Atween Privacy Policy
This policy is written against what the Atween software actually does today, verified against the source code rather than against a template. It takes effect on September 11, 2026.
Atween helps two people in a close relationship record what happened, understand each other over time, and say the one thing that is worth saying. The material you give it is intimate by nature. This policy sets out exactly what we collect, what we do not, where it is kept, how long, who else sees it, and what you can make us do about it.
We do not use your content to train or fine-tune any model. Not by default, not on an opt-in, not today. No mechanism in the product exports your material for training. If that ever changes, it will require your separate, explicit consent, and you will be able to withdraw it.
1. What we collect, and why
1.1 Account and sign-in
Signing in to Atween uses a one-time code sent to your email address. That is the only sign-in method the service offers. We do not collect a phone number. We do not offer, and have not integrated, sign-in with Apple, Google, or any other third-party account.
We do not store your email address. What is stored is an irreversible keyed hash of it, computed with a secret held by the service. It lets us recognise you as the same account on your next sign-in; it cannot be turned back into your address.
One consequence follows from that, and we would rather state it than let you assume otherwise: we cannot send you email on our own initiative. We can only deliver a code to an address you have just typed in. Notices about changes to this policy or to the agreements reach you inside the app, where we ask for your agreement again — not by email.
We also keep an account identifier, the time a sign-in happened, the device session, and the minimum security records needed to detect an account being taken over.
1.2 Your records, and long-term understanding
The text you write — moments, records, things you want to say, the other person's words as you report them, corrections you make — is processed according to the choice you make when you save it. You choose, for each item, whether it is kept or whether it is only for this session.
Where you keep something, we store the record, its source references, the understanding derived from it, your corrections, and its deletion watermark, so that you do not have to explain the same thing twice. Where you choose this session only, it is not brought into long-term understanding and it expires.
1.3 Voice
Speech is transcribed on your phone, and there is no cloud transcription fallback.
Atween ships a speech model that runs on your phone, using an on-device inference runtime. When you hold to talk, the recording is turned into text there, and what reaches the service is the transcript — the text you can see and edit before you accept it. This version has no path that sends the recording itself.
The service records which on-device model produced a transcript (its identity, version and checksum, taken from the signed manifest your device had to verify before it was allowed to run the model), so that a transcript can be audited without anyone ever holding the audio.
1.4 Photographs and the camera
Pictures are handled on your phone.
You can take a photograph in Atween, or hand it photographs you pick in your phone's own picker. Either way the image is held on the phone, shown to you, and editable by you there. This version of Atween has no path that sends an image to the service; what it saves is the text you write.
Atween does not ask for permission to read your photo library, so it cannot browse it. When you choose photographs, you do so in your operating system's picker, which runs outside the app and passes on only the items you selected.
1.5 Delivering to the other person
Nothing you write is visible to the other person unless you confirm delivery of that specific item.
This is enforced in the data model, not by a rule someone has to remember: an item is visible to a designated observer if and only if you have set delivery confirmation on it. There is no third state. Your originals, your drafts, your transcripts, and the understanding derived from them are not visible to the other person.
We do not show the other person when you opened something, whether you read it, or whether you are online.
1.6 Managing your data
When you view, copy, export, correct, delete, withdraw consent, or close your account, we process the request type, its scope, when you submitted it, its status, the receipt number, the deletion watermark, and the audit record. These logs are kept clear of your intimate content.
1.7 Purchases
Atween is sold as a one-time purchase through the App Store and Google Play. Those stores handle payment; we never see your card or bank details. We receive and store the order identifier, the product identifier, the purchase or refund status, and the store's receipt or purchase token, and we keep them in a storage domain separate from your intimate content. You are never asked to submit personal content as evidence for a refund.
1.8 Feedback, complaints and appeals
When you send feedback or raise a complaint or an appeal, we collect what you describe, the account identifier, where in the product you were, the time, the ticket record, and the outcome. Please describe the problem without pasting intimate originals or the other person's words unless it is genuinely necessary to resolve it.
