Neechan collects nothing about you. There is no analytics, no crash reporting, no account, no advertising identifier and no tracking of any kind. Nothing you do in the app is reported to us, because there is no “us” for it to be reported to — the app talks to the imageboards you choose to read, and to anything else only when you ask it to, as described below.

What Neechan is

Neechan is an unofficial reader for two public imageboards, 2ch and 4chan. It is not affiliated with either site, and it neither hosts nor moderates anything you see through it. The content belongs to those sites and is governed by their own rules and policies.

Information we collect

None. Specifically, Neechan contains no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising framework and no third-party tracking library of any kind. It does not ask for an account and does not read your advertising identifier. This is not a promise about intent — the app’s privacy manifest declares no collected data types at all, and the app requests no tracking permission because it has nothing to track.

What stays on your device

Everything Neechan remembers is stored locally, on your device, and is never transmitted anywhere:

Favorites, and the boards you have pinned
Reading history and your place in a thread
Unsent drafts and their attachments
Posts you have marked as your own
Hidden threads, hidden posts and autohide rules
Threads saved for offline reading, with their pictures
Themes you have made, and every app setting
Statistics: time in the app, posts sent, threads opened
Cached images and video

Deleting the app deletes all of it. Nothing is backed up to a server of ours, because there is no server of ours.

If you export a backup, Neechan writes it as a file on your device and hands it to you; where it goes from there is up to you. It carries your favorites, history, rules, themes, settings and statistics. Importing one only adds what is missing.

What leaves your device

Requests to the imageboard you are reading, and nothing else unless you ask for it (see below). Neechan contacts:

2ch — 2ch.org, 2ch.life, 2ch.su
4chan — a.4cdn.org, i.4cdn.org, s.4cdn.org, boards.4chan.org, sys.4chan.org

Those servers see your IP address and the usual details any web browser sends, because that is what fetching a page is. What they do with it is described in their policies, not ours: 2ch · 4chan privacy policy.

Cookies those sites set — an age confirmation, a browser check, a paid pass if you have one — are stored on your device so they can be sent back on later requests, exactly as a browser would. You can view and delete them at any time in Settings → Forum → Cookies.

When you ask for more

A few things you can choose to do reach beyond the imageboard. Nothing is sent for any of them until you tap it.

Image search. Search for this image opens the engine you pick — Yandex, Google Lens, SauceNAO or iqdb — in the in-app browser or in Safari, with the address of the file, or of a video’s thumbnail, in the link. The engine fetches the picture from the imageboard itself; nothing is uploaded from your device. It sees your IP address and that address, under its own policy.
Translation. Posts are translated on your device by Apple’s Translation framework, and their text is not sent anywhere. The first time a language is needed, iOS downloads it from Apple.
Live Text and Visual Look Up. Text in a picture is found on your device. Looking up an object, a landmark or a plant may ask Apple for the answer, under Apple’s privacy policy.

Posting and reporting

Where posting is available, what you write and attach goes to the imageboard you are posting on, and to nobody else. Attachments can have their metadata stripped and their filenames randomised before they are sent; that happens on your device, before the upload. The App Store version of Neechan cannot post at all.

Posting on 4chan goes through a browser view inside the app, because 4chan’s posting server answers nothing else. Before it hands out a captcha, 4chan may ask for a check run by Cloudflare (challenges.cloudflare.com) or hCaptcha (hcaptcha.com). That check loads from its provider, which sees your IP address and browser details under its own policy. The captcha is answered by you; Neechan does not solve it.

A like or a dislike on 2ch is a request to 2ch, as a post is, and is offered only where posting is.

Reporting a post sends your report to the moderators of the site carrying it. Neechan does not receive a copy and cannot remove anything, because it hosts nothing.

Permissions

Photo library — asked for only when you save a picture or video, and only for adding. Neechan never reads your library.
Face ID / Touch ID — optional, to lock the app. The check happens on the device and Neechan never sees anything biometric.
Notifications — optional, for new posts in threads you follow. They are scheduled locally on your device. There is no push server, and Neechan does not have a device token.
Background refresh — optional, so followed threads can be checked while the app is closed. It fetches from the imageboard and nothing else.

Required-reason APIs

Apple asks apps to declare certain system APIs. Neechan declares two: file timestamps, for managing its own media cache and saved threads, and user defaults, for your settings. Both operate solely inside the app’s own storage.

Children

Neechan is not intended for children. The material on the sites it reads is for adults, and the app asks you to confirm your age before it will open boards meant for them.

This website

ib.neechan.pro is a static website. It has no analytics, no advertising and no account. It is served by Cloudflare, which handles the requests needed to deliver its pages, as any web host does.

It stores two things in your browser, and only after you choose them: the language you picked, as a cookie named lang so that the home page opens in it next time, and light or dark, in local storage. Neither is sent anywhere but back to this site.

The project badges at the top of the home page are images from shields.io, which sees your IP address when your browser loads them. TestFlight and GitHub links take you to Apple and GitHub, under their own policies.

Changes

If this policy changes, the new version will be published here with a new date at the top. Its full history is public in the app’s repository.

Questions, or anything you believe should not be online: neechan-dev@proton.me

Source code: github.com/leros1337/neechan

Privacy policy