What happens to what you write.

The short version

• Your answer is sent to Anthropic, the company behind the Claude model, so it can be read and matched to a profile. That is the only thing it is used for.
• We keep your answer only if you tick the box asking us to. Untick it, or leave it blank, and your answer is not stored anywhere.
• If your answer tells us something painful about your own life, we never keep it, whatever you ticked, and we show you support resources instead of a profile.
• Anything we keep with your permission is deleted automatically 12 months after you wrote it, and you can have it deleted sooner by asking.
• We do not sell or share your answer with anyone else, and we do not use it for advertising.

What we collect

Your answer to the question. Free text, written by you. This is personal and we treat it that way.

The result. The profile your answer matched, how confident the match was, and whether a follow-up question was asked. This is kept in summary form, without your words, to improve the matching.

Your progress in the Thrive Tracker, if you buy it. At the moment this is stored only on your own device, in your browser. We cannot see it. Clearing your browser data clears it.

Payment details. Taken by Stripe, our payment processor, on their pages. We never see your card number. Stripe sends us confirmation that a purchase was made and the email you gave them, so we can honour it.

Ordinary web traffic data. Our hosting provider, Vercel, records the usual server information such as your IP address and browser type, for security and to keep the site running. We use it to limit how many answers one address can send in an hour.

Who reads your answer

Your answer is sent to Anthropic's API so that their Claude model can read it and tell us which of the nine profiles it fits. Anthropic's handling of API data is governed by their own terms. We do not use your answer to train any model, and we send Anthropic no name, email, or account to attach it to.

Nobody at Mary Q Analysis reads individual answers as a matter of course. The consented answers we keep are read in bulk, to check that the nine profiles cover what people actually say and to improve the matching. Where one is useful as an example it is stripped of anything that could identify you before being kept for that purpose.

Consent, and what it means

On the question screen there is a box: "Allow Mary Q to keep my answer to improve the assessment and the support we offer. I can delete it anytime." It is unticked by default. If you leave it unticked, your answer is used to produce your result and then discarded. It is not written to any database.

If you tick it, we store your answer with the result it produced. You can withdraw that at any time by writing to hello@maryquestion.com. Deletion means deletion: the text is removed, not hidden, and it is not kept in logs, error reports, or analytics.

Until the storage described here exists, the box is not shown, and no answers are kept at all.

When your answer is about you

The question is about Mary. Sometimes a person answers it with something from their own life: a pregnancy, a loss, an assault, abuse. When that happens we do not produce a profile. We show a page with support resources instead, and we do not store the answer, even if you ticked the box. Nothing about what you wrote is kept, counted by category, or passed to anyone.

How long we keep things

Consented answers: deleted automatically 12 months after submission, by a scheduled job. Sooner on request.

Results without your words (profile, confidence): kept as long as the service runs, since they contain nothing that identifies you.

Purchase records: kept as long as the law requires for accounting.

Cookies

We set one kind of cookie: after you buy the full read or the Thrive Tracker, a cookie unlocks it in your browser for a year. It holds the name of the profile you bought and nothing else. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Children

The service is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their answers. If you believe a child has used it, write to hello@maryquestion.com and we will delete what we hold.

Your rights

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected or deleted, and withdraw consent, by writing to hello@maryquestion.com. Because we attach no account to your answer, we may need you to tell us roughly when you answered and what you wrote, so we can find it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes and the summary above will say what is different.