Privacy policy

Last reviewed: 2026-08-20

Who is responsible

Cohesive is operated by Alejandro Carbajo, a sole trader established in Spain, acting as the data controller under the EU General Data Protection Regulation. Requests to exercise your rights go to [email protected]; a postal address is supplied on request to that address. General questions go to [email protected].

This policy covers the website at cohesivejournal.com, the early-access waitlist, and the Cohesive application. Sections marked application describe processing that begins when you install and use the app; they do not apply if you have only joined the waitlist.

The waitlist

If you join the life-map rebuild’s early-access list, the following is stored:

the email address exactly as you typed it, plus a lowercase form used only to keep the list free of duplicates;
the language of the page you signed up from, and a short label identifying which page sent the signup;
the date and time of the signup.

Nothing else is recorded. Your IP address is not stored with the signup. There is no tracking pixel, advertising tag, or third-party form embedded in the page — the address is posted to Cohesive’s own server and stored in Cohesive’s own database.

The lawful basis is consent (Article 6(1)(a)), given for one specific purpose: to be told once, by email, when the rebuilt app opens. The list is not used for a newsletter, a drip sequence, or any other message. If the rebuild never launches, the list is deleted and you hear nothing.

Submitting the same address twice does not create a second record and does not change your position; the page returns the same confirmation either way, so the form cannot be used to test whether a particular address is on the list.

The website

The site stores one first-party entry: your privacy choice, recorded with the version of the policy it was given under, so the choice can be honoured and requested again if the policy changes materially. This is strictly necessary to respect your decision and does not require consent.

Optional analytics stay switched off until you allow them. The default is essential-only, and choosing “Essential only” degrades nothing — no part of the site depends on analytics. Cohesive uses no third-party analytics service: there is no Google Analytics, no advertising network, no social pixel, and no session recorder anywhere on this site. If you do allow analytics, what is recorded is event names, timings, counts, and failure codes in Cohesive’s own database — never the content of anything you write.

The site is served as static files through a content delivery network, which processes the connection metadata inherent in serving any web page, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page and protect against abuse. That is the network’s own security processing and is not combined with anything else Cohesive holds about you.

The life-map application

The intimate content sent to Cohesive is the catch you log, the conversation that follows it, and your map. It goes to Cohesive’s servers and, when needed to produce the requested result, to an external model provider under a data-processing agreement. Account and service operation also requires separate data: your email and authentication records, profile changes, device-token registration, purchase and access state, a referral code and which account it introduced where you use one, feedback you submit, and operational event names, timings, counts, and failure codes. Your words are never placed in the operational-analytics stream, and a referral is a link between two accounts — never a count, a score, or a reward that rests on what either of you did in the app.

If you use voice input, speech recognition runs on your device. Cohesive does not upload or save the microphone audio. The recognized words remain editable, and only the final text you explicitly send is treated like text you typed.

Cohesive does not inspect the contents of other applications on your device, does not read your screen, and does not collect a screen-time log. It infers nothing about you from your device; it works only from words you supplied or confirmed.

Your records are not sold, not used for advertising, not used to train public models, not used to optimise for engagement, and not read as routine — there is no review queue, no sampling, and no internal feed of what people wrote. Access by a person is limited to three cases, and they are the whole list: support you asked for and handed over the thread on, a security or abuse investigation, and a legal duty that cannot be refused. Each such access is recorded. The rebuilt application will expose this boundary in its “Who’s watching?” screen before public release.

Optional analytics for the application are event names, timings, counts and failure codes. Your words are not in that stream.

Processors

Cohesive uses a small number of service providers, each processing only what its function requires and under contract:

Hosting and database — the application server and its database, which hold the waitlist and, for application users, the account record and the map.
Content delivery — serving this website and protecting it from abuse.
Transactional email — sending the single launch email to the waitlist, and account email such as sign-in and receipts for application users.
Language model provider — producing a question or tentative wording in an inquiry, for application users only. This provider may receive the moment you supplied, the conversation so far, and relevant material from your map. It does not receive your name, email address, or account identifiers.
Authentication providers — Google and Apple, if you choose to sign in with them; application users only.
Payment providers — processing purchases for application users only. For a purchase made in the App Store or on Google Play, the store is the merchant and holds the payment; for a purchase made directly on the web, payment is processed by Stripe. Cohesive never receives or stores your card number in either case, and sees only whether a purchase succeeded and what access it grants.

Where a provider operates outside the European Economic Area, the transfer is covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses together with that provider’s supplementary safeguards. The current list, naming the specific companies and their locations, is available on request at [email protected] and is kept accurate as providers change.

How long data is kept

Waitlist records are kept until the life-map rebuild launches and the single announcement email has been sent, or until you ask for removal, whichever comes first. Once the announcement has gone out, the list is deleted within 90 days. If the rebuild is abandoned, the list is deleted and you hear nothing.

For application users, your catches, your conversations and your map are kept until you delete them or delete your account. Deletion removes the record from disk rather than hiding it from view, and it propagates to the processors your data was sent to. If any part of that cannot be completed, nothing is deleted and the application says so instead of reporting a success it did not get.

Some things outlive the account, and it is better to name them than to imply otherwise:

Rows about operations, with the account reference removed. That an analytics event fired, that an email was sent, and what your email settings were: those rows stay, and the link to your account is cut. In two of them the email address itself stays — the delivery log for a message already sent, and the consent record that proves an unsubscribe was honoured. That is more than the account reference, and calling it anonymous would be untrue.
Billing records, for the period Spanish tax law requires, which is longer than your account. These are invoices and payment references, not your map.
Backups, for up to eight days. The database is backed up once a day and eight backups are on hand at any time, so the oldest is always between seven and eight days old. A record deleted today can therefore survive inside an unexpired backup for up to eight days before it goes with that backup. Backups exist to recover the service from a failure; they are not searched, not opened to read one person’s data, and never used to restore a deleted account.
An export you already downloaded. It is a file on your machine. Nothing deleted here reaches it, and nothing here should.

Security logs are kept for a short, bounded period.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you may request access to your data, correction of it, erasure, a portable copy, restriction of processing, and you may object to processing. Where processing rests on consent — the waitlist and optional analytics both do — you may withdraw it at any time, and withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing that already happened.

For the waitlist, one email to [email protected] is enough, and every launch email also carries a one-click unsubscribe. For the application, export and deletion are available inside the app and keep working whether or not you are a paying subscriber; they are never held back to discourage you from leaving. What deletion reaches, and what it does not, is set out on the account deletion page.

Requests are answered within one month. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Spanish supervisory authority, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (aepd.es), or to the authority in your own EU country of residence.

Automated decisions and children

Cohesive makes no automated decision producing a legal or similarly significant effect about you. The question an inquiry asks is generated text, not a decision, assessment, score, or diagnosis, and you are free to disagree with it or ignore it.

Cohesive is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us their data, write to [email protected] and it will be deleted.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects you, the change is published here with a new review date, and where the change concerns consent, consent is requested again rather than assumed. The date at the top of this page is the date it was last reviewed.