Privacy
Kettle’s privacy policy
Kettle is an offline anger journal app for iPhone. It has no account and no server, so your journal stays on your phone and I never see it. This website uses no cookies, and it counts visits without following you from site to site.
The rest of this page says exactly what that means, including what it costs you.
The short version
- Kettle doesn’t collect your data. I can’t read, recover or hand over your journal, because I don’t have it.
- Everything you write or log is stored on your iPhone.
- Dictation turns your voice into text on the phone. The audio isn’t sent anywhere.
- Notifications and widgets never show what you wrote.
- Kettle is a journal, not therapy or medical care, so HIPAA doesn’t apply to it. What protects your journal instead.
- Apple handles any payment. I don’t see your name or your card.
- This website uses no cookies. It counts visits with Fathom Analytics, which doesn’t use cookies either.
What the app stores, and where
Kettle saves what you give it:
- your answers to the five daily questions
- your frustration and stress numbers
- your meditation sessions: how long, which bell and sound, and how you said you felt afterwards
- your workouts: what you did, how long and how hard
- your settings, such as reminder times
All of it lives in a database on your iPhone. There’s no account and no sign-in, so nothing ties your entries to your name on a server somewhere. The app has no server to talk to. Its only network traffic is Apple’s own purchase system, which loads the Kettle Plus prices and handles a subscription if you choose one.
Face ID lock
You can turn on a lock in Settings. Kettle then asks for Face ID, or your passcode, when you open it and after it has been in the background for a minute or more. While it’s locked, and in the app switcher, it shows a plain cover in place of your journal.
Face ID is run by your iPhone. Kettle only learns whether the check passed.
Is Kettle covered by HIPAA?
No. HIPAA is a US law that covers health information held by health care providers, health plans and the businesses that work for them. Kettle isn’t any of those. It’s a journal, not therapy or medical care, and no doctor or therapist is involved.
Your journal is protected a simpler way: I never receive it. Everything you log is stored on your iPhone, Kettle has no server, and I can’t see any of it.
What happens to my voice when I dictate?
It’s turned into text on your iPhone, using Apple’s on-device speech recognition. The audio isn’t sent to me, to Apple or to anyone else, and Kettle doesn’t keep a recording. Only the text you save is stored.
If your iPhone can’t recognise speech on the device for your language, Kettle switches dictation off. It won’t fall back to a server.
The microphone is on only while you’re dictating an answer.
What can someone see if they glance at my phone?
| Where | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Journal reminder | “Today’s entry is waiting”, and a line about your streak |
| Meditation and exercise reminders | A short nudge to sit or to move |
| Streak widget | Your streak count, and whether today’s entry is done |
| This week widget | Which days this week you journaled, meditated and exercised |
| Meditation on the Lock Screen | The time left, the sound that’s playing, and “Session complete” at the end |
None of these shows anything you wrote, and none shows your frustration or stress numbers. Reminders are off until you turn them on, and the journal reminder arrives once a day at most.
Who handles Kettle Plus payments?
Apple does. If you subscribe to Kettle Plus, the purchase goes through the App Store. Apple tells the app whether your Apple Account has an active subscription, and it sends me sales totals. I don’t receive your name, your email address or your card details.
If you choose “I can’t pay right now”, that choice is saved on your phone and nowhere else. I never find out who chose it.
What Apple may share with me
If you’ve turned on Share With App Developers in your iPhone’s settings, Apple sends developers anonymous crash reports and usage totals for their apps. These contain nothing from your journal. You can turn this off in Settings › Privacy & Security › Analytics & Improvements.
Backups, deleting the app, and losing your entries
Kettle has no export, no sync and no backup of its own. That’s the price of keeping everything on your phone.
- If you delete Kettle, your journal is deleted with it. I can’t get it back for you.
- Kettle’s data is stored the way iOS stores other apps’ data, so it’s included when you back up your iPhone to iCloud or to a computer. That backup is between you and Apple, and I can’t see it.
- If you’d rather your journal never left the phone at all, you can leave Kettle out of your iCloud backup in your iPhone’s iCloud settings.
This website
kettlejournal.com has no cookies and no advertising. The guides and worksheets need no sign-up, and the site has no forms.
To see which pages people read and which sites send them here, the site uses Fathom Analytics. Fathom doesn’t use cookies. It counts a visit with a signature that’s specific to this site and changes every day, so it can’t follow you from site to site or from one day to the next. To count the visit it does process your IP address and browser details, and Fathom’s privacy policy explains how it handles them. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, the site doesn’t count your visit.
Fathom is the only outside service the site loads. The fonts and everything else are served from the site itself.
Like every website, the server that delivers these pages receives your IP address and the address of the page you asked for. The hosting company may keep that in its logs for a short time for security. I don’t use those logs to follow anyone.
If you email me, I’ll have your email address and whatever you wrote. I use it to reply to you.
Children
Kettle is made for adults. It doesn’t collect information from anyone, including children.
Kettle’s App Store privacy label
Apple asks every app to declare the data it collects. When Kettle is listed on the App Store, its label will read “Data Not Collected”.
Changes, and how to reach me
Kettle is made by one person, Andrew Askins. If this policy changes, I’ll update this page and the review date at the top. Questions go to support@kettlejournal.com.