Your words stay yours

What we keep

The conversation you have with distil, typed or spoken. If you speak, we keep the words, not the recording — except for a lifestory recording you agree to keep for your family, as explained below.

The read we write from it, and a name if you choose to add one.

Your email, only if you ask us to send you your read.

Like any website, our servers log technical details such as your IP address to keep distil running and secure. Those logs are kept for about a week.

Simple usage counts: which page was opened, when, which website sent you, which buttons were tapped (like share), and how often a shared link is opened. A random code groups the counts from one browser tab; it isn't linked to your name or email. We don't use ad trackers or follow you around the web.

One cookie keeps you signed in after you open the link we email you. It lasts up to 400 days from your last visit, or until you sign out. Your browser also remembers your earlier reads on that device.

Lifestory voice recordings

For lifestory conversations only, distil asks the elder first, in their own language, whether to keep their voice recordings. If they decline, the conversation continues and no voice recording is stored.

If they agree, the recordings are kept only for the family who made the private, hard-to-guess creator link. The family can listen to them and delete one or all of them at any time.

The elder can choose ‘Stop keeping my voice’ later in the conversation. Future recordings are not kept; recordings they already sent stay under the family's control.

Recordings made but not sent are deleted after 24 hours by an hourly cleanup, so within 25 hours.

distil never clones or synthesises anyone's voice from these recordings, and never uses them to train any model.

What we use it for

To have the conversation with you and write your read. Your read is an AI's picture of your personality. We make it only because you asked for one, and we don't use it to decide anything about you or to target you.

To email you your read, if you asked.

To make distil better. The two people who make distil sometimes read conversations to check that reads are fair and accurate, and we use them to test changes to how distil asks questions and writes reads. Anything we learn this way is used without your name or details attached. We may share overall patterns, like how common each type is, but never anything that identifies you.

We don't train AI models on your conversation. If we ever want to, we'll ask you first.

Who else handles it

A few services run distil for us. Each only gets what it needs to do its job.

OpenAI runs the AI that holds the conversation and writes your read. Under its API terms, it doesn't use your data to train its models.

When we review conversations and test changes, we use AI assistants from OpenAI and Anthropic to help us, with their model training switched off.

Groq turns your voice into text, and OpenRouter turns distil's replies into speech. This only happens if you use voice. For a lifestory recording you agree to keep, Groq also makes the written transcript; the recording itself stays with distil's storage and the family link.

OpenAI and Groq may keep what they handle for up to 30 days to check for misuse, then delete it.

Fly.io runs our servers. Cloudflare serves this website and stores our backups. Resend sends our emails, including the one with your type and the first line of your read.

Most of these services are based in the United States, and that's where your data is stored. We also keep backup copies on our own computers in Australia.

Sharing your read

Nothing is public until you tap share. A shared link shows your read and the quotes it picked out, never the full conversation. You can switch sharing off on your result page, and the link stops working straight away. We can't pull back copies or screenshots that others have already saved.

Keeping and deleting

We keep your conversation and read until you ask us to delete them. Email [email protected] with the link to your read, or from the address you saved it with, and we'll delete your reads and conversations. A family can delete all its lifestory voice recordings, including recordings not yet sent, directly from its creator link.

Backups can contain lifestory voice recordings. Fly.io and Cloudflare backup copies age out within 30 days. Copies on our computers are pruned after 30 days when our local distil tools next run; a powered-off computer cannot run that cleanup, so those copies can remain longer.

OpenAI and Groq may keep data they handled for up to 30 days as described above; we cannot remove those copies early.

A few things to know

Your read is an interpretation of one conversation. It's not a psychological, medical, or clinical assessment, and it isn't a diagnosis.

Please don't share health details, or private things about other people, that you wouldn't want stored.

distil is for people aged 16 and over.

Your data travels encrypted, and private links are long and hard to guess. No system is perfectly secure. If something goes wrong that could affect you, we'll tell you and the privacy regulator as the law requires.

Your rights

You can ask to see, correct, or delete what we hold about you. Email [email protected] and we'll reply within 30 days.

If you're not happy with our reply, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au), or to the privacy regulator where you live.

Changes

If this changes in a way that matters, we'll update this page and the date below. For a big change, we'll post it here before it takes effect, so you can delete your read first if you'd like.