Privacy Policy

Effective date: October 8, 2026 · Last updated: October 8, 2026

GeistHaus LLC ("we," "us") operates GeistHaus, a journaling and self-reflection application. This policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and what control you have over it.

We have tried to write this in plain language. If anything here is unclear, write to us at wes@geist.haus.

Summary

• GeistHaus is for adults only. You must be 18 or older to use it.
• GeistHaus is not therapy, counseling, medical care, or a substitute for any of them.
• Your journal entries and conversations are sent to our AI providers, Anthropic and Amazon Web Services (Amazon Bedrock), so the app can respond to you. They are not used to train AI models.
• We generate psychological reflections and patterns from your writing, and we store them.
• We store complete records of your sessions so we can debug problems and monitor safety. A small number of authorized people at GeistHaus can access this.
• We do not sell your information, show you ads, or use your writing for marketing.
• Our public website runs anonymous analytics and session replay, and sets one cookie that records how you found us. Section 4.7 says exactly what that covers.
• You can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app.

1. Who we are

GeistHaus LLC is a limited liability company organized under the laws of the State of Illinois, United States.

Contact: wes@geist.haus

GeistHaus is the controller of the information described in this policy.

2. Adults only

GeistHaus is intended solely for people 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected information from a minor, we will delete it. If you believe a minor has created an account, contact us at wes@geist.haus.

3. What GeistHaus is, and what it is not

GeistHaus is a tool for reflective writing. It draws on ideas from psychological literature to offer observations and prompts about your writing.

GeistHaus is not a medical device, does not provide healthcare, and does not diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any condition. It is not therapy or counseling, and no licensed clinician reviews your entries or supervises your use of the app. Nothing GeistHaus produces is a clinical assessment or professional advice. If you are struggling, please reach out to a qualified professional.

We mention this in a privacy policy because it affects how you should think about the information you give us: it is personal writing held by a technology company, not a medical record held by a healthcare provider, and it is not protected by HIPAA.

4. Information we collect

4.1 Account information

• Email address
• Password (stored only as a salted cryptographic hash — we never store or see your actual password)
• Account creation date and basic account status

4.2 Your writing and conversations

The core of the service. This includes:

• Journal entries you write
• Your side of conversations with GeistHaus
• GeistHaus's responses to you
• Timestamps and session metadata

This is the most sensitive category of information we hold, and we treat it accordingly.

4.3 Reflections and patterns we generate

GeistHaus analyzes your writing to produce derived information — recurring themes, relational patterns, emotional tendencies, and changes over time. This derived information is stored alongside your entries and used to inform future sessions.

We want to be explicit about this: the app forms and retains structured inferences about your psychology based on what you write. Some of these inferences may concern subjects you did not state directly. You can view and delete this information along with the rest of your account data.

About the people you mention: when you write about others — a parent, a partner, a colleague — what we store is your perception of them: how you experience and describe them. It is never a record, profile, or assessment of the actual person. This information is part of your account data, covered by your consent, and deleted with your account.

4.4 Payment information

Subscriptions can be purchased in two places, and who handles your payment depends on where you subscribe. In neither case do we receive or store your card number, CVC, or full billing details.

• On the web, subscriptions are processed by Stripe, Inc. through Stripe's own checkout. We receive from Stripe only a customer identifier, subscription status, and transaction history sufficient to know whether your account is active. Stripe's handling of your payment information is governed by Stripe's privacy policy.
• In the iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps, subscriptions are purchased through Apple's In-App Purchase and Apple is the seller. Apple charges you and holds the billing relationship. We receive from Apple only a signed transaction record — a transaction identifier, which subscription was bought, and when it expires or was refunded — plus an opaque token we generate so we can attach the purchase to your account. Apple's handling of your payment information is governed by Apple's privacy policy.

4.5 Technical information

• Device type, operating system and version, and app version
• IP address (used for security, abuse prevention, and approximate region — not stored as precise location)
• Crash reports and error logs

4.6 Product analytics

We use PostHog to understand how the app is used in aggregate — which features people open, where they get stuck, retention over time. Analytics events are keyed to a pseudonymous identifier.

