Privacy in the app

The short version: Everything Essênt holds is something you typed, tapped or connected. One named person can read it, and only to fix a fault or answer a question you asked. It is never sold, never shared with another user, and never used to train a model.

This covers the Essênt app. The signup list on this website is covered separately, at /privacy — that notice describes one email address and nothing else.

01 / What Essênt holds

Essênt is based in Taiwan and is the data controller for everything described in this notice, for the purposes of the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation.

Everything listed below is something you gave it. None of it is inferred about you from anywhere else, and none of it is bought from anyone.

Moments — what happened, when it happened, and when you recorded it. Those last two are different, and we keep both.
How it felt — the two sliders. Stored as numbers, shown back to you as words.
Your notes — anything you wrote in your own words about a moment.
Your people — the names you gave them, any contact details you added, and any private note you wrote about them.
Your activities — including the ones you named yourself.
What you told us at the start — what you said matters, and what brought you here, if you answered. Kept as you gave them.
Your settings — your display name, your timezone, whether you use the daily pass.
Your photos, if you add any — they stay on your phone. They are never uploaded, and nobody else can see them.
Your calendar, if you connect it — the events themselves. We ask Google for read-only access and nothing else. Essênt cannot create, edit or delete anything in your calendar, and never asks for permission to.

02 / Who can read it

One person can: Cooper Kao, who built Essênt. Not a team, because there is not one. No employees, no contractors, no analytics staff, no investors.

We could tell you your entries are unreadable to us. It would not be true. Essênt’s insights are worked out on our servers from what you record, which means the server can read what you record — and when an insight is wrong about you, the only way to find out why is to look at what produced it. A promise we would break in the first week of fixing something is worth less to you than a narrower one we keep.

So the commitment is about purpose, not capability:

Read to fix a fault, to answer a question you have asked us, or to keep the service working.
Your answers to the first questions, read to understand who uses Essênt. Nothing else you record is read for this.
Not read out of curiosity, and never browsed as a pastime.
Never read by anyone else, because there is nobody else.

If this ever stops being one person, this section changes before the second person is hired, not after.

03 / What leaves Essênt

Four companies touch your data. That is the whole list.

Supabase — stores it. The database is hosted in Supabase’s Singapore region (ap-southeast-1), the same one the waitlist uses. They hold it on our behalf and do not use it for anything of their own.

Google — only if you connect your calendar, and only to read it. Essênt’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Sentry — receives a report when the app crashes or fails to save: the error, the app version and the kind of phone. It is not told who you are. Hosted in the United States.

PostHog — receives the counts in section 05, against your account number. Hosted in the United States.

Neither of those two is ever sent anything you wrote, anyone you named, how anything felt, or what is in your calendar. Neither is sent your email address. Section 04 says so as a promise; this is where it applies.

Nobody else. No advertising networks, no data brokers.

04 / What we never do

We never sell it. Not to anyone, at any price. If Essênt is ever acquired, a buyer takes on these promises as a condition of the sale. If that ever proved impossible, you would be told before anything changed, with time to export everything and close your account first — you would not find out from a quietly updated page.
We never share it with other users. Essênt has no feed and no public profile. Nobody can look you up: search in the app looks only through your own record. There is no way for one person to see another’s record, and nothing to leak socially because there is nothing social.
We never use it to train a model. Not ours, not anyone’s.
We never show you advertising, and we never use what you record to target anything at you.
We never send your content to a counting or crash tool. Not a title, a note, a name, a rating or a calendar entry. No session recording, no click tracking. PostHog knows you by an account number, never by your email address; Sentry is not told who you are. This is enforced in the code, not merely intended.

05 / What we count

We do keep a small number of counts, so we can tell whether Essênt is actually working for people. They live in our own database and, as section 03 says, at PostHog. They contain none of your content:

when you signed up, and roughly where you heard about us
which days you recorded something — the date, never what it was
when you opened the daily pass, how long it took, and how many cards you rated or left blank
when you opened the app, and whether a reminder brought you there
that you saved or marked a moment, and whether it came from the calendar — never what it said or how you rated it
whether you answered the first questions — never what you answered
when you opened your Insight page, and which range you looked at
whether signing in worked, and if not, why — a wrong code, an expired one
which optional things you switched on: the reminder and its hour, a calendar, an export
when a calendar import ran, and how many events it added, changed or removed — never what the events were
when you moved one of your activities to a different category: how often you had used it — never its name, and not which categories
if the app had to drop some of these counts, how many and why
when the app crashed or could not save — this is what Sentry receives
why you left, if you choose to say. Deleting your account offers one optional question. The answer is kept with how long you had the account and nothing else — not your account number, not your email address.
where the app is getting in your way — which step of setup or of the daily pass you were on when you stopped, and whether you finished. The step, never the content: that you left the pass on card three, never what card three was about.

