Privacy

Last updated 2026-07-03. This page describes exactly what Kobo Note Up does with your data — including the parts that are easy to gloss over in marketing copy. If anything here is unclear, email hi.upchen@gmail.com.

The core promise: reading and exporting happen in your browser

When you use Kobo Note Up to read a Kobo database and export highlights to Markdown or plain text, that entire process runs on your device using SQL.js, a WebAssembly build of SQLite that executes inside your browser tab. Your Kobo database file is read from disk by your browser, parsed in memory, and never uploaded anywhere during this normal flow. There is no server-side database that stores your books, highlights, or reading history.

This is the default behavior for everyone. The two features below are the only exceptions, and both require you to take an explicit action first.

Optional feature: sharing your database for debugging

The footer has a "Share KoboDB for debugging" button. Nothing happens unless you click it and then confirm the dialog that follows.

  • What: your entire Kobo database file, which contains your reading and annotation data (book titles, highlights, notes).

  • Where: uploaded to Vercel Blob, our file storage provider. The resulting file is stored at an unguessable, randomly-suffixed URL, but the storage itself is not access-restricted — do not use this feature if your annotations contain anything sensitive.

  • Why: to help the developer (Up Chen) reproduce bugs against a real database when something in the app breaks.

  • Notification: uploading triggers an automatic email to the developer containing the file's storage URL and the upload timestamp.

  • Deletion: email hi.upchen@gmail.com and the uploaded file will be deleted on request.

Optional feature: exporting highlights to Notion

If you connect your Notion account, exporting highlights to Notion works differently from the default Markdown/text export.

  • What: the highlights, notes, and any handwritten-annotation images you choose to export.

  • Where: this content is sent from your browser to our server, which forwards it to Notion's API on your behalf. It passes through our server in-flight but is not stored there — it is not written to a database.

  • Why: Notion's API requires a server-side OAuth flow and authenticated API calls; a pure browser export isn't possible for this destination the way local Markdown export is.

  • Your Notion access token: stored in an encrypted, HTTP-only browser cookie (not in a server-side database), expires after 7 days, and is only ever sent back to our server to make the export request to Notion's API on your behalf.

Analytics

We use Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, and Vercel Analytics to see anonymous usage patterns — for example, which pages are visited and whether a page load succeeded. These tools record page views and interaction events. They do not receive your book titles, highlights, notes, or any other reading content; that data stays inside the browser flow described above unless you explicitly use one of the two features above.

What we don't do

  • No user accounts or sign-in — there is nothing to register.

  • No selling, renting, or sharing of your data with third parties for advertising.

  • No server-side database that stores your reading content by default.

Questions or deletion requests

Kobo Note Up is open source under the MIT license — you can read every line of code that handles your data at github.com/hi-upchen/kobo-up. For anything else, including deleting a debug-shared database, email hi.upchen@gmail.com.