The commitments Ashwam makes to every woman who uses it — and the governance underneath them. Stated in plain language first. Documented in technical and institutional detail second.
Before any technical detail, here is what we promise — to a woman using Ashwam, in language she should not need a lawyer to interpret.
You own your record — every signal, every pattern Ashwam has surfaced about you. You can export it. You can delete it. You can leave with it. No data hostage situations.
Not your partner. Not your employer. Not your family. Not your doctor — unless you choose to share a pre-consult report. Sharing is always an explicit, per-share decision, never a default setting hidden in a menu.
Every piece of information Ashwam collects has a defined purpose in building your record or in making the platform work. No tracking pixels. No third-party analytics on your health data. No data collected for purposes you have not been told about.
Using the app is one decision. Contributing your data to research is a completely separate one — opt-in, never default, always revocable. You can use Ashwam fully and never share a single record beyond yourself.
Ashwam exists to do two things — give a woman a longitudinal record of her own biology, and contribute to building the women's health science that has been missing. Both are real. Neither is a cover for the other. The decision to use Ashwam and the decision to contribute to research are completely separate. Many women will do only the first. Some will choose to do both. The architecture treats both choices as equally valid.
The clearest way to describe a privacy commitment is to name the things that will never happen. The list below is not exhaustive — it is the set of practices we are committing publicly to never adopt, regardless of business pressure, growth pressure, or partner pressure.
A record that you cannot take with you is not your record. Two mechanics make sure yours is.
Your full structured record — every signal, every pattern Ashwam has surfaced for you — is exportable in a machine-readable format. You can take it to another platform, hand it to your clinician in full, or just keep it. The export is built to be readable, not to be obfuscated. No proprietary lock-in.
Account deletion removes your data from the active platform within thirty days. Backup retention is bounded and disclosed. If you have contributed to a research programme, the ethics-defined withdrawal mechanism applies — disclosed in the consent for that specific programme, never hidden.
A short reference of the governance posture, for clinicians, ethics committees, partners, and institutional reviewers performing diligence. Detail and current standards documentation are available on request via the partner inquiry form on the North Star page.
A privacy commitment that you cannot interrogate is not a commitment. We will answer specific questions in plain language — whether you are a woman thinking about signing up, a clinician considering a pilot, or an institutional reviewer doing diligence on the platform.