Privacy
Polaris is a private beta run by one person. This page says plainly what is stored, what is sent where, and what nobody else can see.
What your account holds
Your name, your email address, and a hashed version of your password — the password itself is never stored and cannot be read back. If you sign in with Google instead, Polaris records that your Google account belongs to your Polaris account. Signing in with Google creates an account in one case only: accepting an invitation to someone's circle, which makes a circle account (see below). Otherwise Polaris is invite-only.
Polaris also stores the timezone your browser reports, so that a day starts and ends when it does where you are.
Your private content
Your Journal entries, your Reflect conversations, your Wishes, Goals, Tasks, Routines, Daily Log and the notes you keep about people in Orbit are private to your account.
No other Polaris user can see any of it, except something you deliberately send to one person in your circle (below). There is no shared feed, no directory of members, and nothing you write becomes visible to somebody else because they also use Polaris. The people you write about cannot see what you wrote about them — not even people in your circle.
Sharing with your circle
You can invite a few people to your circle and send one of them an ask for advice or a recommendation. What they receive is a copy of exactly what you saw in the preview, and nothing else from your Polaris. If you edit the original afterwards, they keep seeing the copy until you choose to share an update. They do not see who else you asked.
Replies stay with the person they were written to, and whoever wrote a reply can delete it at any time, for both people. Ending sharing, or ending the connection, stops the other person seeing what you shared; it cannot undo what they already read or copied. Anything someone saved from a reply stays theirs, credited by first name; if the reply is deleted, its words go.
Circle accounts. Accepting an invitation needs a Google account for the address it was made for. It creates a circle account that holds a name, that address, the Google sign-in, what the person writes to the people in their circle and what they choose to keep. It can open the circle and nothing else in Polaris, and its owner can delete it, with or without everything they wrote, from the circle's Settings.
Nothing written in a circle is sent to AI, by either person.
AI processing, and OpenAI specifically
Polaris uses AI for Reflect, for the daily and weekly reflections, and for the suggestions it offers. When one of those runs, the relevant part of your content is sent to OpenAI's API to produce the response — the journal entry being discussed, the recent turns of a Reflect conversation, the goal being advised on.
That is a real third party receiving real private writing, which is why it is named here rather than described as "AI". What OpenAI may do with data sent to their API is governed by their own terms, not by this page.
Polaris has no web access. It cannot look you up, and it does not send your content anywhere else.
My profile is not read by AI. Its AI switches start off, section by section, and they never cover anything your friends write to you.
Polaris sends email for the things you would expect: an invite, a password reset, and reminders if you have turned them on. People in a circle can also get a short notice that something is waiting — never what it says — and can turn it off. Polaris can tell that its mail server accepted a message, not that it arrived. Your address is not shared with anyone and is not on any mailing list.
Cookies
Two, both strictly for signing in. One keeps you logged in while your browser is open. The second is set only if you tick "Keep me logged in", lasts 90 days, and is deleted when you log out. There is no advertising and no third-party tracking or analytics service in Polaris.
What Polaris counts
To see which parts of Polaris people actually use, Polaris itself counts which pages you open each day, and how many things you have added (entries, people, tasks) - numbers only. It never records what is on a page or what you wrote, and these counts are not shared with anyone outside Polaris.
If you asked for an invite
The invite form stores the name, email address and answer you gave, plus the IP address it came from, so that repeat submissions can be recognised. If you are not invited, that row is all that exists — no account is created.
Keeping and deleting your data
Polaris keeps what you write until you delete it. Journal entries, tasks, goals, wishes, rooms and connections can each be deleted from inside the app, and deleting them removes them.
There is not yet a button that deletes your whole account. It is being built. Until it exists, ask ericgungon@gmail.com and your account and its contents will be deleted by hand. There is also no self-service export yet.
What this page does not claim
Your content is not end-to-end encrypted. It is stored on ordinary managed hosting, and the person who runs Polaris has the technical ability to reach the database — which is exactly how a deletion request gets carried out. It is not read for any other reason.
Changes
Polaris is early and changing. If what it does with your content changes, this page changes with it, and anything significant will be said directly rather than quietly edited in.
Questions: ericgungon@gmail.com