The deal
What happens to your memories.
Trust is the whole thing here, so this page is written to be read rather than to protect anyone from you. If something below is unclear, that is a bug and we would like to hear about it.
Right now, this year
Everything you write stays on your phone. There is no server to send it to. Not "we choose not to upload it" — there is nothing on the other end. The app is a static site and a database that lives in your browser. Turn off your signal and it works exactly the same, because the network was never part of it.
That has an obvious consequence worth saying out loud: if you lose your phone, nobody can restore your journal for you. That is why the export exists, and why the app will keep asking you to use it.
The three tiers
Private
Visible only to you. This is the default for everything, and it is the only tier that exists in the version shipping this year. Nothing moves out of this tier by accident, by update, or by us changing our mind later.
Proximity
Visible only to people who were physically near you when it happened, surfaced later, during decompression. Deliberately not a stand-here-to-unlock mechanic: resurfacing a moment at the exact spot it happened would just put everyone's nose back in a phone in the one place they should be looking up.
The point is narrow and specific. You talked to someone for an hour at 3am, neither of you stopped to swap contact details, and now they are gone. This is for finding each other afterwards.
Global
Published to a shared map, one memory at a time, entirely opt in. This is the only tier that is public in any sense. It is also the only tier that feeds the long-term map of a place across years.
Things that will not happen
- No account, no email, no phone number, no sign-in.
- No photo is ever taken except by you pressing the button. Nothing is automatic and nothing is AI-driven.
- No feed, no likes, no followers, no counters. There is no number anywhere in this app that goes up.
- No ads, no analytics on your journal, no third-party trackers.
- Nothing you marked as private will be reclassified later. If the rules ever change, they change for new memories, not old ones.
- Your journal will never be sold, and neither will this project.
Other people in your memories
Journals are about other people, which means this cannot only be a promise to you. Two rules that matter from the first day rather than as an afterthought:
Nothing published names anybody who did not agree to it. Tagging someone is a request, not an action. If they are not on the app, the tag stays a private note to yourself.
Removing yourself from someone else's published memory has to be simple and it has to work. Not a support request, not a form, not a negotiation. If a memory is published and you are in it, you can take yourself out of it. This is a design constraint on the shared map, and if it cannot be built that way then the shared map does not ship.
Consent you can withdraw
Any connection made through this app can be unmade. Blocking is permanent from your side, immediate, and requires no explanation to anybody. Saying yes once at a burn is not a standing agreement, and the software should not pretend otherwise.
Where your data actually lives
In your browser's own storage, on your device. Two honest warnings about what that means:
Install it to your home screen. On an iPhone, a site left as a browser tab can have its storage wiped after about a week of not opening it, and there is no API a web app can call to prevent that. Once installed to the home screen it gets its own counter and its own storage, and your journal stays put. This is the entire reason the install ask exists.
Clearing your browser data will delete your journal. So will deleting the app. There is no copy anywhere else, because that is the point. Export early and often.
Your journal is a file you own
The export is a single page that opens in any browser, on any device, with the photos and the audio inside the file itself. Not an archive you need us to open. Not a format that expires. Print it and it folds into a booklet.
If this project disappears tomorrow, that file still opens. That is the strongest promise on this page, because it is the only one that does not depend on us still being here.