How we protect your data

If you live with a vestibular disorder, the notes you keep about your symptoms are some of the most personal words you write. Bearings only works if you can hand those words over without a knot in your stomach. This page explains, in plain language, how the app handles them.

The Bearings app is still in development and has not launched yet. Everything below describes how it is already built, behavior that exists and is tested in the code we will launch with, not a wish list. If something on this page changes, we will change this page.

One boundary to keep clear: this page is about the Bearings app. Our website, including the waitlist and the survey, collects no health data at all and has its own privacy policy.

Your words are encrypted before they are stored

The free text you write in Bearings (check-in notes, episode descriptions, the narrative of your appointment brief) is encrypted before it reaches the database. The database only ever holds the locked version. Someone holding a copy of the database would have your words in a form they cannot read. Structured entries, like dates and severity ratings, are protected by the access rules described below.

Your account has its own key

Your words are not locked with one master key shared by every user. Each account gets its own data key, and your notes are encrypted under yours alone.

Deleting your account destroys the key

When you delete your account, Bearings deletes your records and destroys your personal data key in the same step. From that moment, your encrypted words are unreadable everywhere they exist, and backup copies age out completely within days. There is no undo. If you want a copy first, you can export everything before you go.

The database checks who you are, on every row

Every request to Bearings runs as you, the signed-in person, all the way down to the database. The rules about whose records a request can see are enforced by the database itself, row by row, not just by our application code, so a bug in the app cannot quietly widen what a request can reach. The app also holds no standing all-access database credential. Even deleting your account runs as you.

Share links are yours to revoke

Nothing is shared unless you share it. When you create a link to share an appointment brief, the link is a long random token, and you can revoke it at any time. A revoked link stops working immediately. Deleting your account revokes every link you ever made, just as immediately.

You can take everything with you

Your data is yours. From the app you can download a complete copy of it, every check-in, episode, and brief, including your written notes, as a single machine-readable file, along with a printable summary. The export is generated on the spot, only for you, only while you are signed in. Nothing is stored or emailed.

What we won't claim

Bearings is not end-to-end encrypted, and we will not imply that it is. The app has to read your words to do its job, translating your experience into clinical language. So we will never tell you "we can't see your data." What encryption protects here is the stored copy: the database, its backups, and what remains after you leave.

We will also not use phrases like "bank-level security" or promise that your data is perfectly safe. Nobody can promise that honestly. What we can do is show you how your data is handled, and keep this page matching reality.

The standing commitments

We never sell your data. No advertisers, no data brokers. Bearings is not a medical device and does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. And if anything on this page is unclear, email hello@bearings.health and we will explain it plainly.