That is the complete list. We record no page views, no screen time, no mouse or scroll tracking, and nothing at all from outside Essênt. If we cannot name the decision a number would change, we do not record it — and every number above exists to answer one question: whether this is worth keeping in your day.

06 / The people in your record

The people you write about did not agree to any of this, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. If you note that an evening with a friend left you drained, that is a record about them as well as about you.

What we do about it:

Their details are visible to you and to nobody else, ever. Not to them, not to other users.
We never contact them. Adding someone to Essênt does not invite them, notify them, or create an account for them.
We do not build a picture of them across different users’ records. There is no shared graph of people in Essênt, and nothing joins your record to anyone else’s.
Delete a person and their details go with them.

If you would rather not use real names, Essênt works exactly as well with initials or a nickname. Nothing asks you to be more specific than you want to be.

07 / How long we keep it

As long as you have an account. Delete your account and everything above is gone from Essênt straight away — moments, notes, people, calendar events, and the counts in section 05. The same deletion removes you from PostHog. Sentry has nothing of yours to remove, because it was never told who you are. The one thing that stays is the answer to the optional question in section 05, which was never tied to you.

It can persist in encrypted backups for up to 30 days after that, and is then gone from those too. Nobody reads a backup to answer a question; they exist to restore the service after a failure.

You can also delete any individual moment or person at any time, from inside the app, without asking us.

08 / Your rights

Write to hi@essent.space. A person reads it. We will act on any of these without asking you to justify the request:

Access — a copy of everything we hold about you.
Correction — fix anything that is wrong. Most of it you can already edit yourself.
Erasure — delete it, on the timeline in section 07.
Portability — a copy in a machine-readable format.
Withdraw consent — disconnect your calendar, or close your account, at any time.
Restriction and objection — ask us to stop using it while a question is resolved.

No system is perfect. If a breach ever affects what you have recorded, we will tell you and the relevant authority without delay, and we will tell you what we got wrong.

09 / When this changes

If we change what we do with what you record, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect — not with a silent update to this page.

Two changes we would treat as significant enough to ask rather than tell: using what you record to train a model, and letting a second person read it.

The website’s own notice is at /privacy.

10 / If you are in the United States

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — the two things California law means by those words. We never have. There is no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link on this site because there is nothing to opt out of.

What we collect, in the categories California uses: identifiers (your email address and an account number), internet or network activity (the counts in section 05 — which step of the app you were on, never what it said), and the record you write yourself. We do not collect precise geolocation. We store your time zone, so that a late-night entry lands on the right day, and nothing more location-like than that. We draw no inferences about you — no profile, no scoring, no segment.

On sensitive information. California protects a narrow category that includes information about health. What you record is how a day felt to you — your own rating of your own time. It is not a diagnosis, it is not a clinical measure, and it comes from no medical source. We do not treat it as sensitive personal information, and we do not use it to work out anything about you: section 04 forbids that and the code enforces it. If you think that reading is wrong, nothing changes for you — every right below applies to everything we hold, whatever it is called.

Your rights, in addition to those in section 08:

to know what we hold and where it came from
to have it corrected
to have it deleted
to receive a copy
and to not be treated differently for asking. We will never give you a worse product, a worse price, or a slower answer because you exercised a right. There is no version of Essênt for people who ask fewer questions.

How to ask. Write to the address in section 08. A person reads it. We will confirm we received it, and answer within 45 days — if something makes that impossible we will tell you why and take at most 45 more. We will ask you to reply from the email address on the account, which is how we know it is you; we will not make you prove it any other way. You may send someone else on your behalf — say so, and give them permission in writing.

Anyone under 16. Essênt is not for you yet. We do not knowingly hold anything from anyone under 16, and we have never sold or shared the information of a person under 16 — because we have never sold or shared anyone’s.

If you live somewhere else in the United States. Several states now give rights close to these. We do not run a different process for each one: write to us and we will honour everything above, wherever you live. It is a shorter list to keep than fifty.

Contact

hi@essent.space · Essênt

Effective 9 October 2026