Escalate
What happens to what you write
The short version, before the long one: your journal is encrypted on our server, and the words you write are sent to two AI companies so they can be turned into a reading and read aloud.
A private journal. You name what you want, and it comes back to you written as an ordinary moment inside the life where you already have it.
Where your words go
Escalate cannot write or narrate anything by itself. To make a reading it sends what you have written to two companies, both in the United States:
- Anthropic writes the reading. It receives the name you asked to be called, your city, what you wrote in “where you are right now”, what matters to you, your grounding place, the names and details of the people in your circle, and the desire the reading is about.
- ElevenLabs reads it aloud. It receives the finished reading, which by design contains the names, places and numbers you gave us.
If you have set a faith language, an instruction derived from it goes with every request — including when you have chosen “secular”, which says so.
Those companies keep what they receive under their own retention policies, not ours. If you delete your account, we cannot reach back and delete what they already hold.
About other people
Your circle contains people who never agreed to any of this. Please only write about them what you would be comfortable saying in front of them, and leave out anything about someone else’s health, beliefs or private circumstances that is not yours to share.
What “encrypted” actually means here
Everything you write is encrypted before it is stored, so a stolen database or a stray backup is unreadable. That is real, and it is more than most apps of this kind do.
It is not end-to-end encryption. The key lives on the same server as the data, because the app has to read your words to send them for writing and narration. In plain terms: we could read your journal if we chose to. We do not, there is no screen in the app that shows it to us, and an administrator supporting you sees only counts and dates. But you should know the difference between “we do not” and “we cannot”, and this is the former.
What stays on your device
Nothing. No story, no entry and no audio is cached on your phone or laptop — that is why the app needs a connection even to reread something you have already seen. Signing out clears what little the browser held.
Cookies
Only the ones that make signing in work. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel, and nothing is loaded from another company’s server — no fonts, no scripts, no images.
Leaving
You can download everything we hold, or delete your account and every file with it, from your account page. Deletion is immediate and permanent.
Age
Escalate is for adults. You must be 16 or over to use it.
What this is not
Escalate is not therapy, and it is not medical, legal or financial advice. It writes reflective prose from what you tell it. If you are struggling, please talk to a doctor or a crisis line rather than an app.
Encrypted before it is stored. What happens to what you write →