Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 19, 2026

A Cool Journal is made by Eternal Swell LLC ("we", "us"). We are independent and not venture-backed, which means we answer to the people who use the app and no one else. We do not sell your data. This policy explains what the app collects, why, who else sees it, and what you can do about it.

The short version

You write in the app. Your writing is stored so you can read it back and so the coach can remember what you told it before. To generate a coach reply, your entry and relevant earlier context are sent to Anthropic's API. The app runs no third-party analytics and never asks to track you across other companies' apps and websites, though we do keep our own record of how you use it — which prompts and suggestions you were shown, and whether you acted on them — so we can improve it. Our website uses Google Analytics, which we ask you about first; the app has no analytics or advertising code at all, and nothing you write ever reaches Google or an advertising company. We do not sell anything about you. We may periodically review entries to improve how the coach responds. You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app.

What we collect

Only what the app needs to work. There is no hidden collection layer.

• Account details. A name, which is required. An email address, which is optional and only used to let you get back into your account. A timezone, if you set one, so days start and end correctly for you.
• Subscription status. If you subscribe to the coach, which plan you're on and whether it's currently active, so the app knows what you have access to. Payment itself is handled by Apple — we never see your card details.
• What you write. Your journal entries and your conversations with the coach.
• Daily check-ins. The stress, energy, and mood ratings you record.
• Your onboarding answers. The personality questionnaire responses and the goals you select.
• Challenge activity. Which challenge you accepted, how many times you have marked it done, and any note you leave afterwards.
• Photos, if you add them. A photo you take in the app, or choose from your photo library, to attach to an entry or send in a coach chat.
• How you use the app. Which prompts, questions, and challenges we showed you and whether you acted on them, plus a record of coach requests so we can track cost. This is our own record, kept to improve the app and never shared with an analytics vendor.
• Derived context. Summaries the app generates from your entries so the coach can recall earlier threads without re-reading everything. This is built from your writing; it is not separate collection.

What we do not collect

Worth stating plainly, because it is unusual:

• No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs in the app. The app itself contains no third-party analytics, crash-reporting, advertising, or attribution libraries of any kind. Nothing about your use of the app is sent to an analytics or advertising company. The usage record described above is our own, and stays with us.
• No advertising identifiers, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt. The app does not ask for your device's advertising identifier and does not track you across other companies' apps and websites. That is why you will never see iOS's "allow tracking" request from us.
• No contacts, location, calendar, or microphone access.
• No push tokens. Reminders are scheduled on your device by the app itself. Nothing about them is sent to a server.
• Nothing you write leaves the app for anyone else. Not your entries, not your coach conversations, not your check-ins, not the summaries built from them — not to Google, not to an advertising company, not to anyone.

Our website is a different matter, and we would rather draw the line ourselves than let you find it: acooljournal.com uses Google Analytics, with your permission. The app does not.

How your writing is used

This is the part worth being precise about.

When you write an entry or send a coach message, that text is sent from our server to Anthropic, which runs the model that generates the coach's reply. Along with your message we send relevant context: your personality profile, your selected goals, your recent check-ins, a summary of earlier sessions, and — when you mention someone the app already knows about — a short history relating to them. This is what makes the coach able to refer back to things you wrote weeks ago.

Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, what we send is not used to train Anthropic's models. Anthropic deletes inputs and outputs within 30 days in the ordinary course. There is one exception worth knowing about: where Anthropic's automated safety systems flag content as violating its Usage Policy, it may retain that content for up to two years, and the resulting classification scores for up to seven. You can read the terms that apply to our account at anthropic.com/legal/commercial-terms.

We do not use your writing to train any model of our own, and we do not sell it, rent it, or share it for advertising.

Photos are not sent to the model. A photo you attach is stored and displayed back to you only.

We ask before any of this happens. The first time you open the coach, the app shows you what is sent, names Anthropic as the recipient, and asks for your permission. If you say no, the coach stays off and nothing you write is sent anywhere — writing, check-ins, search and export do not involve Anthropic at all and keep working normally.

You can withdraw that permission at any time, in Settings inside your profile, under Your data — "Coach replies by Anthropic". Withdrawing stops any further sharing from that moment. It cannot un-send what was already sent, which is why the paragraph above says what Anthropic does with it and for how long.

Every company we share data with is held to this policy. We only use providers whose terms give your data the same or equivalent protection as described here: they may use it solely to provide the service we asked them for, may not sell it, and may not use it to train their own models. Anthropic's commercial terms say so explicitly, which is why the coach runs on them. If a provider ever stopped meeting that bar, we would replace them or stop using the feature.

Who can read your entries

To improve how the coach responds, we may periodically review journal entries and coach conversations — to assess the quality, accuracy, and tone of its replies. No one outside the company has access.

We review for that reason and no other. We don't share what we read, and we don't use it to train models.

Face ID and your device

If you turn on Face ID (or Touch ID, or your device passcode) to lock A Cool Journal, that check is done entirely by your phone's operating system. We never receive or store your face data, fingerprint data, or any biometric template — the app is told only whether the device approved you. Turning the lock off again is a setting in the app.

It is worth being precise about what this protects: the lock stops someone picking up your unlocked phone and reading your journal. It does not encrypt your entries, and it changes nothing about what our server can see.

Analytics on this website

This website uses Google Analytics, loaded through Google Tag Manager, so we can see how many people find the site, which pages they read, and whether they go on to the App Store. On a product this small that is the difference between improving it and guessing.

We ask first. Nothing is set until you accept, and if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we treat that as a no and never show you the banner at all. You can change your mind from the "Cookie choices" link in the footer of any page.

This is the website only. The app contains no analytics, advertising, or attribution code of any kind — nothing you write, and nothing you do inside the app, is visible to Google or to anyone else. Our own record of how you use the app, described above, stays with us.

