Journal and AI
An AI journal that does not read your journal
"Private" is the easiest word in this category to write and the hardest to mean. Here is the specific version, which is checkable rather than reassuring.
Your journal is not training data
Journal text never leaves your account, and nothing you write is retained for model training. Not anonymised and used, not aggregated and used — not used.
This is worth stating flatly because the industry norm is a privacy policy that reserves the right to do it and a marketing page that implies otherwise. The commitment is only meaningful if it is specific about what does get sent, which is the next section.
What the AI actually receives
When you ask for a reflection, two things are sent: the statistics already computed from your data — a correlation coefficient, a sample size — and the text of the specific entry you asked about. Nothing else, and nothing is retained afterwards.
So the model sees the entry you deliberately handed it, in the moment you handed it over. It does not have a standing view of your journal, it is not reading last month to build context, and it cannot, because it is never given the corpus.
The analytics record a word count, not the words
This is the detail that usually gives the game away, so it is worth being explicit about. The product analytics event recorded when you write is a word count. Not the text, not a summary of the text, not a sentiment score derived from the text.
A great many apps that would never send your journal to a model will cheerfully send its contents to an analytics pipeline, because analytics feels like plumbing rather than like reading. It is reading.
And you can take it all with you
Everything you have written is exportable in one click, as JSON, along with the rest of your data. A privacy claim that comes with a locked door is a weaker claim than it sounds.
At a glance
- Used for model training
- No
- Sent to the AI
- Computed statistics, plus the entry you ask about
- Retained after a reflection
- Nothing
- Analytics event on writing
- Word count only
Common questions
- Is my journal used to train AI models?
- No. Journal entries are never used as training data, by Crescendo or by the model provider.
- What is actually sent to the AI when I ask for a reflection?
- Computed statistics, plus the specific entry you asked about — not your journal history. The reflection is generated from that and nothing is retained afterwards.
- What does Crescendo record when I write an entry?
- A word count, as an analytics event. Not the text, not a summary of it, and not its sentiment.
- Can I use the journal without the AI features at all?
- Yes. A reflection happens only when you ask for one, so a journal you never ask about is a journal nothing is sent from.