Privacy

The short version

• Your private side is private from your partner. Not by a setting — by the shape of the database. Private and shared content live in separate stores, and there is no path from your partner’s account to yours.
• Nothing is sold, and nothing is advertised. Vessa has no advertising business and no data business. There are no third-party analytics or advertising trackers in the app.
• You can take it all back. Export everything as a file, or delete your account and its contents outright, from Settings. No email, no waiting.

What Vessa holds

Your account. An email address, and a password if you did not sign in with Apple or Google. Signing in with Apple shares only your name and email, and if you choose to hide your email, the address Vessa holds is a private one Apple forwards to you. Authentication is handled by Clerk; Vessa never sees or stores your password.

What you tell it. Everything you tell Vessa: your answers when you start (your name, birthday and city, and the choices you tap), conversations, notes about your partner, dreams, reflections, and notes on plans. If you use voice input, your phone’s or browser’s own speech recognition (Apple’s or Google’s, which may process the audio on their servers) turns it into text, and only the text is sent to Vessa.

What Vessa works out. Vessa builds an evolving understanding of you from what you have said — the Mirror, and the propositions behind it. This is derived data and it is yours; it is in your export and it is deleted with your account.

Special-category information. Things you say about your relationship and your sexuality are treated as sensitive personal data under GDPR. They are held on the basis of the explicit consent you give when you start using Vessa. To take that back, delete your data — it is one action in Settings and it happens immediately.

Things you connect, if you choose to. A calendar (Google, or your device’s own), an approximate location used once to suggest the city you are in and not tracked afterwards, and a device token for notifications. Every one of these is asked for at the moment you use the feature, never on launch, and each is optional.

When you open the app. One number per day: how many times you opened Vessa, counted once per half hour. Nothing about what you did while it was open, and no trail of visits. It is used for one thing: not sending a notification about something you have already seen.

Feedback you send. If you use “Share feedback”, your words go to the people who build Vessa along with what helps them understand and fix what you describe: your device model and system version, the app version, the screens you had visited in that session, the names of recent actions and the requests the app made (never their contents), any errors, and account facts such as whether a partner or calendar is connected. It never includes your reflections, conversations, or anything else you have written. Each report becomes a ticket in Linear, the tool the team tracks work in, with your name and email so the team can ask you about what you reported.

What Vessa does not hold. No advertising identifiers, no behavioural profile for targeting, no third-party analytics SDK, no contact list, no photos beyond what you add yourself.

The partner boundary

Vessa is used by two people, and the most important thing it does is keep them apart where it matters. Everything you write is private by default. Sharing is always a deliberate act — a dream you add to a shared list, a plan you both see.

Private and shared content are stored in separate database schemas, not one table with a flag on it. That means a partner’s app is not merely disallowed from reading your private side; there is no query it can make that would reach it.

Vessa may let something private inform a suggestion it makes to your partner — that is much of its value — but only after transforming it so it cannot be attributed back to you or reconstructed. It never quotes you to them, and never says what you said.

Who else sees it

Vessa runs on a small number of services, each doing one job. They are processors: they handle data on Vessa’s instructions and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.

• Anthropic — makes Claude, the AI that does Vessa’s thinking. Receives the text it needs to answer.
• Neon — the Postgres database your content is stored in.
• Vercel — hosting for the API.
• Clerk — accounts and sign-in.
• Voyage AI — turns text into the numeric form Vessa searches over.
• OpenAI — draws the pictures on date plans, from a short description of each place that Vessa writes. It receives none of your own words and no account details.
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your device.
• Linear — only if you send feedback: where each report is kept, with your name and email, so it can be worked on.
• Google — when you type your city at the start, to suggest the place you mean; when Vessa looks up a place for a date suggestion; and if you connect a Google calendar.

Beyond these: nobody. Vessa does not sell personal information, does not share it for advertising, and has no affiliates to pass it to. If a lawful request for data ever arrives, we will tell you unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

How it is protected

Everything travels over TLS. Your private content is encrypted at rest with a key unique to you, which is itself wrapped by a server key — so the raw store is not readable on its own.

Vessa is deliberately not end-to-end encrypted, and it is worth being clear about why: the product is an intelligence that reads what you write and reasons about it. It cannot do that over ciphertext it cannot open. Keys are held server-side. If that trade is not one you want to make, Vessa is not the right product for you, and we would rather say so here than bury it.

How long it is kept

Your content stays until you delete it. Deleting your account removes your content and your login identity immediately and permanently — there is no recovery window and no archive we keep for ourselves.

One honest caveat: our database provider keeps point-in-time backups for operational recovery, so deleted content can persist in those backups for a short period after it is gone from Vessa. We are defining and enforcing that window; until it is published here, treat “deleted” as immediate in the application and short-lived in backups.

What you can do

• Take a copy. Settings → Export everything. A JSON file with your account, your conversations, the notes you have written, your dreams, any feedback you have sent, and what Vessa has worked out about you.
• Delete everything. Settings → Delete everything. Content and account, at once — including your feedback and the tickets it became.
• Disconnect your partner. In Settings, at any time, without deleting anything of your own.
• Correct what Vessa believes. The Mirror is editable. If it has the wrong idea about you, say so and it changes.

If you are in the UK or EU, you also have the rights that come with GDPR — access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, and the right to complain to your data protection authority. The first five are built into the app.

Children

Vessa is for adults and is not directed at anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect information from children.