varah

Privacy

Last updated: 2026-10-09

Varah is a personal app for personal things. We treat your data with the seriousness that implies. This page is the plain-language version of how the Varah iPhone app and this website handle it.

The short version: your journal, your health data, and what Varah learns about your life are stored on your iPhone. To write its replies, Varah uses AI that runs in the cloud, and only after you agree. We don't sell your data, we don't show ads, and we don't track you across other apps or websites.

Your account

You sign in with Sign in with Apple. To run your account we keep:

  • Your email address, as Apple shares it with us (this can be a private relay address if you chose to hide your email).
  • Your profile details: your name, username, birthday, and, if you add them, a nickname, pronouns, and a profile photo.

These are stored on our servers so you can sign in and so Varah knows what to call you. Your profile photo is the only image we keep on our servers.

Varah is for adults. When you set up the app, we check that you're 18 or older, using Apple's age range feature where it's available and your birthday otherwise.

What stays on your iPhone

  • Your journal and chats: everything you write or say, and every conversation with Varah. You can mark an entry private or locked, and Varah won't search it when answering you.
  • What Varah learns about your life: the people you mention, the picture Varah builds of your world, the threads it follows, and how you like to be spoken to.
  • Your health data: what Varah reads from Apple Health and Oura Ring, and the meals, symptoms, and moods you log.
  • The people you add: if you link someone from your contacts, Varah keeps only their name.
  • A data access log: a record, kept on your device, of each time Varah read your journal, health data, people, or profile.

iCloud Sync

iCloud Sync is off until you turn it on. When it's on, your journal, people, and profile also sync to your own private iCloud account, which Apple runs and we can't read. Your health data and the facts Varah remembers stay on the iPhone, even with sync on.

What leaves your iPhone, and why

Cloud AI

Varah's replies, the patterns it finds, and its overnight reflections are written by AI services that run in the cloud. Varah asks for your agreement before it sends anything, and you can turn cloud AI off at any time in Settings > Where Your Data Lives. With it off, nothing is sent to AI services. Your journal still saves on your phone, but Varah can't reply or find patterns.

With cloud AI on, Varah sends only what it needs for the moment:

  • What you write or say to Varah, and any photo you attach to a message.
  • Relevant context from your iPhone: what Varah has learned about you, the names of people you mention, past entries that help answer you, and short summaries of your health data (like sleep and heart rate).
  • Calendar details, if you connect your calendar: event titles, times, places, and the start of event notes, so Varah can understand your days.
  • When you catch Varah up on a day: place names, scene words, calendar titles, and health tags, only from the sources you switch on. Catch-up never sends the photos themselves.

People you've hidden or asked Varah to avoid are never included. You can also choose Keep reflections on this phone, and your overnight reflections are written without cloud AI.

What's sent is used to answer you. Varah keeps no copy of it on a server. The AI services may hold it briefly under their own terms, and they don't use it to train their models.

Voice

By default, your iPhone turns your speech into text by itself. With cloud AI on:

  • Replies read aloud: Varah's words are sent to a voice service to become audio. What you wrote is not.
  • Multilingual speech (off unless you turn it on, in Settings > Voice): recordings of your voice are sent to a voice service to become text.

Oura Ring

If you connect an Oura Ring, Varah reads your sleep, readiness, activity, heart rate, blood oxygen, workouts, and tags from your Oura account. The sign-in keys for your Oura account are kept in your iPhone's secure storage. You can disconnect at any time.

Crash reports and app usage

To find and fix problems, the app sends crash reports, performance data, and app usage events (such as which screens you open) to a crash-reporting and analytics service. They're tied to your account ID. They never include your journal, your conversations, the people in your life, or your health data. They aren't used for advertising.

Apple Health

If you connect Apple Health, you choose exactly what Varah may read, and you can block whole categories inside Varah too. Depending on what you allow, Varah can read body measurements, vital signs, activity and workouts, sleep, nutrition, mindfulness, mood, cycle tracking, symptoms, and similar readings. Varah can also save the meals, symptoms, and moods you log back to Apple Health.

