurate, or harmful — a channel the app stores require us to provide. Reporting is entirely voluntary and nothing is sent unless you tap Report. When you send one, we store the reason you selected, any details you choose to write, a snapshot excerpt of the reported answer (kept so the report survives even if you later delete that conversation), your account reference, and — where the answer came from a saved conversation — a reference to it. A copy is emailed to our support address. We use reports for one purpose: reviewing and correcting the AI Agent's behaviour.

1.9 Subscription and Credit Purchases

Subscriptions and packs of extra AI credits are purchased through, and paid to, the Apple App Store or Google Play. We never see or store your payment card information. Through our subscription-management provider (see Section 5) we receive and store your current plan and its expiry date, and, for a credit pack, the store's transaction identifier, which pack you bought, and how many credits were granted — the record that lets us apply each purchase to your account exactly once and never twice.

1.10 Security and Abuse Prevention

Our servers and our hosting provider keep short-lived technical logs of requests made to the service — the IP address a request came from, the time, and which part of the service was called. These exist to keep the service running, to apply rate limits, and to investigate abuse or attacks. They are not joined to your content and are not used to build any profile of you. We also record which device currently holds the active session for your account, so that signing in on a new device signs the previous one out.

What we do NOT collect: We do not collect your location, your contacts, microphone input, or any biometric data. We do not browse your photo library or use your camera — we receive an image only when you yourself choose one to add to a folder, stripped of its metadata on your device and encrypted before it reaches us, so we never see the picture or where it was taken. We run no analytics, tracking, or crash-reporting tools of our own, use no advertising identifiers, and build no profile of you from anything you read, search, or write.

2 How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

We do not use your data for advertising, profiling, or marketing. We do not sell or rent your data to any third party. Your information is never used for anyone's personal purposes — it is used exclusively to operate the App and enhance your user experience.

3 Data Storage and Security

The information you entrust to the App is kept safe and encrypted — on your device, in transit, and on our servers. Your notes, folders, files, saved references, and contracts go further: they are end-to-end encrypted, meaning we hold only ciphertext we have no ability to decrypt.

3.1 On Your Device

Your data is stored locally in a database protected by your operating system's application sandboxing, which prevents other apps from accessing it. Authentication tokens and your encryption key are stored in your device's secure hardware-backed storage (iOS Keychain / Android Keystore). Your content is readable on your own device — that is what makes offline access and instant search possible — and is encrypted at the moment it is sent to us.

Files are handled more carefully than the rest. A file you have opened is kept on your device in its encrypted form, so that it stays available with no network at all. A readable copy is written only when something has to display it — a PDF viewer, or the share sheet — and that readable copy is deleted when you sign out and again every time the App starts cold. Decrypted case documents therefore do not accumulate on your device.

Signing out erases your local content, your encryption key, and every readable file copy from the device.

3.2 End-to-End Encryption of Your Content

Your notes, folders, files, saved references, and contracts are encrypted on your device before being uploaded, and are only ever decrypted on your own devices. In plain terms:

Because synchronization has to know which record to route where, a small amount of non-content information necessarily remains unencrypted on our servers: record identifiers, creation and update timestamps, which folder a note or a file belongs to, whether a note is pinned, and which template a contract was created from. For a stored file we additionally hold its size in bytes and a checksum — computed over the encrypted bytes, deliberately, so that it cannot be used to test whether you hold a particular known document. The words you actually write, the files you store, and the laws and rulings you save are never among it.

In practice, what our servers can see about a case folder is that an account owns some folders, that those folders contain some notes, some references, and some files of a certain size, and when each last changed. What the case is, what is in it, and what you concluded about it, they cannot see at all.

Important — only you can unlock your content: Because we do not hold your key, we cannot recover your notes, folders, files, saved references, or contracts if you lose access to it. When you register, the App gives you a one-time recovery code — the only way back into your content if you forget your password. Store it somewhere safe. If you lose both your password and your recovery code, your synchronized content cannot be decrypted by us or by anyone else, and it is permanently unrecoverable. This is a direct consequence of end-to-end encryption, not a limitation we can lift.

3.3 On Our Servers

Your account information, your User Content (notes, folders, saved references, contracts — stored as encrypted ciphertext, as described above), and your AI conversation history are stored on our backend servers, hosted on Railway. The files you add to your folders are stored as encrypted objects on Cloudflare R2. All communication between the App and our servers travels exclusively over encrypted HTTPS (TLS) connections, and data on our servers is encrypted at rest by our hosting infrastructure — a second layer beneath the end-to-end encryption you already hold the key to.

Files move between your device and storage over short-lived, single-purpose signed links that we issue to your device and that expire within minutes. They cannot be guessed, listed, or shared, and the storage bucket is not publicly readable by any route.

3.4 Security Measures

We implement these safeguards so that your information stays secure at every step. As with any online service, no method of transmission or storage can be guaranteed absolutely, which is why we layer these protections and keep them up to date.

4 Permissions We Request

4.1 Calendar Access (Read and Write)

The App requests permission to access your device calendar solely to write note reminders that you explicitly create within the App. We do not read, copy, collect, or store any of your existing calendar events. You can disable this permission in your device settings at any time; doing so will prevent the App from adding reminders to your calendar.

4.2 Notifications

The App requests permission to send you notifications for the reminders you set. You can manage this in your device settings. Disabling notifications will prevent reminder alerts from reaching you.

