Where your data can be

Every place an entry can end up, and nothing left out. If a place is not on this list, your entries are not there.

On your iPhone

This is where everything you log lives: periods, symptoms, your own trackers, medications and doses, visits, lab results, notes, photos of the diary. The database sits in the app’s own storage, encrypted by iOS, and it is opened only by this app. If you switch on the app lock, it also needs Face ID or your passcode to open.

In Apple Health — only if you switch it on

If you allow it, the app writes the period days, spotting and symptoms you entered exactly into Apple Health, so your records stay together. It never writes anything the app worked out for you. Dates you marked as approximate are never written there at all. Apple Health is Apple’s, not ours: what it does with a sample afterwards — including syncing it between your own devices — is described by Apple, and you can delete those samples in the Health app.

In a file you made yourself

Three kinds, all started by you: an encrypted backup file (locked with a password you choose, which we never see and cannot recover), a spreadsheet export, and the PDF summary for a clinician. Once you have sent one of those to somebody or saved it somewhere, it lives by that place’s rules, not ours. The app writes the backup and the spreadsheet to a temporary folder and deletes them as soon as the share sheet closes. The summary it keeps, so you can hand the same file over twice — it is listed under “Made earlier”, and you delete it there when you are done.

In your iCloud device backup

This one is worth reading twice. The app itself uses no iCloud: it stores nothing in iCloud Drive and has no account of yours. But if you back your whole iPhone up to iCloud, iOS includes the app’s storage in that backup, like it does for every other app. That copy is Apple’s backup of your phone, under Apple’s terms — and under the standard protection, Apple holds the keys to it. Turning on Advanced Data Protection in your Apple account makes that backup end-to-end encrypted. You can also exclude Cycle Ally’s data from the device backup in the app’s settings, at the cost of losing it when you change phones unless you keep your own backup file.

Not on our servers, because there are none

We run no server that holds your entries. There is no account, no sign-up, no profile, no “cloud sync”. This is not a promise about how carefully we would guard a copy — there is no copy. If somebody asks us to hand over your log, whether a company, a court, or a data broker offering money, the answer is not a policy decision: we have nothing to give them.

Two places that are not about your log

• An email you send us, if you write to support. It sits in our mailbox, like any other letter. There is no mailing list and no form on this website to join one.
• Your subscription, if you buy Plus. Apple bills it and tells the app whether it is active. We never see your name, your card, or your address; Apple’s reports show us counts, not people.

About HIPAA

HIPAA covers doctors, hospitals, insurers and the companies working for them. It does not cover an app you installed yourself, and any tracker claiming to be “HIPAA compliant” is telling you something that does not mean what it sounds like. What actually protects your entries here is the plain fact that they stay on your phone. The rules that do apply to us are state consumer health data laws and, where you live under it, the GDPR — see the Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy and the Privacy Policy.

Questions about any of this: support@cycleally.com.