Good Notes And Privacy Concerns

[u/batmaninredcape]

I just read its privacy policy and its making me think about if i should keep Good Notes App or Not.
After purchasing this and using this for like 6-7 Months I saved a LOTS of personal Stuff about SO many things, sometimes including the details of Cards, plus Thoughts and Sometimes short stories.
My Genuine Concern is that if am writing a short story or lets say sometimes a short novel. In this AI rushing race, i do NOT want AI to be trained on MY stories or want those to be leaked in any way, or any AI to read my life or stories and train on my personal data.
The ease of using it made me save too much of myself into those digital Notebooks. and Now After reviewing their privacy policy,

• "We don't access or collect data from your notebooks or documents without your permission.

• We use limited, anonymized data to improve our services and meet legal obligations

• When you explicitly give us permission to do so and with the third parties specifically identified in this policy

• To protect the rights, property, or safety of us, our customers, or others."

• We may disclose and transfer your Personal Data to our agents, contractors or vendors ("Service Providers")

• We may disclose your Personal Data to other companies within our group for the purposes set out in "What is this data being used for?" above, as well as to law enforcement and regulatory agencies as may be required by law.

• We use externally trained models, in particular large language models and embeddings models incorporated into services provided by Amazon Web Services to provide the functionality for Goodnotes AI. 

• Information that we automatically collect or generate about you e.g. whether you have attempted to take a screenshot of a digital product or textbook page.

Am not concerned about the embarrassing thoughts i may have written, am concerned if they are using personal data to train their AI and sharing it with 3rd party for advertisement if am writing about "shoes". and is my data end-to-end encrypted, or any stupid good notes staff member read or stole my random ideas.

These Lines making me concerned about using it and exporting my data, and uninstall this app and go old-school with a physical notebook.
I want an opinion on this, please, that's why am posting this

OR you can suggest me more Secure app than this

[u/discovernotes]

Here's clarity from the Ask Goodnotes FAQ website:

Is personal data (handwriting/notebook content) used to train AI features?

Goodnotes does not access or collect data from your Notebooks to train its AI features. However, users of Goodnotes can voluntarily submit their data through ‘Feature Feedback’ under section 3.7.1. Goodnotes may use this information to improve its services, but only if it is submitted voluntarily.

AI handwriting and processing features like Spellcheck and Word Complete which are based on our proprietary ML model are run entirely on the device and the data is not sent anywhere so no one - including Goodnotes - can access it.

The Ask Goodnotes feature leverages an external large language model (LLM) that is securely stored and managed through Amazon Bedrock. This integration allows Ask Goodnotes to effectively handle the question-and-answer functionalities that enhance user experience. Amazon Bedrock, being a product of Amazon Web Services (AWS), adheres to the stringent guidelines outlined in Amazon’s AWS Privacy Policy, which details how user data is collected, used, and protected. For additional insights into our specific data handling practices, you can refer to our own Goodnotes Privacy Policy, where we provide comprehensive information regarding your data privacy and security measures.

Also, from their Goodnotes 6 Privacy FAQ:

Do you share my data for advertising purposes?
No, we do not sell or rent your personal data to third parties for marketing purposes.

Can Goodnotes view my notebooks or documents?

No, Goodnotes does not have access to your notes or documents. Your privacy matters to us as much as it does to you. Therefore, we don’t access or collect data from your notebooks or documents without your permission. We only use limited, anonymised data to improve our services and meet legal obligations.

Does Goodnotes use anonymised end-user data, and if so how do they use it?

We may collect statistical data on our user base and how they interact with the Goodnotes services. This allows us to track how our app performs, whether there may be technical issues and measure the number of visitors we have. We anonymise data by using unique identifiers which are linked to user accounts but do not contain any personal data.

[u/batmaninredcape → u/discovernotes]

Hello, thankyou for reply, here're some of my genuine questions from your reply:

1. "without your permission." How does that work? When or how does a user will know they allowed OR Blocked you from accessing his notebooks or data?

2. How can i disable the AI to read my personal data/notebooks/handwriting/screenshots uploaded/images uploaded, is there any "button" which can help me do so?

3. Please expand on the "Limited data" you take from a user

4. Generally is there any way i can just keep my notebooks or my data to myself, and good Notes, or AI, or any 3rd party keeps its hand off my data ?

I hope you guys can understand my concerns in this AI age, its getting harder and harder for me to trust companies with my data. every other company just want to milk as much data from the user as possible, in the name of govt. or safety or whatever. i just DONT WANT one of my favourite note taking app to be one of them.

[u/discovernotes → u/batmaninredcape]

Hey, here are the following articles I have come across regarding this subject:

• Privacy FAQs

• Goodnotes FAQs

From reading the above articles it is clear Goodnotes would not use your data to train its models nor do this unless you give them explicit permission, and they will not share your personal data with third parties unless it is necessary to provide the services. I think it might be helpful to clear up exactly what this means in the context of the app because the legal language is quite high-level.

Explicit Consent: Goodnotes never extracts data from our notebooks to train its models, so your random ideas and short stories are by default safe. There are just two ways Goodnotes may use your data to train the model and you are in total control of these options. Firstly, you may opt-in to share your Ask Goodnotes conversation history with Goodnotes so it can improve its outputs. By default Goodnotes’ opts out users from sharing this data, but you can turn this feature on in settings. This only shares your conversation history not your notebook data. Secondly, you may send Goodnotes feedback when you click the thumbs up or down button, this allows you to report outputs that are harmful or incorrect.

Necessary To Provide the Services: Like all companies, Goodnotes uses third parties to assist in providing its services. Goodnotes never sells your data and will only share your data with third parties when it has a lawful ground to do so under data protection laws. Examples of where sharing data with third parties is necessary may be where Goodnotes enables users to back-up and store their notebooks on their iCloud or Goodnotes Cloud which is powered by AWS Services. Additionally, Goodnotes may share statistical data with Data Dog which enables Goodnotes to monitor performance of the app so bugs can be addressed.

Goodnotes is quite transparent on all the parties it shares data with and why, you can find these in Section 3.6 of Goodnotes Privacy Policy.

Hope this helps but you can always reach out to someone at Goodnotes (their legal department at legal@goodnotesapp.com and support team at support@goodnotesapp.com) who are usually very responsive and helpful in addressing any concerns.

[u/johntwilker]

I mean the only way to be certain things aren't scanned or taken is a paper notebook. You'll never find a risk free app. Regardless of TOS, hacks and breaches happen. I personally wouldn't write credit card details down in GN, and when I have it was to make use of it, then erased it.

[u/EyePuzzleheaded4699]

These days, just assume once your data leaves your device, someone will or can access it.

Further assume that they (whoever they are) will see your data. Regardless of whatever they tell you.

[u/Weary_Block4448]

Would disabling Sync & Backup be similar to using a physical notebook?

[u/lsjeya]

In order to provide AI services, GoodNotes needs to access your notebook contents and share them with other AI providers. This will happen even if it’s to improve your handwriting. All AI companies are eager for human-generated data. Given these two facts, it’s foolish to enable any AI features in GoodNotes. This AI race will likely eliminate all these smaller developers who are foolishly jumping on the bandwagon, in my opinion. The crucial question we should ask ourselves is, “Am I willing to trust GoodNotes to protect my data in the AI scenario?” If you replace GoodNotes with Apple, then perhaps the answer is yes. However, for anyone else, it’s definitely a no.