SHOON is a diary. Nothing you capture is public, nothing is sold, and nothing is used to train anything.
Last updated 22 September 2026 · shoontheway.com
Your photographs are yours. They are stored in your own account and nobody can open one unless you send it to them or share that day with them.
Your sleep and screen time never leave your phone. They are read on the device, used to work out one observation, and forgotten.
You can take all of it back. Export everything as a spreadsheet or a PDF at any time, and delete your entire account from inside the app.
| What | Where it lives | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Photographs | Your account, encrypted in transit and at rest. A full-resolution copy also stays on your own phone. | They are the journal. Everything else is a label on top of them. |
| Time and place | Saved with the photograph, shown only to you unless you share that day. | The place is a label you choose. If you allow location, SHOON uses your phone's precise location to suggest that label the next time you take a photograph in the same spot. The reading, and the places SHOON has learned, stay on your phone: no coordinates are saved with your photographs or sent to SHOON, so there are none to share. Location is optional, and SHOON only asks for it after you have tagged a place yourself. |
| Mood and energy | Your account. | To draw your own charts. They turn a pile of photographs into a pattern you can see. |
| Username and picture | Readable by anyone signed in to SHOON. | It is how people find you. It is the only public part of your account, and it holds nothing but a handle, a display name and a picture. |
| Nicknames you give people | Your account, readable only by you. | What you privately call somebody is your business. The person you renamed is never told. |
| Email address | Your account, not shown to anyone else. | To sign you in and to prove the address belongs to you. |
| Date of birth | Your account, in a private area only you can read. | Asked once when you join, to check you are 18 or over. It is never shown to anybody and never leaves your account. |
| Notes and messages | Your account. A note sits with the photograph it belongs to. | Messages are readable only by you and the person you sent them to. |
| Plans and goals | Your account, readable only by you. | So your calendar and the things you are working towards are there on any phone you sign in on. A goal's daily check-ins are yours alone, and there is no "missed" record: a day you did not answer is simply a day you did not answer. |
| Feedback you send | SHOON's own records, readable only by the SHOON accounts given the operator permission. A screenshot goes to SHOON's file storage, where no account can open it from inside the app at all — it can only be looked at by someone with owner access to SHOON's Google Cloud project. | Only when you open Settings → Send feedback and press Send. It holds what you typed, the category you picked, the app version and whether you are on Android or iOS, and a screenshot only if you chose one from your gallery. Nothing is attached automatically, and you cannot read your own feedback back afterwards — nor can anybody else using the app. |
| Your interests and briefing settings | Your phone only. | To suggest things for empty time and to prepare tomorrow's briefing at the time you chose. They are never uploaded and are forgotten when you sign out. |
| Notification token | Your account, in a private area. | An anonymous identifier for this installation, so a notification can reach this phone. It is useless to anyone without our server credentials. |
If SHOON crashes, a report goes to Google Crashlytics describing what went wrong — the error, the phone model, the version of the app. It does not include your photographs, your notes, your messages or your location.
It exists so that a crash on your phone is not invisible to us, and it is the only thing SHOON reports automatically. There is no analytics in the app: nothing records which screens you open, how long you spend in them, or what you tap.
Three things are read on the device and never uploaded anywhere, to SHOON or to anyone else:
All three are optional. Refuse any of these permissions and everything else works unchanged.
SHOON can create calendar plans from something you say. This only happens when you press the microphone button. SHOON never listens in the background, has no wake word, and does not run a listening service.
Your phone does the transcription, not SHOON. On phones that support it, your speech is turned into text on the device and never leaves it. On other phones, Android sends the audio to Google's speech service to be transcribed and returns the text; that transfer is handled by Android under Google's privacy policy. SHOON asks for on-device transcription wherever the phone can provide it.
SHOON never receives, records, or stores the audio. It receives only the text, which stays on your phone while you check it. Nothing is saved to your calendar until you press the button to add it, and what is saved then is only the plans you approved, exactly as they were shown to you — each with its time and what you called it. The sentence you spoke is not saved anywhere.
You do not have to use it. Every voice feature has a typed equivalent, and refusing the microphone permission leaves the rest of SHOON working exactly as before.
Sharing gives one person one window of time, and you choose both ends of it. Stopping a share takes effect immediately — they lose access at the database, not merely in the interface.
A photograph posted to a community is handed out one view at a time and then expires. The post never carries a permanent link to the picture, so "viewable twice" means viewable twice.
A private community is visible only to the people in it. Its name, its description and its size are not readable by anyone else.
Nobody, for any commercial purpose. SHOON does not sell data, does not run advertising, and does not share your content with third parties for their own use.
Some of it is handled by others on our behalf, and only to run SHOON:
Nobody else receives your content, and none of these receive it for their own use.
Profile → Settings → Delete my account.
It removes every photograph, note and rating, your plans and goals, any feedback you sent and its screenshot, your conversations, your nicknames, your place in every community, and the account itself. It happens immediately and it cannot be undone. Anything you had already sent to somebody else stays with them, and photographs people saved to their own phones are theirs.
You can also export everything first, from Insights, as a spreadsheet or a PDF.
SHOON is for adults. You must be 18 or over to have an account. The app asks for your date of birth when you join and refuses anyone younger.
That check relies on the date you type. It is not verified against a document, and no app that asks this question can honestly claim otherwise. What it does mean is that accounts are not knowingly created for anyone under 18, and that nobody can arrive at the sign-up screen without being asked.
Eighteen rather than thirteen because SHOON holds photographs, the places they were taken and private messages, and because Indian law — where SHOON is built and run — treats everyone under 18 as a child whose data needs a parent's consent. Rather than build a parental-consent system for an audience SHOON was never meant for, the app is simply for adults.
If you believe someone under 18 has an account, write to the address below and it will be removed.
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the date at the top changes and the app will say so before the change takes effect.
Questions, requests to see or delete your data, or anything else — either address reaches the same person:
A request to delete your data will be answered even if you cannot open the app — you do not need an account to ask.