Journaling Suggestions Intelligently Groups Daily Moments and Special Events

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

Journaling Suggestions can include suggestions from your activities (such as workout type, duration, routes, calories, 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 Journaling 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 customize the categories of data to include in your Journaling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions, and tapping a specific category to turn it on or off. If more than one journaling app uses Journaling Suggestions, your choices of which categories to include in your Journaling Suggestions will apply to all apps. You can also clear the history of suggestions that have not yet been shared with a journaling app by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions, then tapping Clear History. You can turn off Journaling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling Suggestions, then tapping Turn Off All. Your decision to turn off all suggestions will apply to all journaling apps using Journaling Suggestions.

Nearby People

Journaling Suggestions may also use contextual information to determine which suggestions may be more meaningful or relevant to you. Journaling 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 prioritize your suggestions. It is stored on device, and is not shared with Apple. You can choose not to allow Journaling Suggestions to use the number of devices and contacts around you to prioritize your suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling 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 > Journaling 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 Journaling Suggestions will not detect how many devices and contacts are around you to improve or prioritize your suggestions.

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

You control which suggestions are shared with journaling apps that use Journaling 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 Journaling Suggestions by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling 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 Journaling Suggestions notifications, Journaling Suggestions may prompt you to write about moments and special events. You can disable Journaling Suggestions notifications by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Journaling 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 www.apple.com/privacy

Published Date: March 5, 2024