Privacy

• Your account: your first name, email address and a scrypt hash of your password. We never see or store the password itself. If you continue with Google instead, Google tells us your name and email address and confirms it’s you; there’s no password, and we get nothing else from your Google account.
• Your study progress: the answers you give, flashcard reviews, mock exam and clinical station results, lessons completed, your exam date and study settings. This is what lets you pick up on another device.
• AI usage counts, daily and monthly, so we can apply the fair-use limit and your plan’s credits.
• Your plan and payments: which plan you’re on, until when, and for each payment the amount and Razorpay’s order and payment references. We never see or store card, UPI or bank details. Payment records are kept after an account is deleted, without the link to you, because the law requires them.
• App Store and Google Play subscriptions: if you subscribe in the iPhone or Android app, which subscription or credit pack you bought, when it renews or ends, and the store’s transaction references. Apple or Google take the payment, so we never see your card or store account details.
• How the app is used: which parts you open and a few things you finish, such as answering a question (its topic and whether you got it right), a lesson, a mock paper or a clinical station, signing up, and starting or completing a purchase. Tied to your account’s id, never your name or email, and never the text of questions, answers, tutor chat or anything you type. No screen recordings.
• Where your signed-in devices are, roughly, to spot an account being used by more than one person: every few minutes while you use Southward, the city your connection appears to come from (worked out from your IP address, on our own servers), and a one-way hash of your network. Never the IP address itself, and never your device’s GPS. These records are deleted after 30 days. If we see the account in two distant places at once, we keep a note of the two cities, the distance and the time, to show you a warning.
• Feedback you send us from Send feedback: what you wrote, which kind of feedback you chose, and whether it came from the website, iPhone or Android app and which version, so we can reply and fix things. If you delete your account, the feedback stays without the link to you.
• Sign-in attempt counts, keyed by a one-way hash of your IP address or email address, to slow down password guessing and automated sign-ups. They’re cleared out after about a day.

Without an account, progress stays in your browser’s local storage on your device and never reaches us. Settings has an export button if you want your own copy either way.

• Vercel hosts the site and Neon hosts the database, both in Singapore.
• OpenAI or Anthropic receive the text of AI requests: your tutor questions, clinical station conversation, and the text of any PDF you upload to make questions or flashcards. We don’t keep uploaded PDFs; the text is sent for that one request and then discarded.
• OpenAI also receives what you say in a clinical station in the iPhone or Android app, or in a browser without its own speech recognition: the recording of each line, to turn it into text, and the audio of a live voice station while the call is on. We don’t keep the recordings.
• Razorpay handles payments for Premium. Your name and email are passed to its checkout so you don’t have to type them; everything you enter there goes to Razorpay, not us.
• Apple and Google take payment for subscriptions bought in the app, and RevenueCat keeps the record of them for us, under your account’s id rather than your name or email.
• Google confirms who you are if you choose Continue with Google, and sends us only your name and email address.
• TypeSafe checks AI-written questions and marks clinical stations, so it receives that content too.
• PostHog (its servers are in the United States) receives the usage counts above, so we can see what people use and where they get stuck. On the website they travel through our own domain. Your browser’s do-not-track setting is honoured. If you’d like your usage data removed, delete your account and email us, and we’ll delete it from PostHog too.
• Meta (Facebook and Instagram) hears, through the Meta Pixel on the website, when a page is viewed, an account is made, a checkout is opened and a pass is bought, with the pass’s price. That’s so our ads on Facebook and Instagram can tell which of them brought people to Southward. Meta isn’t sent your name, email or anything you study, and the app on your phone doesn’t include the Pixel. Your browser’s do-not-track setting turns it off.
• Resend delivers the emails we send, such as a password reset link, so it receives your email address and that message.
• Sentry receives error reports when something breaks: what failed, the page or request it happened on, and your browser and device type. Not your name, email or IP address.
• Your browser handles voice input in clinical stations. Some browsers, Chrome among them, send that audio to their maker to turn it into text.

We don’t send your name or email with AI requests.

One cookie, which keeps you signed in (in the app, the same sign-in is kept in your phone’s keychain instead). It’s HttpOnly (page scripts can’t read it) and lasts 60 days. The website also keeps a random id in your browser’s local storage so usage counts from one visit line up; it isn’t a cookie and it isn’t shared with anyone else. The Meta Pixel described above sets Meta’s own cookies on the website (unless do-not-track is on), so Meta can match a visit to the ad it came from. No other advertising or third-party cookies.

Everything travels over HTTPS, passwords are hashed, and the AI features only answer signed-in users. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a password you don’t use anywhere else.

You can export your progress at any time from Settings, and delete your account there too, under Delete account. Deleting an account removes it, its progress and its usage records from the database straight away. How to delete your account. If you can’t sign in, or have any question about your data, email support@cherrybytelabs.com from the address you signed up with.

If we change what we collect or who processes it, we’ll update this page and the date at the top.