Privacy
Last updated July 29, 2026
The short version
Nelawa holds the contents of your head — appointments, medication, children, money, all of it. We treat it accordingly.
We don't sell anything to anybody. We don't record your screen. We don't watch what you click. The analytics we do run count actions, never content, and identify you by a one-way hash of your email rather than your email.
Two things are worth knowing properly, because they're the parts people don't expect: what you type into Nelawa is sent to an AI service to be sorted, and Nelawa is a private beta run by one person. Both are explained below.
Who we are
Nelawa is built and run by Howard Glick, based in the United Kingdom. For data protection law, that's the data controller. You can reach a human at hello@nelawa.com — it goes to one inbox and one person reads it.
What Nelawa stores
Your account
Your email address, and either a password or a marker saying you sign in with Google. If you use a password, we store a salted hash of it — never the password itself, and it can't be read back out. We also keep the date you signed up.
Everything you put into Nelawa
Tasks, notes, projects, grocery lists, day plans, reminders and settings. This lives in your browser's local storage, and — if you have an account — is also synced to our server so it follows you between devices. It's stored as a single record per person in Cloudflare D1.
This is the sensitive part, and we'd rather say so than bury it. A task app collects whatever you'd otherwise carry in your head. In practice that means medication and appointments, your children's names and schools, money you owe, things you haven't told anyone. Nelawa is designed on the assumption that its contents are private, and everything below follows from that.
Feedback you send
If you report a bug or tell us something's in the wrong place, we store what you wrote, which version of the app you were on, and which screen you were looking at. Reports are also forwarded to a private discussion on our GitHub repository so they don't get lost — with your email address removed before it leaves our server. Only what you typed goes across.
Reminders
If you switch on push notifications, we store the address your browser gives us for delivering them, the keys needed to encrypt them, the hour you chose, and your timezone offset. Turning notifications off removes it.
What we don't store
- Your own AI key. If you supply one, it stays in your browser and is deliberately stripped out before anything syncs to our server.
- Your connected accounts' credentials. When you connect Google, Slack or iCloud, the access token lives in your browser's memory for that session only. It isn't written to disk and it never reaches our server or our database. It's why you currently have to reconnect when you come back.
- Your calendar or email content. We read it to show you your day or to suggest tasks. What we keep is the task you decide to keep.
The AI part, properly explained
Nelawa's job is to take a messy brain-dump and turn it into sorted tasks. That sorting is done by a large language model, which means:
The text you type into Capture — and the task text involved in clarifying, planning or scanning — is sent to Anthropic's API to be processed, and the result is sent back. It goes via our own server, which adds the instructions; your text is the part that travels.
We log how many tokens each request used, so we can see what the service costs. We do not store the content of those requests — not the text you sent, not the response. Anthropic handles the data under their own privacy policy.
You can turn AI off in Settings. Nelawa then sorts your capture using rules that run entirely in your browser, and nothing is sent anywhere. It's less clever and it works.
Connected accounts
Connections are optional and off until you set them up. What each one can see:
| Connection | What Nelawa does with it |
|---|---|
| Google Calendar | Reads your events for the next four weeks to show your day. Writes an event only when you explicitly add one. |
| Gmail | When you press "Scan inbox", reads the subject and sender of recent messages to suggest tasks. It doesn't read message bodies. |
| Slack | When you run a scan, reads recent messages that are directed at you — DMs, mentions, replies in threads you started. |
| Apple iCloud Calendar | Reads your calendar via an app-specific password you create. The password passes through our server on each fetch and is not stored there. |
Disconnecting stops all of it, and for Google we also tell Google to revoke the access.
Analytics
We use PostHog to understand whether the app is working — which steps people get stuck on, whether a feature is used at all. It's set up deliberately rather than out of the box, because the default settings would have collected exactly the wrong things:
- No autocapture. Clicks and on-screen text are never collected.
- No session recording. Your screen is never recorded, ever.
- No heatmaps and no click coordinates.
- Named events only, and we choose each one: opening the app, submitting a capture, completing a task, finishing onboarding, running a scan, sending feedback, and similar.
- Counts, not content. Event details are numbers, true/false values and fixed labels. Task text is never attached to an event.
- Identity is a one-way hash of your email address, not the address itself.
- Requests go through nelawa.com rather than directly to PostHog.
On the sign-in page, events are anonymous and record only which method was used and whether it worked — never an email address or a password.
If you'd rather not be counted at all, email hello@nelawa.com and we'll exclude you.
Cookies and similar storage
| What | Why | Needed? |
|---|---|---|
es_session | Keeps you signed in. | Essential — the app can't work without it |
| PostHog storage | Recognizes the same person across visits so events aren't counted twice. | Not essential — see the opt-out above |
Local storage (braindump.*) | Your actual tasks and settings, held on your device. | Essential |
There's no advertising, no tracking pixels, and nothing shared with an ad network.
Where your data goes
Nelawa is run by one person on other people's infrastructure. That means a small number of processors, each doing one job:
| Who | What for | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Hosting, and the database holding your account and your tasks | Global network |
| Anthropic | Sorting and clarifying what you capture | United States |
| PostHog | Product analytics | United States |
| GitHub | Receiving feedback reports, with your email removed | United States |
Some of these are outside the UK and the EEA. Transfers rely on the safeguards those providers have in place, including the UK extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses where applicable.
Nobody buys this data and nobody is sold it. There is no advertising business here and no plan for one.
Why we're allowed to hold it
- To provide the service you asked for — your account, your tasks, syncing them between your devices, and the AI sorting that is the point of the app.
- Our legitimate interests — keeping the app secure, understanding whether it works, and fixing what doesn't. We've limited analytics to what you can see above precisely so this stays proportionate.
- Your consent — for push notifications, and for each account you choose to connect. You can withdraw either at any time.
How long we keep it
Your account and its contents are kept while your account exists. Completed tasks move to an archive and are cleared according to the retention setting you choose in the app.
Feedback reports are kept so we can act on them and see whether a fix worked.
If you ask us to delete your account, we delete it. Everything above goes, apart from anything we're legally required to keep.
Your rights
Under UK data protection law you can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, hand it over in a portable form, restrict what we do with it, or object to us processing it.
Email hello@nelawa.com and we'll do it. We aim to respond within a few days and are required to within a month.
Being straight with you about scale: Nelawa is a small private beta and there is no self-service delete button yet. Deletion is done by hand, by the person who built the app, when you ask. That's slower than a button and it is not less thorough.
If you think we've got something wrong, please tell us first — but you also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.
Security
Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are stored as salted hashes. Sessions can be invalidated centrally, so a password reset signs out every other device. Third-party access tokens are kept out of our database entirely. Nelawa's own configuration files are blocked from being served publicly.
No system is perfect, and we'd rather say that than pretend. If you find something wrong, tell us — you'll get a real reply.
Children
Nelawa is for adults. It isn't designed for or directed at under-18s, and we don't knowingly create accounts for them. It is very likely to contain information about children — that's what family life is — and that information is treated with the same care as everything else here.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top and tell account holders by email. Nelawa is under active development, so it will change.
Contact
hello@nelawa.com — questions, requests, complaints, or to point out something on this page that isn't true.