Health data you share with Varah is never used for advertising or marketing, and never sold. It's used only to help you understand how you're doing.

Permissions

Varah asks for each of these only when you use the feature that needs it, and you can change them at any time in iPhone Settings:

  • Health: to read and save health data, as above.
  • Calendar: to see your events and add ones you ask for.
  • Contacts: to link a person in Varah to someone in your contacts.
  • Photos and camera: to choose a profile photo, attach a photo to a message, or help you catch up on a day. For catch-up, your iPhone reads each photo's date and place and describes the scene itself.
  • Microphone and speech recognition: to talk to Varah.
  • Face ID: to lock the app or private entries. This happens entirely on your iPhone.

Notifications are scheduled on your iPhone. Varah doesn't use a server to send them.

Beta testers

If you're invited to the private beta, the beta version asks you to accept a confidentiality agreement first. To record that you signed it, we keep your typed name, your signature, the date, your device model and settings, your IP address, and your approximate location (to about a kilometre). This applies only to beta versions, not to the App Store version.

The waitlist

If you join the waitlist on this website, we store your email address, the page you signed up from, and your browser type. To stop abuse, we also keep a scrambled, one-way version of your IP address; the address itself is never stored. We use your email to tell you about the beta and nothing else. You can ask us to remove it at any time.

This website

To understand how people find and use this website, we use a website analytics service. It sets cookies in your browser and records the pages you visit, roughly where you are (to about a city), your device and browser type, the site that sent you here, and whether you joined the waitlist. It never receives your email address. We don't use it for advertising, and its advertising features are turned off. You can block it with your browser's cookie or content-blocking settings, and the website works the same without it.

What we don't do

  • We don't sell your data or share it for advertising.
  • We don't show ads, and we don't track you across other companies' apps or websites.
  • We don't read your journal. It isn't stored on our servers.

Subscriptions

Varah Bloom is bought and managed through the App Store. Apple handles payment, and we never see your card details.

Keeping and deleting your data

You're in control of what's kept:

  • Forget a fact: in Settings > What Varah Knows, remove anything Varah has learned.
  • Export: create a backup file of your data at any time, protected with a passphrase if you choose.
  • Reset everything: erase Varah's data on your iPhone and start fresh.
  • Delete your account: in Settings > Account. This deletes your account and profile details and your profile photo from our servers, removes Varah's data from your iPhone (including what Varah saved to Apple Health), and, if iCloud Sync is on, removes Varah's data from your iCloud. A safety copy may stay inside the app's storage on your iPhone until you delete the app.

Crash reports and app usage data are kept for a limited time and then deleted by the analytics service. Deleting your account doesn't cancel a subscription; cancel it in your App Store settings.

Who helps us run Varah

We use a small number of trusted service providers, each only for the job described here:

  • Account and storage: keeps your sign-in account, profile details, and profile photo.
  • Cloud AI: writes Varah's replies, patterns, and reflections.
  • Voice: reads replies aloud, and turns your voice into text when multilingual speech is on.
  • Crash reporting and analytics: helps us find and fix problems in the app.
  • Website analytics: shows us, in aggregate, how visitors use this website.
  • Website hosting, email, and waitlist storage: runs this website, keeps the waitlist, protects the signup form from abuse, and sends the waitlist confirmation email.

Each provider may process data only to provide its service to us. Our providers are based in, or process data in, the United States, so your data may be handled outside the country you live in. If you'd like more detail about a provider, contact us.

We may share information if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see, correct, export, or delete your personal data, to object to or limit how we use it, and to withdraw consent at any time. Most of this you can do inside the app. For anything else, email us and we'll respond within 30 days. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

Safety

Varah is an AI, not a therapist, doctor, or crisis service. If you're in crisis, the app can point you to people who can help right away.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top and let you know in the app.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: hello@varah.ai.