Strua — Privacy Policy

At a glance

Local-first, and what that actually means

Strua is built so that through ordinary use of the tools, the app does not transmit what you write — it stays on the device you wrote it on (if you choose to export or share an entry, that copy goes where you send it). It is held in your browser's own storage (localStorage and IndexedDB). We do not receive the contents of your entries through ordinary use of the tools.

Being local is not the same as being encrypted or private from everyone. Anyone who can use your device and browser profile can open your entries. If you share a computer, use a separate browser profile or account. Local storage is also not a backup: if you clear your site data, lose the device, or use a different browser, the entries are gone and we cannot recover them, because we never had them. Export regularly if they matter to you.

What we collect

From you directly - Account: email address and a password (stored hashed by our authentication provider — we never see it in readable form). - Subscription: plan, status, renewal date, and Stripe's identifiers for your customer and subscription. Card numbers go to Stripe and never reach us. - Anything you send us: the contents of an email you write to support, including any entry you choose to paste into it. - How you found Strua (optional): at sign-up you may pick how you found us, for example that a therapist or healthcare provider recommended Strua. The answer waits on your device until you first sign in, then adds one to a running total for that answer, and is removed from your device. It is never saved to your account and the total has no date attached. We never ask for, collect or record a provider's name, and our materials for providers use the same link for every provider, so no record links your account to a specific clinician.

Automatically - Analytics: page views and content-free counts of features being used, via Plausible. - Technical and security: our hosting provider receives each page request (address, IP address, timestamp) in order to serve it; our plan gives us no access to those page-request logs. Our own serverless functions (sign-up checks, payments, account deletion) write short-lived logs we can read, which record an event, its outcome and, where relevant, an identifier such as a masked email address or a payment-customer id, and are kept for at least 24 hours and at most 7 days, per our hosting plan — never a page address and never the contents of an entry (we checked every log statement in that code). - Audio: meditations, soundscapes and audio walkthroughs stream from our database provider's file storage. That request names the audio file and carries your IP address, not your account.

What does not reach us through ordinary use of the tools - The contents of your entries, reflections, mood notes, journal or worry dumps. The one way they can reach us is if you send them to us — by exporting and sharing them, or by pasting them into an email. Then we have what you sent. - Which specific tool you completed. Completion events are recorded as an anonymous count with no tool identity, no mood, distress, helpfulness or crisis information and no text, and page addresses are rewritten in your browser before they are sent. Requesting a page does send its address to our hosting provider — that is how the page reaches you — but we do not retain or have access to those requests. - Advertising identifiers, cross-site tracking, or any data-broker feeds. We do not sell your personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and never have.

No AI monitoring of what you write

No AI reads, scores, summarises or monitors your entries. There is no crisis detection. Your private entries are not sent to any AI provider.

A note about analytics, stated plainly

Our analytics are designed to tell us how many people used something, never who. But a provider that serves a page necessarily receives the technical data every browser sends, including your IP address. Plausible uses that to generate a rotating daily identifier and does not retain raw IP addresses, set cookies, or track you between sites — and we receive only aggregates. We describe it this way rather than claiming "no personal data reaches our analytics," because that claim would be too strong.

How we use what we collect

To give you an account and keep you signed in · to provide and support the paid features you bought · to take payment and handle refunds · to answer you when you write to us · to keep the service secure and working · to understand, in aggregate and without identifying you, which parts of the site people use · to send you Strua Notes, if and only if you ticked that box (you can untick it in Settings at any time, or reply "stop" to any Note; we honour a stop within 10 business days).

Why we are allowed to process what we process

Strua is offered to adults in the United States. Where a data-protection law applies to you and requires us to state a basis for processing, these are ours:

Who we share with

We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information. We use a small number of providers to run the service, each under terms restricting their use of the data:

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. The disclosures above are to providers who process data on our instructions to run the service. Stripe also processes what it receives for its own fraud-prevention and legal-compliance purposes, and Cloudflare to improve its bot-detection service, each under its own privacy policy.

We disclose information for legal or safety purposes only to the extent applicable law permits or requires, and we limit the disclosure to the information appropriate for that purpose. Where the law requires us to notify you of a disclosure, we will, and we will tell you about others where we are able to. Nothing here means we monitor what you write in the tools — we cannot, because we do not receive it (a copy you choose to email us is the exception, and it is handled as support mail).

Security

• Connections between your browser and Strua's web services use HTTPS/TLS.
• Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider; we cannot read them.
• Our database provider encrypts data at rest.
• Administrative access to Strua's production data is limited to the operator of Strua, LLC. The providers listed above also process data on our instructions, under their own access controls.
• Through ordinary use of the tools, your entries are not sent to our servers, which reduces server-side exposure. It does not make them invulnerable: anything you export or paste into an email to us does reach us, and local storage is still readable by anyone using your device profile, or by malicious scripts if the app were ever compromised.

We do not run formal third-party security audits.

