Alt. Ego asks you for more than most products do. It asks when and where you were born, and it asks you to write honestly about failure, pressure and the things you say to yourself when you fall short. This page explains exactly what happens to that, in plain terms, without hiding the uncomfortable parts.
The short version. We store your email, your birth details, the answers you write during the initiation, and the identity the system computes from them. Your answers are processed by Anthropic to score them, and they are stored on our database so your profile follows you between devices. We do not sell anything to anyone, we do not run advertising trackers, and you can have all of it deleted by emailing us.
Alt. Ego is an independent product operated from New Jersey, United States. For any privacy question, correction or deletion request, the contact address is privacy@alt-ego.org. A real person reads it.
| What | Why we need it |
|---|---|
| Email address | It is how you sign in. Alt. Ego has no passwords — we email you a one-time link. It is also how we reach you if something goes wrong with your account. |
| Name or chosen display name | So the product can address you. |
| Birth date, birth time, birth place | The chart layer of the identity engine is computed from these. Birth time is optional and you can mark it approximate. |
| Your written answers to the initiation prompts | These are what the identity engine actually scores. See section 4 — this is the most sensitive category and it gets its own section. |
| Feedback you choose to send | Only when you open the feedback panel and write something. Never collected silently. |
We record structured usage events — which screen you reached, which step of the initiation you were on, how long it took, whether something errored, which of the three worlds you opened. Each event carries a random identifier stored in your browser, your coarse browser family (for example "safari"), and the page path.
These events never contain what you wrote. An initiation prompt event records a word count and a duration — never the text. Three kinds of multiple-choice result are recorded: which option you picked on each philosophy dilemma and each pressure question, the primary, secondary and shadow archetype the test computed for you, and, if you answer the fit check after your reveal, whether each of those three fits you (fits, sort of, not me) along with how close the test's call was. If you also type what you would call yourself instead, that one line is stored as feedback, not as a usage event. If you were signed in when you sent it, it is deleted with your account; if you were not, it was never tied to an account, so we can only remove it if you tell us roughly what it said and when. This is enforced in two independent places: the browser only ever sends counts, and the server drops any nested value before writing. We do this because the only honest way to improve a 20-minute process is to find out where people get stuck, and we would rather measure that than guess.
We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing. We use a small number of service providers to run the product, and each one only sees what it needs:
| Provider | What they receive |
|---|---|
| Anthropic (AI processing) | The text of your initiation answers and other prompts you submit, so the model can analyse them. See section 4. |
| Neon (database, US) | Everything we store — this is where the database lives. |
| Render (hosting, US) | Runs the application server. Data passes through it in transit. |
| Resend (email) | Your email address, in order to deliver your sign-in link. |
| Loops (waitlist email) | Your email address only, and only if you submit the waitlist form on the home page. |
| Open-Meteo (geocoding) | The birthplace text you type, in order to resolve it to real coordinates and a timezone. No account or identifier is attached. |
| Google (optional sign-in) | Only if you choose to sign in with Google. If you also grant calendar access, we store a token that lets the product read your calendar; you can revoke it at any time in your Google account. |
We will also disclose data if we are legally required to. If that ever happens and we are permitted to tell you, we will.
The initiation asks you to write about pressure, failure, what you say to yourself when you fall short, and what you privately believe you are. This is the most personal thing in the product, so we are being specific about it rather than burying it in a list.
What happens to that text:
If you would rather your answers were not retained after your identity is computed, email us and we will delete the stored text while leaving your computed profile intact. We would rather offer that than pretend the trade-off does not exist.
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, our basis for processing is your consent (which you give by choosing to complete the initiation) and our legitimate interest in operating and improving the product. Where US state privacy laws apply, you have the equivalent rights below. Alt. Ego does not sell personal information as those laws define it.
Whatever jurisdiction you are in, you can ask us to:
Email privacy@alt-ego.org. We aim to respond within 30 days and we will not charge you for it.
When you ask us to delete your account we remove your email, your birth details, your written answers, your computed identity, your progress, and any feedback you sent.
What remains is the anonymous usage record — rows saying that someone reached step four of the initiation and spent two minutes there, which dilemma and pressure-question options were picked, which archetypes were computed, and how the fit check was answered. Those rows are detached from your identity and contain no text you wrote, and we keep them because deleting them would silently rewrite our historical understanding of where the product fails people. If you object to even that, say so in your deletion request and we will remove them too.
Traffic is encrypted in transit. Sign-in uses single-use, short-lived, signed links rather than passwords, so there is no password of yours for anyone to steal or reuse. Sessions can be revoked. We keep access to the production database limited to the operator.
We are not going to claim this is unbreakable, because no one honestly can. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we will tell you directly and promptly rather than waiting to be asked.
Alt. Ego is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has given us data, email us and we will delete it.
We do not use advertising or tracking cookies. The product stores data in your browser's local storage in order to work at all — your session, your progress, and the random identifier used for usage events. Clearing your browser data clears all of it.
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects what happens to your data, we will email you rather than quietly updating the date at the top.