Interim documents — alpha programme.
Cognate is in invite-only alpha. These pages describe, accurately and in plain language, how the software behaves today. They have not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. A reviewed version will replace them before Cognate is offered to anyone outside the programme.
They are published now so that anyone joining the alpha can see exactly what the software does before connecting an account. Retention periods, refund terms and the liability and governing-law sections are our own provisional drafting and may change on review. The product is changing weekly and so will these pages; anything material will be announced by email first. Questions, corrections and objections: privacy@trycognate.com.
Cognate is a local-first application. Your mail, calendar, documents, notes and the connections between them are stored on your own devices and synchronised through your own iCloud account. Cognate operates no server that holds your content.
This policy describes the narrow set of things that do reach us, the third parties involved, and the choices you control.
The following never reaches Cognate:
Synchronisation between your devices uses Apple iCloud, in your own account, under Apple's terms. Cognate cannot read that data and holds no copy of it.
There are two exceptions to all of this, and they are set out rather than buried: usage and diagnostic data, in section 2, and the AI features, in section 3.
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | To issue an invite, send sign-in codes, and identify your licence | While your account exists |
| Licence and subscription status | To know whether the application should run | While your account exists |
| Update checks | To tell the application a new version exists | 30 days |
| Usage and diagnostic data | To find what is broken and what is unused | 12 months |
Anything you send to feedback@ | Because you wrote to us | While your account exists |
| Waiting-list submissions | To invite you, and to decide which connectors to build | Until you ask us to delete it |
Cognate records how the application is used and whether it is working, and sends that record to us. It covers which features are used and how often, whether operations succeed or fail, error and crash diagnostics, and the version and platform you are running.
It does not include the content of your mail, your calendar, your documents or your notes, and it does not include names, email addresses, subject lines or file names.
During the alpha and beta programmes this cannot be switched off. It is how a pre-release product gets fixed, and taking part means accepting it. Before Cognate is offered publicly we will say plainly what the position is at that point.
Cognate's AI provider is Anthropic. It is the only provider, and it is not selected by you.
Some AI work happens when you ask for it. Some happens automatically, as part of how the product works — reading what arrives, extracting commitments and dates, linking new material to what is already there, scoring what deserves your attention. That is the product. It is not an ambient service running behind your back, but it does not stop to ask permission each time either.
When you connect a Microsoft or Google account, you authorise Cognate through that provider's own sign-in screen. The resulting tokens are stored on your device, in the operating system's secure storage. They are not transmitted to us, and you can revoke them from your provider's account settings at any time or by disconnecting the account in Cognate.
| Who | What they do | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Website hosting, email routing, storage of application builds, usage and diagnostic intake | Requests to this website; mail sent to our addresses; the usage record described above |
| Resend | Sends sign-in codes and invitations | Your email address and the message |
| Stripe | Takes payment and runs the subscription | Your billing details, which Cognate does not store |
| Anthropic | Runs the AI features | The text each operation sends, and nothing marked Keep from AI |
| Apple | iCloud sync and app distribution, in your own Apple account | Your synchronised data, encrypted under Apple's terms |
Delete your account. Write to privacy@trycognate.com. Your account record, licence record and waiting-list entry are deleted within 30 days. Everything on your devices and in your iCloud account is deleted by you, because we cannot reach it.
If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union you have rights of access, correction, deletion, portability and objection over personal data we hold, and a right to complain to your supervisory authority. Since what we hold is your email address, your licence status, your correspondence with us and the usage record described above, those requests are small and quick to answer. Everything else is already in your possession, on your own machine, where we cannot reach it.
Account records, licence records and usage data are held in the United States, on Cloudflare's network. Your content is held on your own devices and in your own iCloud account, in whichever region Apple assigns to it.
Cognate is changing weekly, and so will this policy. If it changes materially, we will say so by email before the change takes effect.
Cognate is a product of Charles Araujo International, LLC. In this policy, “Cognate”, “we” and “us” mean that company, which is the data controller for everything described above.