Held
What Held keeps.
And what it doesn't.
Grief is private. Here is exactly what Held holds onto, in plain words — because you shouldn't have to trust a policy you can't read.
Your conversation stays in your browser. What you write to Held, and what it writes back, is saved on your own device — not on a server somewhere. It's there when you come back. Press Start over and it's gone.
A small note, so Held can remember you. If you return on the same device days later, Held tries to know it's you — so you don't have to start from nothing. To do that it keeps a small record, tied to a random marker in your browser (not your name, not your email). The record holds when you first came, when you were last here, how many times you've talked, and the first and most recent thing you wrote, in your own words. Not the whole conversation. Held forgets it after 90 days away, and Start over erases it right then.
To answer you, your words pass through a model. Held is an AI. To write each reply, what you've said is sent to the language model that runs it. Held keeps no transcript of that on its own servers, never sells it, and never uses your grief to train anything. They go to the model for one reason only — to write the reply in front of you. That's the one place your words leave your browser while you talk, and it's what makes a reply possible at all.
If you ask Held to write to you. The letters are the only time Held needs your email. It keeps your address — and your pet's name, if you give it — for one purpose: to send the letters you asked for. Your email is never sold or passed around; only the service that delivers the mail ever sees it, so it can reach your inbox. One click stops the letters, any time, no explanation. The link is in every letter.
Counting who comes. To know whether Held is reaching people, the site uses Google Analytics — the same page-counting tool much of the web runs. It records visits and which pages get read, in aggregate, and it sets a cookie and reports to Google the way analytics does. It never sees your conversation; that's separate, and stays in your browser. If you'd rather it didn't run, a tracker-blocker stops it and Held works exactly the same.
What Held doesn't do. No accounts to make. No ads. Nothing about you is for sale. No ad trackers following you around the rest of the web.
If you're in immediate crisis, please call or text 988 (the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, free, 24/7, US). Held is early; if anything here is unclear or lands wrong, that's on us, not you.