Analytics events do not contain the text of your journal entries or conversations.

4.7 Visiting our website

Every page on geist.haus, including this one, loads PostHog, an analytics service we use through our own domain. It records the pages you view and the links you click, the page that referred you, your browser and device type, your IP address and the approximate location derived from it, page performance timings, and browser console messages. It also records a replay of how you move through a page: scrolling, clicks, and cursor movement. The website has no forms, so a replay never contains anything you typed. To tell one visit from the next, PostHog keeps a random identifier in your browser (a cookie and local storage) for up to a year. None of this is tied to an account, and we draw no conclusion about your health from the pages you read.

If you arrive through a link that carries campaign parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, or an advertising click identifier), the site stores those parameters, and nothing else, in a first-party cookie named gh_attr for 30 days. The first visit wins; later visits do not overwrite it. If you then create an account, the app reads the cookie once, records the source on your account and in our product analytics, and deletes the cookie.

We use no advertising networks, advertising pixels, or cross-site tracking, and we do not sell or share anything the website collects. No third party collects information about your activity over time and across other websites through geist.haus.

Do Not Track. The site honors the Do Not Track setting in your browser: when it is on, PostHog is not loaded and the gh_attr cookie is not set. You can also block or clear cookies and site data in your browser; the site works without them.

Analytics events are kept for 12 months and session replays for 30 days (Section 10).

5. How we use your information

We use your information only to:

• Provide the service — respond to your writing, maintain continuity across sessions, and surface patterns over time
• Maintain your account and process your subscription
• Detect and respond to safety concerns (see Section 7)
• Diagnose bugs and monitor the quality and safety of the service
• With your separate permission, test and improve how Geist responds
• Prevent fraud, abuse, and unauthorized access
• Comply with legal obligations

We do not use your writing to make decisions about you outside the app, and we do not use it for advertising or marketing of any kind.

6. AI processing

GeistHaus uses large language models provided by Anthropic, PBC and by Amazon Web Services, through Amazon Bedrock, to generate its responses and analysis.

When you write in GeistHaus, the content of your entry — along with relevant context from your prior sessions — is transmitted to Anthropic's API or to Amazon Bedrock for processing, depending on the feature. This is essential to how the app works; there is no version of the service that does not do this.

Under our commercial agreement with Anthropic:

• Your content is not used to train Anthropic's models.
• Anthropic automatically deletes API inputs and outputs within 30 days of processing, except where longer retention is required to enforce its usage policies or to comply with law.

Anthropic's handling of this data is governed by its commercial terms and privacy policy.

Some features run OpenAI's open-weight gpt-oss models, which Amazon Web Services operates on Amazon Bedrock in the United States. OpenAI is not involved in running them and receives nothing. Under the AWS terms that govern Amazon Bedrock, your content is not stored or logged, not used to train any model, and not shared with the model's developer.

7. Safety monitoring

Because people sometimes write about being in distress, each message you send is automatically screened by a separate classification model to detect indications of crisis or risk of harm. If the classifier flags a message, GeistHaus will surface crisis resources to you.

Please understand the limits of this:

• This screening is automated. No person is monitoring your writing in real time.
• We do not contact emergency services, family members, or anyone else on your behalf, under any circumstances.
• The classifier is imperfect. It will miss things and it will flag things that are not emergencies.

GeistHaus is not a crisis service and must not be relied on as one. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. If you are in crisis, call or text 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline).

8. Logging and human access

We keep detailed records of sessions — including the full text of prompts and model responses — in an observability system we run ourselves, on the same Amazon Web Services infrastructure that holds the rest of your data. No separate provider receives them. We do this to diagnose failures, review how Geist's safety and crisis handling performed, and investigate safety incidents.

This means a small number of authorized GeistHaus personnel are technically able to read the content of your sessions. Access is limited to what is necessary for the purposes above, restricted to personnel who require it, and logged. We do not browse user content casually or for any purpose unrelated to operating the service or, where you have agreed, improving it.

