A sanctuary is only a sanctuary if it is private.

How you sign in

You can enter the sanctuary with email & password or with Google. If you use Google, we receive only your email address and a stable account id — never your Google contacts, calendar, drive, or profile beyond what is needed to sign you in.

You may browse The Path as a guest. Guest choices (a preview reflection, onboarding selections, unsaved cards) live only in your own browser's local storage until you decide to create an account.

What is stored on your account

• · Your email address, so you can sign in and receive optional correspondence.
• · Your journal reflections and the prompts that inspired them.
• · Your Council conversations and Council Debate transcripts.
• · Cards you save to Cards and intentions you plant in your Garden.
• · Your Cultivation ledger — which practices you have kept, virtues tended, and the growth of your groves.
• · Your preferences — which guides you follow, onboarding answers, email choices, subscription status.
• · Anonymous rate-limit counters (how many AI calls today), never linked to content.

All of it lives in a database protected by row-level security — the database itself refuses to return one seeker's data to another. Nothing is shared across accounts. Ever.

Who can read it

No one but you. The Path has no support dashboard that displays journal entries, saved cards, or chat logs. No employee, contractor, or admin routinely reads user content. The only time your data is ever touched by a human is if you email asking for help and hand it over yourself.

What is sent to the AI

When you speak with a Council member, open a Debate, or request an AI-assisted Daily Letter, the text of that single exchange is sent to a large-language-model provider so the guide can respond. We do not send your email, your journal, your saved cards, or your other conversations with it.

The provider we use contractually forbids training on API inputs. Your words do not become part of any model.

Cards, Garden, and sharing

When you save a One Line to Carry card, plant an intention in the Garden, or shuffle your Cards deck, those items are stored against your account so they follow you across devices. When you tap Share or Download, the card image is rendered on your own device — nothing is uploaded to a third party in the act of sharing. What you do with the image after that is up to you.

Emails we may send

If you opt in, The Path may send you a Daily Council Letter, gentle reminders to keep your practice, or occasional notes about new features. Every email carries a one-tap unsubscribe. Transactional messages — sign-in links, receipts, account changes — cannot be unsubscribed from while your account is active.

What is not stored

• · No behavioral tracking. No third-party analytics on your reflections.
• · No advertising cookies. The Path sells no ads and has no ad partners.
• · No sale of data. There is no arrangement under which this could happen.
• · No fingerprinting or cross-site tracking scripts.

Cookies & local storage

The Path uses only the storage it needs to work: a session cookie / token so you stay signed in, and a small amount of local storage for guest previews, onboarding progress, and remembering which council member you last spoke with. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Export your writing

Everything you have written is exportable at any time from your Account page — journal entries, Council conversations, saved cards, and Garden intentions — delivered as a plain Markdown / JSON file you can keep forever, offline, in a format no company controls.

Delete everything

You can permanently delete your account from the same page. This purges every reflection, every conversation, every card, every planted intention, every Cultivation record, every preference, and the account itself. It is immediate and it is not recoverable — this is intentional.

A note on payments

Subscriptions and one-time Patron contributions are handled by Stripe. We never see your card number. Stripe stores billing information under their own privacy terms; we store only the fact that your support is active and, for subscriptions, when they renew.

Reliability & anonymous crash reports

To keep the sanctuary standing at scale, The Path uses a crash-reporting service that receives only technical details when something breaks — the file and line number of the error, the browser type, and an opaque account id used to group repeat reports. It receives no reflection text, no chat content, no card content, no email address, and no IP address. This behavior is hard-coded and auditable in src/lib/sentry.ts.

We also keep a lightweight ledger of how many times you called the Council each day (counts and token totals only, never message content). You can see this yourself on the Account page. It exists so we can support you fairly and prevent runaway usage from a bug or hijacked session.

Children

The Path is intended for adults exploring wisdom traditions and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from children. If you believe a child has created an account, write to the sanctuary and we will delete it.

Where your data lives

Your account, writing, and Cultivation records are stored with our managed database and authentication provider on infrastructure in the United States. AI responses are generated by a large-language-model provider under a no-training contract. Payments are processed by Stripe. These are the only third parties that touch your data, and each is limited to the narrow purpose above.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, export it, or erase it. The Account page already does the first three with one tap and the fourth permanently. For anything else, write to the sanctuary and we will answer within a reasonable time.

Changes to this page

If anything about how The Path handles your data changes, it will be reflected here first, in plain language, before it takes effect. The central promise — that no one reads your writing — will not change.