Privacy Policy

Echo ("EchoJournal — Voice Diary") is a voice journaling app made by ETL Studio. Your journal is the most private thing an app can hold, so this policy is written to be read: what we collect, where it lives, who can see it, and how you delete it.

What we collect

• Your account: your email address and a password (held by AWS Cognito — we never see or store your password ourselves), and the display name you choose.
• Your journal: the entries you write or speak (as text), the date you assign them, and any tags you add.
• What our AI derives from each entry: a title, a polished rewrite, mood labels, five 1–10 wellbeing scores, and a short reflection. Because your entries can hold feelings and struggles, this derived information is health-related data — which is why Echo asks for your explicit consent, in the app, before any analysis (you can withdraw it there just as easily).
• Service counters: how many AI analyses you've used today (we cap them), and your journaling streak — both derived from your entries.

What we deliberately do not collect

• Your voice. Speech is transcribed on your iPhone by Apple's on-device speech framework. The audio never leaves your phone and is never recorded.
• Analytics, advertising, or tracking data. There are no third-party SDKs, trackers, or ad networks in the app. Crash diagnostics stay on your device unless you choose to share them with Apple.
• Your location, contacts, photos, or anything else the journal doesn't need.

Where your journal lives and who can read it

Your entries are stored on Amazon Web Services in the European Union (Frankfurt), encrypted in transit and at rest with a customer-managed encryption key. AI analysis runs on Amazon Bedrock using EU-only inference — your words are processed to write your reflection and are never used to train AI models. No human reads your journal: there is no admin tool that displays journal content, and support staff do not browse user data.

Reminders are scheduled entirely on your phone; reminder notifications contain only generic encouragement, never journal content.

Echo is not a therapist

Echo is a journal, not a medical device, therapy, or crisis service. It never diagnoses, and its reflections are not professional advice. A journal is a place to be honest — including about dark thoughts — and honesty requires knowing what the app does with them: if an entry contains signs of a personal crisis, Echo shows you support resources (crisis lines) instead of a generated reflection. That is the entire response. Echo cannot call for help on your behalf, and no person is alerted — if you or someone else is in danger, contact local emergency services or a crisis line directly.

We don't monitor your journal

Echo does not scan your journal to report you, profile you, or alert anyone. No human reviews entries, and there is no admin tool that displays journal content. The only automated reading of your words is the AI that writes your reflection and, as part of that, a safety check whose sole effect is showing you support resources. Nothing you write triggers any outbound report from Echo.

Legal requests

Like any company, we can be legally compelled to disclose data we hold. Our commitments: we disclose only in response to valid legal process under applicable law, we challenge overbroad requests, we notify you where the law permits, and — because we practice data minimization — we can only ever produce what actually exists: your entries and their analyses, nothing more (no location, no contacts, no tracking history, no audio).

Deleting your data

Delete your account any time in Profile → Delete account. This permanently erases your account and every entry, analysis, tag, and consent record — immediately, with no retention period and no backups of journal content. One honest caveat: a signed-in session on another device may remain technically valid for up to 15 minutes after deletion, though all data is already gone.

Your rights

You can read everything Echo holds about you inside the app, and erase all of it yourself as described above. For anything else (including GDPR requests), contact yaniv.hamou@gmail.com.

Children

Echo is not directed at children under 13 and is rated for ages 12+.

Changes

If this policy changes, the "last updated" date changes with it, and material changes will be called out in the app before they apply.