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Effective date: [DATE] Provider: [COMPANY NAME] ("we", "us", "Steady") Contact: [privacy@yourdomain.com]
Steady is built to know as little about you as possible. There is no account, no sign-up, and no email address. Your recovery data — your sobriety date, check-ins, journal, cravings, triggers and contacts — stays on your phone and is never sent to us.
There is one exception, and it is entirely your choice: anything you post to the Community feed leaves your device and is stored on our servers, because other people in recovery need to be able to see it. Sections 4 to 6 explain exactly what that involves.
You do not register, and we never ask for your name, email address or phone number. The name you enter during setup is stored on your phone only, so the app can greet you — we never receive it.
If you use the Community feed, your device generates two things: a random device identifier and a random handle such as BraveRiver42. Both are created on your phone, contain nothing about you, and are the only identity our servers ever see. They are not linked to your Apple ID, your name, or anything else about you.
The following never leaves your phone. We have no copy of it and no way to obtain it:
| Data | Purpose |
|---|---|
| Your name, sobriety date, substances | Core tracking and milestones |
| Check-ins, mood, cravings, journal notes | Recovery insight over time |
| Trigger list — flagged places and your notes about them | Pattern Interrupt warnings |
| Accountability contacts | The reach-out feature |
| Reminders | Local notifications, scheduled by your phone |
| AI companion conversation | Support chat (see section 8) |
| Subscription status, if you subscribe | Handled by Apple; we store no payment details |
When you post to the Community feed, that post is sent to and stored on our servers so other people can see it. This applies to:
Posts are stored on Cloudflare infrastructure that we control — a database for the text and an object store for images. They remain there until you delete the post or we remove it under section 6. Because the feed is public to other users of the app, treat anything you post as public: do not include your full name, location, contact details or anything else identifying. Our automated review (section 5) tries to catch that, but you are the best judge.
Nothing else from the app is sent with a post. Your journal, check-ins, sobriety date, trigger list and contacts are not attached and never leave your phone.
Every post is screened before anyone else can see it, so that this stays a safe space for people in recovery. To do that we send the post — the text, and the image if there is one — to Anthropic's Claude for an automated safety check. Claude returns an approve or reject decision and a short reason, which is stored with your post.
Posts are rejected if they encourage or glorify substance use, mention self-harm, harass or sexualise, are spam, or contain personal identifying information. A rejected post is visible only to you, with the reason shown, so you know what happened.
We instruct Anthropic that this content is not to be used to train models. We do not send your name, journal, location or any other app data with it — only the post you chose to publish.
If you turn on flagged places, Steady uses your location in the background for one purpose: to warn you when you approach a place you have flagged. This is processed entirely on your phone by iOS — your location is never sent to us, and we have no ability to see where you are or where you flagged.
You can turn this off at any time in the app or in iOS Settings, and Steady remains fully usable without it.
Before anything is sent anywhere, a crisis screen runs on your phone: a message that looks like a crisis is answered on the device itself, pointing you to human helplines, and is never sent to the AI.
For other messages, your recent companion conversation is sent over an encrypted connection to our server, which passes it to Anthropic's Claude to generate the reply, together with minimal context (which substances you are recovering from, and how many days you have been sober) — never your name, your journal, your location, or your flagged places, paths and people. Our server keeps no copy of these messages; your conversation history lives only on your phone. Anthropic processes the messages to produce the reply and handles them under its own commercial API terms; we instruct Anthropic that they are not to be used to train models. To keep the companion available and prevent abuse, each request also carries your random device identifier (the same one section 4 describes — not your name or anything about you), and our server keeps short-lived usage counts against it: how many requests, never what was said. Minute counts expire within minutes and daily totals within two days. If the companion cannot be reached — or these limits are hit — the app falls back to a small set of built-in replies and nothing leaves your phone.
The companion is not a therapist, counsellor or crisis service. In an emergency, use the helplines in the app or contact emergency services.
Information about substance use and recovery is special-category personal data under UK and EU data-protection law. For the data that stays on your device, we are not processing it at all — we never receive it. For Community posts, our lawful basis is your explicit consent, given when you choose to publish a post. You can withdraw that consent at any time by deleting your posts.
To ask about anything the in-app controls do not cover, contact us at [privacy@yourdomain.com].
We would rather be accurate than reassuring, so:
No system is perfectly secure. Our approach is to hold as little as possible in the first place.
We keep Community posts, and the likes, reports and blocks attached to them, until you delete the post or we remove it. On-device data stays until you delete it or remove the app. We hold no server-side copy of your private recovery data, because it is never sent to us.
Steady is intended for adults in recovery and is rated accordingly. It is not for anyone under 17, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has posted to the Community feed, contact us and we will remove it.
Depending on where you live — including under UK and EU GDPR — you have rights to access, correct, erase, restrict and port your personal data, and to complain to your data-protection regulator (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).
In practice, most of your data is on your own device and under your direct control. For anything we hold, contact us at [privacy@yourdomain.com]. Because posts are anonymous, we may need you to make the request from the device that created them, as that is the only way we can identify which posts are yours.
We will update this policy as Steady changes, and post the new effective date above. Where a change materially affects what we collect or share, we will surface it in the app rather than relying on you to check.
[COMPANY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS] Privacy: [privacy@yourdomain.com] · Support and content concerns: [support@yourdomain.com]