Afterglow
Privacy Policy
Effective September 8, 2026
The short version
Afterglow has no accounts and no tracking. Your photos, symptom logs, notes, and reports live on your phone.
What stays on your phone
Everything, by default: your recovery photos, your symptom check-ins, your notes, your provider's contact details if you saved them, and every report you generate. There is no account, no cloud copy made by us, and no analytics or advertising software in the app.
What can leave your phone
Exactly two kinds of network requests, and only one of them — a photo you explicitly choose to send — carries personal data:
- A photo you choose to send for an AI Photo Note. Only when you confirm the consent screen, only that one photo, with location metadata removed first. The request also carries the procedure you logged, the recovery phase, and the day number, so the note can be written against your timeline. It travels through our relay (which holds the API key and keeps only an anonymous per-install key from Apple's App Attest, used to block abuse — it retains no photo or recovery data) to OpenRouter, which routes it to OpenAI's API to write the note. OpenRouter does not retain prompt or response content for our account. OpenAI may retain the request for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, unless longer retention is required by law or reasonably necessary to prevent harm. OpenRouter and OpenAI do not use this API data to train their models. If you never confirm the consent screen, no photo ever leaves your phone.
- A feature-availability check. The app fetches one small public configuration file so we can switch the AI feature off remotely. The request carries no personal data.
Alongside the first of those, the app asks Apple to confirm it is a genuine copy of Afterglow on a real iPhone, and sends that confirmation to our relay with the photo. This is how we keep strangers from using the relay at our expense; it identifies the app installation, not you, and it carries no personal data and no photo. Our relay keeps that per-install key so a device that abuses the service can be cut off. It happens only inside a note you have already consented to. Apple describes this as App Attest.
Purchases are processed by Apple; we never see your payment details.
Face photos and face data
Afterglow uses ordinary camera photos that you take for your private recovery journal. It does not use Apple's TrueDepth camera data, extract face geometry, create a biometric or face template, identify anyone, or perform face recognition.
The full-resolution originals stay in the app on your phone until you delete an individual photo, choose Settings → “Delete all my data,” or delete the app. We do not have a server copy of those originals.
If you confirm an AI Photo Note, Afterglow sends that one selected photo, with location metadata removed, plus the procedure you logged, recovery phase, and recovery day to our relay, OpenRouter, and OpenAI. Our relay passes the request through and retains no photo or recovery data. OpenRouter does not retain prompt or response content for our account. OpenAI may retain the request for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, unless longer retention is required by law or reasonably necessary to prevent harm. OpenRouter and OpenAI do not use this API data to train their models.
After a request is sent, deleting the local photo or your Afterglow data cannot recall copies temporarily retained by a processor for security, legal, or abuse-monitoring purposes. We require each processor to provide the same or equivalent protection under its published API privacy and security commitments. You can use every non-AI journaling feature without sending a face photo.
Deleting your data
Settings → "Delete all my data" permanently removes everything from your phone. There is no server copy for us to delete. Anything you already exported or shared — a report, photos saved to your camera roll — is outside the app and cannot be recalled by us.
Not medical advice
Afterglow is a personal documentation tool. AI Photo Notes describe what a photo appears to show; they are not a diagnosis or medical assessment. Your provider's instructions always come first.
Contact
Changes
If this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it.