4.3 Location — Map Display Only (iPhone and iPad)

The legal locations map shows public places: courts, ministries, and legal offices. On iPhone and iPad, it can also show your own position on that map, so you can see where you are in relation to them. Your device asks your permission the first time you open the map, and you may decline or revoke it at any time in your device settings — the map works fully without it.

Your location is used for that one purpose and nothing else. It never reaches us. It is not transmitted to our servers, not stored by us, not attached to your account, not used to decide which content or prices you see, and not used for analytics, advertising, profiling, or any location history. On Android this display is not enabled and the App requests no location permission at all.

To be exact about one thing: the map itself is drawn by Google's Maps service (Section 5). Displaying a map means Google receives what it needs to draw it — the area you are looking at and your device's network address — and, while the blue dot is shown, that is handled by Google's mapping component on your device. That is Google acting under its own privacy policy, not us collecting your position. If you would rather not involve it, decline the location permission: the map still works and simply does not show where you are.

4.4 Camera — Only When You Photograph a Document

The App can use your camera for one purpose: photographing a document so you can add it to a case folder. Your device asks your permission the first time you use it, and you may decline or revoke it at any time in your device settings — every other part of the App works without it. The camera is opened only when you tap to take a photo, never in the background, and nothing is captured or transmitted unless you keep the photo. The photograph has its hidden metadata — including the location it was taken — removed on your device, and is then encrypted before it is uploaded, so we never see the image or anything it came with (Section 1.4).

4.5 Photo Library — Only the Images You Pick

The App can read an image from your photo library so you can add it to a case folder. We receive only the image you select. The App does not browse, index, scan, or upload your photo library, cannot see any other image in it, and never reads it in the background. On iPhone and iPad you may grant access to selected photos only, and the App works normally that way. As with the camera, the image has its hidden metadata stripped on your device and is encrypted before upload, so we never see it.

The App does not request access to your microphone or your contacts.

5 Third-Party Data Sharing

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we never share it for anyone else's purposes. The service providers listed below process it only on our behalf, only to make the App work, and only under instructions from us.

To operate the App, we rely on a small number of service providers that process data strictly on our behalf and under our instructions, over encrypted connections:

When you ask the AI Agent about a contract. Your contracts are end-to-end encrypted, so we cannot read them. If you open one and ask the AI Agent about it, your device decrypts that contract and sends its text to the AI service for that request alone, so the Agent can answer you. That conversation is a scratchpad: it is not saved on our servers and it disappears when you close it. The contract text is used only to produce your answer and is not retained by us or by the AI service afterwards. This happens only for a contract you deliberately ask about, and only while you are asking — never in the background, and never for your notes or folders. The one exception is if you choose to report an answer from that conversation, in which case the excerpt you report is stored as described in Section 1.8.

We may disclose your information only if required by applicable Lebanese law, a court order, or a lawful governmental authority request. Even then, we can only ever disclose what we actually hold in readable form — your notes, folders, saved references, contracts, and stored files are end-to-end encrypted, so for those we could produce nothing but ciphertext we are unable to decrypt.

6 Data Retention

We keep your account information, your encrypted User Content, and your AI conversation history for as long as your account remains active. More specifically:

Deleting your account. You can delete your account from inside the App, by contacting us, or by following the steps at adlapp.org/delete-account. Doing so deletes your account and everything attached to it from our live systems — your encrypted content, the stored files in your folders and the objects holding them, your AI conversations, your reports, your purchase records, and any linked Google or Apple sign-in. Where you used Sign in with Apple, we also tell Apple to sever the link between your Apple ID and ADL. Residual copies may remain in our providers' encrypted infrastructure backups for a short period before they are overwritten, and we may keep a minimal record where the law requires us to. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone.

7 Your Rights

Under applicable Lebanese law, including provisions of Law No. 81 of October 10, 2018 on Electronic Transactions and Personal Data, you have the right to:

To exercise any of these rights, contact us using the information in Section 10. We do not charge for this and we do not treat you differently for asking.

If you are outside Lebanon. Where the law of your own country gives you further rights — for example under the GDPR in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, or under California privacy law — we honour those requests through the same contact point, including data portability and objection to processing. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law, and we have no advertising or profiling activity to opt out of.

Where your data is processed. ADL is operated from Lebanon, but our hosting, storage, email, subscription, and AI providers are international, so your information may be processed on servers outside Lebanon, including in the United States and the European Union. We use providers that are contractually bound to protect it on terms at least equivalent to those described in this Policy. Your notes, folders, files, saved references, and contracts travel and rest as ciphertext wherever they go.

One practical note on the right of access: because your notes, folders, files, saved references, and contracts are end-to-end encrypted, we hold no readable copy of them. Your own devices are the only place that content can be read, and the App itself is how you access and export it. A request to us can therefore cover your account information and AI conversation history, but for encrypted content we can only confirm what we store and supply it in its encrypted form. Your right to delete is unaffected — deletion removes the stored ciphertext entirely.

8 Children's Privacy

The App is intended for users 18 years of age or older and is not directed at minors. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have inadvertently received such information, we will promptly delete it. If you believe a minor has provided us with personal data, please contact us immediately.

9 Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy periodically. Changes take effect upon posting to adlapp.org/privacy-policy with an updated "Last Updated" date. Continued use of the App after changes are posted constitutes your acceptance of the updated Policy.

10 Contact Us

For questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy:

Elie Abou Zeidan

Email: contact@adlapp.org

Website: adlapp.org

Privacy Policy: adlapp.org/privacy-policy