1.9 Keeping the service running
We process the application version, network status, and the security and rate-limiting records needed to keep accounts safe and to stop abuse. Your IP address is used at sign-in for rate limiting; it is used in keyed-hash form and is not stored as an IP address in our database.
Atween contains no analytics SDK, no crash-reporting SDK, no advertising SDK, and no attribution SDK.
We do not collect crash logs or performance telemetry, there is no advertising identifier, and there is no cross-app tracking. This is verifiable from the application's dependency manifest.
2. Cookies
The Atween mobile applications do not use cookies. The Atween website is a static site: it runs no third-party scripts, sets no cookies, uses no analytics or tracking pixels, and writes nothing to your browser's storage.
3. Who else processes your information
We use a small number of service providers, and we name every one of them in the Third-Party Information Sharing List, which is the authoritative enumeration. That list states, for each one, what it receives, why, where it operates, and whether it is actually in use today.
Processing that happens on your device, and processing by Atween's own services, is not provision to a third party.
Apart from those providers, we do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not provide your content to anyone else — except where the law requires it, where it is necessary to protect someone's life or safety, or where you have asked us to.
4. Where your information is kept, and how it is protected
Personal information collected by the Atween service is stored in Alibaba Cloud's US East 1 region, in Northern Virginia, United States. Nightly backups of the main database are replicated to Cloudflare R2 object storage.
AI inference is performed by our model provider, and that computation may take place outside the region above. Where the law that applies to you requires a separate legal basis for such a transfer, we will satisfy it before the transfer takes place.
Encryption keys are not held by the cloud provider.
Key management runs on Atween's own self-hosted service.
Content held on our side is encrypted with per-record keys wrapped by that key-management service. Where a record can be identified by a digest rather than held in the clear, the database holds only the digest.
5. How long we keep things
| Class | What it covers | How long |
|---|---|---|
| This session only | Material you chose not to keep | Not more than 24 hours. This is a hard constraint in the database, not a default a caller can extend. |
| Kept by you | Material you chose to save | Until you delete it, or until your account is closed. |
| Security and accounting | Purchase and entitlement records | As long as tax, accounting and dispute-handling law requires. |
| Legal | Which agreement version you accepted, and when | As long as we must be able to evidence it. Held in a storage domain isolated from your content. |
Separately from the above: if an account goes 365 days without qualifying activity, it enters deletion, with a further 30 days of grace before that becomes final.
6. Your rights
You can, from inside the app: read and copy your records; export them as a package; correct them; delete individual items; withdraw a consent; close your account; and raise a complaint or an appeal. Each of these is a real endpoint in the service, not a form that reaches a mailbox.
For deletions we give you a verifiable status or a receipt. A deletion propagates: the record, the derived understanding, indexes, caches, queues, export tasks, and the context assembled for later AI reads. Records the law requires us to retain are isolated from your content.
Depending on where you live you may have further rights — to object, to restrict processing, to data portability, or to complain to a supervisory authority. We honour those where they apply to you.
7. Atween is for adults
Atween is for adults only. Before an account can be created you must affirm that you are of the age of majority where you live; an account cannot be created without that affirmation, and the service refuses the request if it is absent.
We do not collect a date of birth and we do not attempt to estimate anyone's age. The affirmation is yours to make.
Atween is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If we learn that an account belongs to someone below the age of majority, we will close it and delete the associated information. If you believe a child has provided information to us, contact us and we will act on it.
8. Changes to this policy
We may revise this policy as the law, the product, or our providers change. Where a change is material — the purposes of processing, the categories of information, the providers who process it, cross-border transfers, or the paths by which you exercise your rights — we will tell you inside the app and ask for your agreement again. As set out in section 1.1, we cannot notify you by email.
9. Contact
Atween is operated by Jingjie (Yumen City) Technology Co., Ltd., registered at Room 102, Office Building East of Qiangsen New Energy, Fuyuan Road, Industrial Park, Xinshiqu Subdistrict, Yumen City, Jiuquan, Gansu Province.
The contact address for privacy questions is privacy@atween.app. Complaints and appeals go to complaints@atween.app.