Privacy
The promise
No account. No email. No login. Your journal lives on your phone; nothing is stored on our servers.
The disclosures below describe how Thoughtful actually handles your data. They are the operative text; the summary above is a plain-language statement of intent.
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Local-first. Your journal — the people you add, notes, gift ideas, dates, tiers, cadence — lives on your device. Thoughtful has no accounts, no login, and does not collect user identifiers. There is no server-side record of who you are or what you have written.
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AI processing in transit. When you ask Thoughtful to generate suggestions, a limited per-person context — names, dates, and AI-eligible notes — is sent transiently to our server and to Anthropic, our AI provider. This context is not retained after the response is returned, is not used to train models (Anthropic's commercial API terms do not use inputs for training), and is never sold.
You control what leaves the device. Any note can be marked Not used for Reach out topic suggestions, which keeps it local only. Health details, special dates, and notes marked off-AI never leave your device at all — for any purpose.
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Profile sharing. When you explicitly choose to share a profile or group, the selected impersonal fields — name, phone, email, birthday, and the relationships among the shared set — are stored on our server under a random token so the recipient can claim them. The stored payload is deleted when it is claimed, when the share is revoked, or after 30 days, whichever comes first. Notes, gift ideas, tiers, nudge history, and home addresses are never included in a share.
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Anonymous analytics. Thoughtful uses TelemetryDeck to receive anonymous, aggregate usage counts (for example: a screen was opened, a nudge was acted on). No names, notes, or personal content are included. You can turn this off at any time in Settings.
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Backups. Backups are user-initiated. When you create one, the file is saved wherever you choose to save it — your iCloud Drive, Files, or another location you pick. Thoughtful does not store backups on our servers.
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Affiliate links. Some gift links in Thoughtful route to retailers through affiliate programs. If you buy something through one of those links, the retailer may pay us a commission. The price you pay never changes, and whether a link is affiliated has no bearing on what Thoughtful suggests.
Children's privacy
Thoughtful is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has provided information through the app, contact us and we will remove anything we can identify.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the product changes. Material changes will be surfaced in the app before they take effect, and the effective date at the top of this page will always reflect the current version.
Contact
Questions or concerns about privacy — reach us at hello@staythoughtful.app.