We have deliberately turned off Google's advertising features: no Google Signals, no ad personalisation, no advertising cookies. Google receives page views from this marketing site, not an advertising profile of you.

How we advertise A Cool Journal

We pay to advertise A Cool Journal, and we measure whether it works in two ways, neither of which identifies you to anyone.

For the app, we use only what Apple builds into the App Store: Apple's own attribution for App Store ads, and Apple's SKAdNetwork for everything else. Both report that a campaign produced installs, not which person you are.

For this website, when you arrive from one of our ads we keep the click's identifier — a random code the ad platform puts in the link, which means nothing on its own and says nothing about you. If you create an account, we may tell the ad platform that a signup followed that click, so it can tell us which ads are worth paying for. We send the code and the fact of a signup. We do not send your name, your email address, or anything you write.

There is still no Meta pixel and no advertising tag on this site, and nothing from inside the app is ever involved.

Cookies

Three kinds, and the app uses none at all.

• Necessary cookies make the site work and cannot be turned off.
• Analytics cookies are the Google Analytics ones described above. They are optional — we ask before setting them, and you can withdraw at any time.
• Our own ad measurement. If you arrive by clicking one of our ads, we store the click's identifier in a cookie so that, if you go on to create an account, we can tell which ad brought you. It is set without asking, because it is only read by us and nothing about it is sent to an advertising company at the point it is stored. It is not used to build a profile of you or to target you anywhere else, and if your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we do not set it at all.

Do not sell or share my personal information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Analytics is not advertising: Google measures visits to this marketing site for us, and because we keep Google's advertising features switched off, none of it is used to build an advertising profile or to target you elsewhere.

To opt out, decline analytics in the banner, use the "Cookie choices" link in any footer, or send a Global Privacy Control signal — we honour it. None of this touches your journal, which is never involved either way.

Where your data lives

That is the complete list of processors we use. None of them is a data broker, and none of them receives anything you have written.

Security

Your data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.2 or greater, and encrypted at rest using AES-256 by our database provider.

To be clear about what this is not: A Cool Journal is not end-to-end encrypted. Our server can read your entries, because it has to — the coach cannot remember what you wrote if the content is unreadable to the system that generates its replies. Anyone claiming both is claiming something that cannot be true. We would rather tell you that than imply otherwise.

No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend to.

When we might have to disclose something

We may disclose information where we reasonably need to in order to comply with the law, a legal process, or a government request; or to protect the rights, property, security, or safety of Eternal Swell, the people who use A Cool Journal, or anyone else. We are a small company and this has never happened, but you should know the possibility exists.

If Eternal Swell is ever involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, bankruptcy, or sale of assets, information associated with A Cool Journal may transfer as part of that transaction. It would not change our commitment not to sell your writing or use it for advertising.

Your choices

• Delete a single entry. Open the day on your home screen, tap the ••• menu on the entry card, and choose Delete entry. This removes the entry, its coach conversation, and any photo attached to it.
• Delete your account. From Settings inside your profile. This deletes your account and everything associated with it — entries, conversations, check-ins, personality results, goals, challenge history, generated summaries, and stored photos. It is immediate and cannot be undone.
• Withdraw permission for coach replies. Settings inside your profile, under Your data. The coach stops working until you allow it again; everything else is unaffected, because nothing else leaves our systems.
• Export your data. Open Settings inside your profile and choose Export journal. You can export as a PDF, Markdown, or plain text file, covering all time or a shorter range. If you cannot access the app — for example, you have deleted it but want a copy of your data — email us at the address below and we will provide one.

The exported file is not encrypted, and the app tells you so before you export. Once it leaves the app it is an ordinary file: anyone you send it to can read it.

Your rights, wherever you are

Washington residents have specific rights over consumer health data — mood, stress and energy check-ins, and anything you write about your mental or physical wellbeing all count. Those are described in our separate Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy. A Cool Journal is sold in the United States and Canada. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under local law — including the California Consumer Privacy Act, Canada's PIPEDA, and Quebec's Law 25. These generally include the right to access your information, correct it, delete it, and get a copy of it.

To exercise any of these, use Export journal and the delete controls in Settings — they do most of this without asking anyone — or email us at the address below. We do not sell personal information. On sharing, see how we advertise: the app shares nothing, and the website's advertising cookies count as sharing under California's definition, which you can decline.

How long we keep things

Your entries stay until you delete them or delete your account — a journal you cannot read back is not much of a journal. When you delete your account, the records are removed from the live database immediately.

When you delete an entry or your account, it is removed from the live database straight away. We also keep our own encrypted backups of the database, so a failure on our side cannot lose your writing — those are held for about two weeks and then destroyed. A deleted entry can therefore persist in a backup for up to that long before it ages out. Nobody reads a backup except to restore from one.

Children

A Cool Journal is not directed to anyone under the age of 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe someone under 16 has given us their information, email us and we will delete it.

If you are outside the United States

Your data is processed and stored in the United States. A Cool Journal is offered in the United States and Canada — so if you are in Canada, using it means your information is transferred to the US, where privacy laws differ from those at home.

We do not currently offer the app outside those two countries.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how your writing is handled, we will tell you in the app rather than quietly editing this page.

Who is responsible for privacy here

Quebec's Law 25 requires us to publish who is in charge of protecting personal information, and how to reach them. At Eternal Swell LLC that responsibility sits with the Privacy Officer, who is the company's sole member, reachable at hello@acooljournal.com.

In a company this size that is a person reading the email, not a ticket queue. If you write about your privacy, you are writing to the person who can actually change how the app behaves.

Contact

Questions, or a request about your data? Email hello@acooljournal.com.

A Cool Journal is made by Eternal Swell LLC, Seattle, Washington, United States.