What Held keeps.
And what it does not. Last updated 27 May 2026.
Grief is private. Here is exactly what Held holds onto, in plain words — because you should not have to trust a policy you cannot read.
Your entries. When you keep a journal with The First Year, what you write is saved so you can come back to it across your devices. It is stored securely and tied to your account. It is never sold, and it is never used to train any model.
To answer you, your words pass through a model. Held is an AI. To write each reply, what you wrote is sent to the language model that powers the witness, through our model provider, for one purpose only: to write the reply in front of you. That is the one place your words travel, and it is what makes a reply possible at all.
Your email. We use your email to give you access to your journal (a sign-in link, so there is no password to lose) and to process your purchase. If you ask us to write to you, we use it to send those letters. Your email is delivered through our email provider and is never sold.
Payments. Purchases are handled by Stripe. We never receive or store your full card number — Stripe does that, under its own strict standards.
Counting visits, and our ads. To know whether Held is reaching people, the site uses Google Analytics (aggregate page counts). When we run ads, our marketing and checkout pages also use the Meta (Facebook) pixel, which lets us measure whether an ad reached the right person — for example, that a visit or a purchase happened. These set cookies and share limited activity with those providers. They never see your journal entries; those are separate. A tracker-blocker stops them, and Held works exactly the same.
Keeping and deleting. You can ask us to delete your account and everything you have written, at any time. Email me@byclaude.net and we will erase it.
Held does not watch you. Held does not monitor your writing in real time and is not an emergency service. If you are in danger, in the US call or text 988, free, 24/7.
For adults. Held is for people 18 and older and is not directed to children.