Effective date: August 1, 2026

Mineral Quartz is a daily creative practice made by Bryn McCoy, Technofisch Design Studio LLC. This policy describes what Mineral collects, why, and what happens to it. The short version: your reflections are yours, we collect the minimum the practice needs, we sell nothing, we show no ads, and you can delete everything, permanently, from inside the app.

What we collect, and why

Your account. Mineral works without an account at first. If you choose to keep your field, we collect an email address and password, handled by Firebase Authentication (Google). We use them to sign you in — nothing else. No account is required to try the practice.

Your birth date. The timing map is drawn from your birth date. It is stored with your account and used only to compute your position on the map. Providing it is optional — the app works without it. If future features ask for a birth time or birthplace, those will be optional too, used only for the same purpose, and covered by this policy.

Your field notes. The heart of Mineral is what you write and record: reflections, notes, and voice recordings. These are stored privately against your account in Google Firebase (Firestore and Cloud Storage). They are readable by you alone — our security rules prevent any other user from accessing them. We do not read, mine, sell, or advertise against your reflections.

Voice transcription. When you record a voice reflection, the audio is sent to OpenAI’s transcription service (Whisper) to convert your speech to text, so your words can appear in your notes and patterns. OpenAI processes the audio to produce the transcript; under OpenAI’s API terms, API data is not used to train their models. No other user content is shared with OpenAI.

Patterns. Mineral’s Field Guide counts repetitions in your own notes — words, phrases, and images that recur — and shows them back to you with your own sentences as evidence. This happens on our servers using counting, not profiling: the results are visible only to you, are derived only from your notes, and are deleted when the contributing notes are deleted.

Your approximate location (only if you choose sunrise notifications). If you set the morning call to arrive at sunrise, the app asks for approximate location permission and uses coarse coordinates to compute local sunrise times. These coordinates are stored only on your device and are never transmitted to our servers. Decline the permission and the feature simply uses a fixed hour instead.

Notifications. The daily notification is scheduled locally on your device. Its content is the day’s practice line. If you set a preference (an hour, or sunrise), the mode and hour are stored with your account so your choice survives a reinstall — your coordinates are not.

What we don’t do

No advertising, and no advertising identifiers. No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs. No sale or sharing of personal information — with anyone, for anything. No use of your reflections to train AI models, ours or anyone else’s. No reading of your field by us in the ordinary course of operating the service; access to production data is limited to what is strictly necessary to run and debug the service.

Who processes data on our behalf

Two processors, both bound by their own security and privacy commitments: Google Firebase (authentication, database, file storage, cloud functions — where your account and notes live) and OpenAI (voice-to-text transcription only). There are no others.

How long we keep things

Until you delete them. Deleting a single note removes it and reverses its contribution to your patterns. Deleting your account — the in-app “release this field” flow in Settings — permanently deletes every note, every recording, every derived pattern, and the account itself, from our systems. There is no recovery after release. If you simply stop using Mineral, your data remains stored, private, until you return or release it.

Your rights

You can read everything Mineral holds about you inside the app — the field is the data. You can delete any note, or everything, at any time, in the app, without asking us. If you live somewhere with statutory privacy rights (such as the EU/EEA, UK, or California), you may also have rights to access, correct, port, or delete your data, and to complain to a supervisory authority; you can exercise any of these by using the in-app tools or contacting us at the address below. We do not discriminate against anyone for exercising privacy rights.

Children

Mineral is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

Data in transit is encrypted (HTTPS/TLS). Data at rest is encrypted by Google’s infrastructure. Access is guarded by per-user security rules verified in code review, and the app attests its integrity to our backend (Apple App Attest). No system is perfectly secure, but the surface here is deliberately small: no third-party data sharing, no analytics pipelines, one purpose.

Account deletion (web notice)

Account deletion is available in the app: Settings → release this field. This deletes all notes, recordings, patterns, and the account itself, permanently. If you cannot access the app, email us from your account address and we will complete the deletion for you.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, we will note it in the app before the change takes effect. The current version always lives at this address.

Contact

hello@madebymineral.com
Technofisch Design Studio LLC
Chicago, IL USA