What Kintsugi records about you, why, and how to get rid of it. This page is the plain-English version. The privacy policy is the formal one, and if the two ever disagree, that is a bug — tell us and we will fix this page.
The category of data this is
Notes about your mental health, your neurodivergence, whether you are staying off something, and what you eat are special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR. That is the same legal class as your medical records. We treat it that way, and it is why the app is built the way it is rather than the fast way.
Every look at your data is written down
Access to health data in Kintsugi is denied by default and granted explicitly, and every decision is recorded in an append-only log — the times access was granted and the times it was refused. Refusals matter as much as grants: a run of refusals is how you notice somebody trying doors. The log cannot be edited after the fact, including by us.
Deleting means deleting
Ask to close your account and it is first marked deleted and taken out of reach, then permanently removed, and the removal itself is recorded. There is a grace period before the permanent step so that a decision made at three in the morning is not irreversible by breakfast. There is no unlogged deletion anywhere in the system, and there is no copy kept for analytics.
We collect less than we could
A field recording somebody’s addiction history is a liability as much as an asset. If a feature works without a piece of information, the app does not ask for it. That rule has cost us features we would otherwise have shipped, which is the point of having it.
This website
The site you are reading has no third-party analytics, no advertising tags, no social tracking pixels, no external fonts and no cookie banner, because there are no non-essential cookies to ask you about. Nothing here reports your visit to anyone else.
If you write to us through the contact form, your message is recorded on this site so that a failed email cannot lose it, and it is deleted automatically after six months. Only we can read it. Please keep health details out of that form all the same — it is ordinary email at the other end.
What we will never do
- Sell your data, or share it with advertisers or data brokers. Not for any price.
- Use what you write in the app to train a model.
- Show you an advert based on anything you have logged.
- Email you to guilt you back into the app.
Asking us about your data
You can ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, or ask us to stop using it while you dispute something. Use the contact form and choose “a data protection request” — that routes it to a person rather than a support queue. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, and you do not have to raise it with us first.