If a breach ever happens

If personal information we hold is breached, we will give every notice that applicable breach law requires, to everyone it requires — affected individuals, regulators, and the media where that is required — within the time it requires. That includes the FTC's Health Breach Notification Rule where it applies, and it covers unauthorised disclosures, not only intrusions. This commitment does not depend on how Strua is ultimately classified under that Rule.

How long we keep things, and how to delete them

On our servers. When you delete your account, your account record and your subscription record are removed immediately — not queued, not scheduled. Any active subscription is cancelled at the same moment, so nothing renews afterwards.

Some things outlive that, and we would rather name them than let you discover them:

• Records the law requires us to keep, such as a record of a payment for tax purposes. We may also keep records where the law specifically permits it — for example to investigate fraud or a security incident. Aggregate counts that cannot identify anyone may also be kept.
• Stripe records. Deleting your Strua account does not delete any customer or payment records Stripe holds for you, including your billing email address. Payment or refund receipts may still arrive after deletion. To request deletion of personal information Stripe holds in connection with Strua, email Dr.G@strua.app. We will handle your request using Stripe's available deletion processes and explain any limits on what can be removed. Some information may remain under applicable retention requirements.
• Backups. Our database plan keeps no scheduled backups of its own (checked on the day this policy took effect), so deleting a record from the live database is the deletion. Our email provider keeps a record of account email it sent for 30 days on its plan; our function logs expire within days (below). If that changes, this section changes with it.
• Support email. Deleting your account does not automatically delete your support correspondence, which we keep separately to handle your request and any follow-up to it. To have it deleted, email Dr.G@strua.app and ask. We will delete it, except where the law requires or specifically permits us to keep particular information — and where we must keep a record, we will tell you what we are keeping and why, and remove health details from it where they are not needed for that purpose.
• Clinician Access Program applications. If you applied to the program, that application (name, email, state, licence details, practice name, referral source) is kept separately from any account and is not removed by deleting an account. Email Dr.G@strua.app to have it deleted.

On your device. Deleting your account from within the app also clears what Strua stored on that device for that account — your practice history, entries, custom tools and settings.

What it cannot reach: anything on your other devices or browsers, and any export, share or device backup you already made. Those are outside Strua and have to be deleted where they live. Removing an installed app icon may or may not clear its storage, depending on your device — do not rely on it either way. To clear a device directly:

• Any browser: clear site data for strua.app in your browser's settings (Chrome and Edge: Settings → Privacy → Site settings; Safari: Settings → Safari → Advanced → Website Data; Firefox: Settings → Privacy → Cookies and Site Data).
• In the app: use the in-app deletion controls where offered.

Your choices and rights

You can access, correct, export or delete your account data. Email Dr.G@strua.app and we will action it. We honour the rights applicable law gives you, including access, correction, deletion, portability, and opting out of the sale or advertising-related sharing of personal information — which we do not do, so there is nothing there to opt out of.

We will not penalise you for exercising a right — no worse price, no degraded service. Some requests do have unavoidable functional consequences: deleting the account data you sign in with means the account no longer works, and deleting your device entries removes them from your history. We will tell you before we do something irreversible.

Consumer health data has its own rights and its own appeal route — see the Consumer Health Data Notice. If a data-protection authority has jurisdiction over your data, you may also complain to it.

Cookies and tracking

Strua sets no cookies of its own. Your sign-in session is kept in your browser's own storage, not in a cookie. Stripe sets its own cookies only when you open checkout or your billing portal, both of which are Stripe-hosted pages. Cloudflare's human-verification check on the sign-in forms runs in Cloudflare's own frame under Cloudflare's privacy policy. Our analytics provider is cookieless, and there are no advertising, social or cross-site tracking cookies. The full detail is in the Cookie Policy.

Do Not Track. We do not track you across websites, so there is nothing for a Do Not Track signal to switch off. We honour applicable opt-out preference signals where the law requires it.

Links to other sites

Strua links to outside resources, such as crisis services and research citations. Those sites have their own privacy practices and we are not responsible for them.

Consumer health data

Some of what we receive — your account, subscription, technical and support information — may count as consumer health data under laws such as Washington's My Health My Data Act, given what Strua is for. The Consumer Health Data Notice is a separate document with its own link in the site footer, and it sets out the categories, sources, purposes, recipients, and how to exercise or appeal a rights request.

Children

Strua is for adults 18 and over and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, email Dr.G@strua.app and we will delete it.

International users

Strua is operated from the United States, and the providers named above are US companies with the one exception worth naming: our analytics provider, Plausible, processes visitor data on servers in the European Union. We have not independently verified every processing location each provider uses.

If you use Strua from outside the US, your information is processed by providers in the US and, for analytics, the EU — and possibly in other locations those providers use that we have not verified — which may offer different protections than your own country. For crisis support outside the US see iasp.info/resources/Crisis_Centres.

Changes, and contact

We will tell you about material changes through the app or another appropriate channel before they take effect, and obtain consent where it is required. A change does not authorise a new use of information we already hold if that use needs separate consent. Previous versions are kept.

Strua, LLC — Dr.G@strua.app — Florida, United States.

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