Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your data

Symtrail is an independent app, not a company's product. Symtrail's publisher is responsible for the limited analytics data described in section 3, and can be reached at the address in section 11. The health information you log is a different matter: it never reaches us at all — it stays on your device, as described next.

This policy covers the Symtrail mobile app for iOS and Android, and this website.

2. What stays on your device

Symtrail is a diary. Everything you put into it is written to a database inside the app's own private storage on your phone, and it stays there:

• The people you add — names, birth dates, sex, colour, and whether the PFAPA flare-cycle tracking is switched on
• Symptoms and their severity
• Temperature readings
• Medications, doses, strengths and reminder times
• Free-text notes
• Your settings — language, temperature unit, appearance

None of this is uploaded. Symtrail has no user accounts and no server to sync to. It is not backed up to us, it is not encrypted-and-stored-in-our-cloud, and we have no way to read it. The app works identically with the phone in airplane mode, because logging never needed a connection in the first place.

The one exception is entirely under your control: if your phone is set up to back itself up (iCloud Backup on iOS, or Google's device backup on Android), the app's data may be included in that backup under your own account, governed by Apple's or Google's privacy policy rather than ours. We have no access to it there either.

3. The one thing that does leave: anonymous usage analytics

To understand which parts of the app are actually used and where people get stuck, the app sends anonymous product-usage events to PostHog, an analytics provider, acting as our processor. Symtrail uses PostHog's EU Cloud, so this data is processed on servers in the European Union.

What an event contains

• The name of the thing that happened, as a plain label — for example symptom_logged, report_exported, settings_changed, or a screen being opened
• Coarse properties describing the kind of action — for example that the entry was a temperature rather than a medication, or that a person was added during onboarding rather than from the profile screen
• A randomly generated identifier created by the app on first launch. It is not your name, email, phone number, or an advertising ID, and it is not linked to any identity — we cannot work out who it belongs to
• Basic technical context supplied automatically by the analytics SDK: app version, device model, operating system version, language and time zone
• Your IP address, which reaches PostHog as part of the network request and from which an approximate country or region may be derived. It is not used to locate you, and we do not combine it with anything else

The point of collecting this is to understand how the app is used well enough to maintain and improve it. Because the data is deliberately coarse and carries no health information, it tells us about screens rather than about people — but if you would rather it stopped, write to us using the address in section 11.

4. What we never collect

To be explicit, the analytics described above never include:

• Symptom names, temperature values, medication names, doses, or the content of notes
• The names, birth dates or any other detail of the people in your diary
• The contents of an exported report
• Your contacts, photos, precise location, health-kit data, or any other information from elsewhere on your phone

Symtrail contains no advertising SDKs and no third-party trackers beyond the analytics described in section 3. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it with data brokers, and we do not use it to build advertising profiles or track you across other companies' apps and websites.

5. Medication reminders

If you ask Symtrail to remind you about the next dose, the reminder is scheduled locally on your phone by the operating system. It is not a push notification sent from a server — there is no server, and no device token is registered anywhere. The reminder text does not contain the medication name. You can revoke the notification permission at any time in your phone's settings.

6. The PDF report

The report for your doctor is generated on your phone from your own entries, and is not uploaded to produce it. Once it exists, what happens to it is up to you: if you choose to share it — by email, messaging app, printing, or saving it to a file — it travels wherever you send it, and whatever service you use to send it is then handling that file under its own privacy policy. Bear in mind the report contains health information, so share it deliberately.

7. Children's information

Symtrail is designed for adults keeping records about themselves or about someone they care for, usually their own child. It is not directed at children and children are not expected to use it. The app is not in Apple's or Google's kids categories.

Where a diary is about a child, the information is entered by their parent or guardian and stays on that parent's device. We do not receive it, so we do not knowingly collect personal information from or about children — and the anonymous analytics in section 3 contain nothing that describes any individual, child or adult.

8. Keeping and deleting data

On your device. Your entries stay until you remove them. Deleting a person from the Profiles screen permanently deletes that person and everything logged against them. Deleting the app removes the whole database from your phone. Neither action needs to reach us, and neither can be undone by us — if you have not made your own backup, deleted data is gone.

Analytics. Events are retained by PostHog under our account for as long as they remain useful for understanding product usage, and are deleted on our normal housekeeping schedule thereafter.

9. What you can do with your data

Almost all of it is already in your hands. The health information lives on your device, so you have direct access to every entry, you can correct any of them, and you can delete any part of it — or all of it — without asking us or waiting on us.

For the analytics data, contact us using the address below and we will act on your request. Because those events are anonymous by design, we may need you to help us identify the relevant records, and if we genuinely cannot link the data to you we may be unable to single it out — which is a consequence of collecting as little as possible, not a way of avoiding the request.

10. Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the revised version will be published on this page with a new date at the top. Two things in particular will not change quietly: if Symtrail ever gained optional cloud sync or accounts, or started collecting anything beyond the coarse analytics described in section 3, that would be a material change announced in the app itself and in the release notes — not a silent edit here.

11. Contact

Questions about this policy, or about any data Symtrail holds, can go to our contact address. We will respond within 30 days.