We would rather state this plainly than describe it as "diagnostic data."

Session logs are retained for 2 years and then deleted. We keep them to operate and debug Geist; to review how Geist's safety and crisis handling performed, which may include review by a member of the GeistHaus team; for security and abuse prevention; and to establish or defend legal claims.

9. Who we share information with

We do not sell your personal information. We do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, employers, insurers, or anyone assessing you.

We share information with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contract, only for the purposes we specify:

We may also disclose information if required by valid legal process, or where necessary to protect the rights, safety, or property of GeistHaus or others. If we receive a legal demand for your content, we will notify you unless legally prohibited from doing so.

If GeistHaus is acquired or merges with another company, your information may transfer as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

10. Retention

• Account and content: retained while your account is active.
• Session logs: 2 years.
• Analytics: 12 months.
• Website session replays: 30 days.
• Attribution cookie: 30 days, or until you create an account.
• Financial records: retained as required by tax and accounting law, typically seven years. These contain transaction records, not your writing.

Helping improve Geist (optional). With your separate permission, we use records of how Geist processed your conversations (your messages, Geist's responses, and the inferences Geist formed) to test and improve Geist. This can include review by the GeistHaus team and running examples through our AI provider. If you don't give permission, none of your data is used this way, and Geist works the same. You can give or withdraw permission at any time in Settings. When you withdraw, examples set aside from your conversations are deleted within 30 days.

11. Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time: under Settings → Delete my account on the web, or Account → Delete my account in the iOS, macOS, and Android apps. All of the ways to delete, including without the app installed, are on geist.haus/account-deletion.

Deletion removes your account, all journal entries and conversations, and all derived reflections and patterns. This is account-wide and permanent. We cannot recover deleted content.

Deletion completes in our production systems within 30 days. Encrypted database backups are retained no longer than 35 days on a rolling basis, and no restored backup will reintroduce deleted content. When you delete your account, your session logs, and any test examples derived from them, are deleted within 30 days.

12. Security

We protect your information with encryption in transit (TLS) and at rest, access controls limiting internal access, hashed password storage, and infrastructure isolation.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as required by applicable law.

13. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Know what personal information we hold about you
• Access a copy of it
• Correct inaccurate information
• Delete it
• Opt out of sale or targeted advertising (we do neither)
• Limit use of sensitive personal information
• Not be discriminated against for exercising these rights

These rights are available to residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws. We extend them to all our users regardless of state.

To exercise any of these rights, use the in-app controls or write to wes@geist.haus. We will verify your identity through your account email before acting. We respond within 45 days.

You may designate an authorized agent to make requests on your behalf. If we decline a request, you may appeal by writing to wes@geist.haus with "Appeal" in the subject line.

14. California privacy rights (CCPA/CPRA)

This section is for California residents. We honor it whether or not GeistHaus meets the thresholds that make the California Consumer Privacy Act apply to a business.

In the preceding 12 months we collected these categories of personal information:

We collect them for the purposes in Section 5 and disclose them for those business purposes to the service providers in Section 9. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We use sensitive personal information only to provide the service you asked for, so there is no separate "limit use" choice to make. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.

California residents have the rights listed in Section 13 — to know, access, correct, delete, opt out, and limit — and exercise them the same way: the in-app controls or wes@geist.haus, with identity verified through the account email, a response within 45 days, authorized agents accepted, and an appeal by email. We will not discriminate against you for exercising them.

15. Consumer health data

Washington and Nevada residents have specific rights concerning consumer health data. Because GeistHaus processes writing about your emotional and relational life and generates psychological inferences from it, we treat this information as consumer health data under those laws.

See our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy for details, including your right to withdraw consent and to have consumer health data deleted.

16. Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app and by email before they take effect. The "last updated" date above always reflects the current version.

17. Contact

GeistHaus LLC, an Illinois limited liability company
wes@geist.haus