Privacy Policy

Glean is a soft journal for your gut. To do its quiet work it holds some sensitive information about you — so we want to be exact about what we keep, why, who else ever sees it, and the control you have over it. No dark patterns, no fine print that says the opposite of the headline.

What we collect

• What you log — meals (typed, spoken, photographed, or looked up by scanning a barcode); symptoms like bloating, stool, fatigue and wind; period days you log by hand; supplements, water and alcohol; and any notes you add.
• Health-app data you allow — sleep, cycle, activity, heart, weight, workouts and more, from your phone's health app (Apple Health, or Google Health Connect on Android). We read these one way only; Glean never writes back to your health app.
• Reports you upload (Pro) — blood tests, hormone and thyroid panels, DNA results and allergy panels.
• Weight-tracking details (opt-in) — if you set up a gentle plan, your body weight over time, your height, and your activity level.
• Account basics — your email address and, if you create one, a display name.
• Minimal technical data — app version and crash diagnostics, used only to keep Glean working.

Two things worth knowing

Two specifics people ask us about most:

• Meal photos never leave your phone as a stored file. When you photograph a meal, the picture is sent once to Anthropic's Claude to read what's on the plate, and isn't kept by Anthropic afterwards. The photo itself lives only on your device — we never upload it to our own servers — and Glean deletes it automatically after 30 days to keep your phone tidy. (Photos you upload of a lab report, and the raw file from a DNA export, go further the other way: those are used once for the read and then not kept anywhere at all, on our servers or yours — only the extracted markers are saved to your account.)
• A symptom note you type is capped to a short excerpt before it's ever used to find patterns or written into your weekly report — so a note can only ever contribute a brief snippet to the AI, never a long or unbounded piece of text.

Sensitive (special-category) data

Health information and genetic (DNA) results are special-category data under UK and EU data-protection law — the most protected kind. We collect and use them only with your explicit consent, given through a dedicated consent step in the app — a separate screen you actively agree to before Glean processes any of it, not something bundled into signing up or implied by using a feature. You can withdraw that consent at any time by removing a permission, deleting the data, or deleting your account. We use it for one purpose only: to show you patterns in your own body.

Where your data goes

We keep the list of companies that ever touch your data short, and each is bound by a data-processing agreement to handle it only on our instructions:

• Supabase — our database, sign-in and file storage, hosted in the EU (Ireland, eu-west-1). Your entries live here, encrypted and isolated to your account.
• Anthropic (Claude) — to find rhythms, write your weekly report, and read a photographed meal, a barcode result or an uploaded lab report into structured data, we send the relevant entries to Anthropic's Claude AI. Depending on what a read needs, that can include a recent slice of your health-app data (roughly the last two weeks). Anthropic processes this only to return the result and does not use it to train its models.
• GitHub Actions — the scheduled jobs that refresh your rhythms (every few days) and write your weekly report (Fridays) run on GitHub's infrastructure, under a private key that can read across accounts to do that job — it's never exposed to the app, the website, or anyone else. Each run reads what it needs from your account, sends the relevant parts to Anthropic, writes the result back, and doesn't keep a copy once it's done.
• RevenueCat — manages your Pro subscription and free trial through the app store. It receives your Supabase account ID and your email address, so a purchase can be tied to your account; it never sees anything you've logged.
• Apple HealthKit / Google Health Connect — read-only, for the health data you choose to share from your phone's health app. Neither Apple nor Google ever receives your Glean entries.
• Open Food Facts — when you scan a packaged food's barcode, we send the barcode and your device's IP address to Open Food Facts (a free, open food database) to look up the product. No account details or personal identifier are included in that lookup.
• Cloudflare — hosts this marketing website. It has no access to anything you log in the Glean app. If you sign up for our newsletter on this site, that email address goes straight to our database (Supabase), not to Cloudflare — see "The notice-slowly letter" below.

Some of these process data outside the UK/EU (for example, in the United States) under appropriate safeguards such as Standard Contractual Clauses.

The notice-slowly letter

If you sign up for our monthly email on this website, we store the email address you give us (and where you signed up) in our database, for as long as you stay subscribed. We use it for one thing: sending you the monthly letter and the welcome guide that comes with it. The legal basis is your consent, given when you type your email and press subscribe. You can unsubscribe at any time by emailing [email protected] — we'll remove your address promptly. Signing up for the newsletter is entirely separate from having a Glean account; we don't merge the two.

What we never do

• We never sell your data, and we never share it with advertisers or data brokers.
• We don't run ads inside Glean.
• We never use your health entries to train models — and the AI we rely on doesn't either.

How your data is used

Everything Glean surfaces — every pattern, every gentle suggestion — is built only from your own entries. We process your logs to find rhythms across food, sleep and how you feel, and to show those back to you with their confidence in plain sight. Our lawful basis is your consent for the sensitive data, and our legitimate interest in running the account you asked for. That processing serves you, and no one else.

Microphone & camera

The microphone is used only while you are recording a voice log, and the camera only while you are photographing a meal or a report, or scanning a barcode. Neither is ever accessed in the background. You can revoke either permission in your phone's settings at any time, and the rest of Glean keeps working.

Storage, security & retention

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and access is limited to the systems needed to run the app. Account data is stored in the EU (Ireland) — if you're in the UK or EU, your health data doesn't have to leave the region to be held. We keep what you've logged for as long as your account exists, other than meal photos (deleted automatically after 30 days, as above) and report photos (never kept at all, as above). When you delete your account — from You → Delete account — we remove your account and everything tied to it.

Your rights

Wherever you live, and in particular under UK/EU GDPR, you can:

• Access & export — get a copy of everything you've logged, as a single JSON file, any time, from You → Export everything. (The separate one-page doctor's-visit summary you can generate on Pro is a shorter PDF built for an appointment — not the full export.)
• Delete — erase your data, or your whole account, from inside the app.
• Correct — edit any entry that's wrong.
• Withdraw consent — take back a permission (health app, microphone, camera) whenever you like.
• Object or restrict — object to processing we base on legitimate interest, or ask us to restrict it while a query is being resolved.
• Complain — to your data-protection regulator (in the UK, the ICO).

Children

Glean isn't intended for anyone under 16, and we don't knowingly collect data from children.

A note on medical advice

Glean is not a medical device and what it surfaces is not medical advice. It exists to help you notice patterns and have a better conversation in the doctor's office — not to diagnose, treat, or replace professional care.

Questions

Write to us at [email protected]. A person will read it.