Journalling Suggestions Intelligently Groups Daily Moments and Special Events

Journalling Suggestions uses on-device processing to intelligently group moments and events, in order to provide you with personalised suggestions. Using information stored on your device, Journalling Suggestions can recommend special moments for you to remember and write about. You control which suggestions are shared with journalling apps that use Journalling Suggestions.

Journalling Suggestions can include suggestions from your activities (such as workout type, duration, routes, kilojoules and heart rate), media use (such as which podcast and song you listened to, artist name and track name), contacts (such as whom you communicated with via texts, calls and FaceTime), photos (such as photos and videos from your library, shared albums and memories) and significant locations (such as places you’ve recently been, as well as how often and when you visited them, in order to learn places that are significant to you).

When you enable Journalling Suggestions, limited historical data stored on your device, including information about your workouts, media use, communications and photos, will be used to create meaningful suggestions for you. You can customise the categories of data to include in your Journalling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, and tapping a specific category to turn it on or off. If more than one journalling app uses Journalling Suggestions, your choices of which categories to include in your Journalling Suggestions will apply to all apps. You can also clear the history of suggestions that have not yet been shared with a journalling app by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, then tapping Clear History. You can turn off Journalling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, then tapping Turn Off All. Your decision to turn off all suggestions will apply to all journalling apps using Journalling Suggestions.

Nearby People

Journalling Suggestions may also use contextual information to determine which suggestions may be more meaningful or relevant to you. Journalling Suggestions uses Bluetooth to detect the number of devices and contacts around you without storing which of these specific contacts were around. This information is used to improve and prioritise your suggestions. It is stored on device and is not shared with Apple. You can choose not to allow Journalling Suggestions to use the number of devices and contacts around you to prioritise your suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, then tapping to turn off Prefer Suggestions with Others.

You can also control whether your contacts include you in their number of nearby contacts by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, then tapping to turn off Discoverable by Others. If you disable Discoverable by Others and choose not to be included in your contacts’ counts, Prefer Suggestions with Others will also be disabled and Journalling Suggestions will not detect how many devices and contacts are around you to improve or prioritise your suggestions.

Sharing Journalling Suggestions with the Journal App and Third-Party Apps

You control which suggestions are shared with journalling apps that use Journalling Suggestions by selecting moments that are meaningful to you and adding them to the app. Only you can see your suggestions prior to sharing them. You can view which apps are using Journalling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions, and viewing Apps Using Private Access.

If you choose to share your suggestions with the Journal app, you have control over your entries. When your phone is locked with a passcode, entries in the Journal app are encrypted. If you have default two-factor authentication and a passcode, all Journal entries are end-to-end encrypted when stored in iCloud, so even Apple can’t read them. Additionally, you can choose to enable secondary authentication and lock the Journal app with your device passcode, Face ID or Touch ID.

Notifications

If you enable Journalling Suggestions notifications, Journalling Suggestions may prompt you to write about moments and special events. You can disable Journalling Suggestions notifications by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journalling Suggestions > Suggestion Notification Settings and tapping to turn them off.

At all times, information collected by Apple will be treated in accordance with Apple’s Privacy Policy, which can be found at apple.com/au/privacy

Published Date: March 5, 2024