A journal is the most personal thing a person writes. What you're thankful for, what you'd never say out loud, what you wrote at midnight — that deserves real privacy. Protecting it isn't a feature of Steps; it's the reason Steps exists. Here are our promises, in plain words. Where they conflict with growth, the promises win.
A phone number, so Steps can text you. The words you send — a few per answer is enough. And the mornings and the time you chose. No mood scores, no location, no contacts, no photos: a journal needs your words and nothing else.
Steps texts from a plain phone number — no caller ID, no business name, no app icon. You save the contact under any name you like, and that name is all anyone glancing at your lock screen, your watch, or your car screen will ever see. The morning text never mentions a journal. Privacy that stops at our servers isn't privacy.
Never sold, never used for ads, never handed to anyone. What you write on your best morning or your worst will never be used to aim an ad at you, and never becomes a number on a dashboard. We store your journal for exactly one reader: you.
A deliberately simple program asks you a question when you reply and saves your answer — that's its whole job. It is a program, not a person: it never analyzes your life, never interprets what you wrote, never offers advice, and nothing you write is ever used to train AI, ours or anyone's. The rules it follows are public, at steps.org/safety.
A skipped morning is saved like any other day — Steps has no opinion about it. No shame tricks, no guilt-trip notifications, no streak confetti that makes a quiet week feel like failure. One gentle follow-up in the afternoon, which you can switch off, and the next text arrives on your schedule, like always.
The numbers Steps shows you are simple counts of your own words — the word family, on 31 mornings this year — added up for you and shown only to you. No mood scores, no "insights", nothing guessed about your state of mind, nothing you couldn't check by hand.
What sits on our servers is exactly this: dates, the messages you sent, your schedule, and records of your conversations with Steps — names, emails and phone numbers masked before anything is stored — held for one purpose: making Steps reply better. Never to train AI, never for ads. We say all of this plainly instead of pretending a perfect black box exists.
Take everything with you any time. Delete your account and everything — your journal, your schedule, your number — is gone for good within 30 days. There is no "deactivated" limbo.
Steps is run by Pipedesk OÜ in Estonia, and your data is stored encrypted in EU data centers, under the GDPR — rights you can enforce, not promises. The legal version of this page is the Privacy Policy.
Read it all back any time, take it all with you, or erase it — your journal, at app.steps.org.
Questions about any of this, or something that falls short of it? [email protected]. The legal version lives in the Privacy Policy and Terms.
