Your record
is yours.
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.
What this means
in plain language.
Before any technical detail, here is what we promise — to a woman using Ashwam, in language she should not need a lawyer to interpret.
Your data is yours.
You own your record — every entry, 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.
No one sees it without your decision.
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.
We ask for what helps you — and nothing more.
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.
Research is a separate decision.
Using the app is one decision. Contributing your data to research is a completely separate one — opt-in, never default, always revocable. No research programme is running yet. You can use Ashwam fully and never share a single record beyond yourself.
Two missions.
One platform.
Two consents.
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 will always be completely separate. Many women will do only the first. Some will choose to do both. The architecture treats both choices as equally valid.
We are stating this before we have built any of it. There is no research programme today, and no woman's data has been used for research. The commitments below are the standard we are binding ourselves to in public, in advance — so that when the first programme exists, the rules were already set and you can hold us to them.
- i. Research consent will be opt-in, never default. The default is no research participation, and stays that way unless you actively choose to enable it, programme by programme.
- ii. Each research programme will be its own consent. Agreeing to contribute to one study will never enrol you in any other. The programme, its purpose, its governance and its outputs will be described before you decide.
- iii. Withdrawal will always be available. You will be able to revoke research consent at any time, and already-collected data will be removed from the active dataset. What happens to data already used in a published analysis will be governed by the ethics rules published with that programme.
- iv. Researchers will not be able to download your data. Approved questions will be answered inside a governed environment — the data stays put; the answer goes out.
- v. Outputs will be aggregate. Published results will be statistical, model-derived or aggregate — never your individual record, never re-identifiable.
The trust anchor list.
Plainly stated.
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.
- Never Sell your data to advertisers, brokers, insurers, employers, or any third party — in any form, derived or otherwise.
- Never Collect data from you for purposes you have not been told about, or run third-party tracking on your health record.
- Never Default you into research participation. Research is always its own opt-in decision.
- Never Provide your data to insurers — health, life, or otherwise — under any circumstance.
- Never Share your record with employers, including through a corporate wellness programme, even if your employer is paying.
- Never Allow law enforcement access without a valid legal order — and we will publish the count of such requests, transparently.
- Never Use your reproductive health data — your cycle, your fertility, your perimenopausal status — to make commercial decisions about you or beyond you.
- Never Lock your data into the platform. You can export and delete, in machine-readable format, at any time.
Leave with everything.
Or stay with everything.
A record that you cannot take with you is not your record. Two mechanics make sure yours is.
Export at any time.
Your full record — every entry, 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.
Delete and it is gone.
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.
For institutional
and clinical reviewers.
Two points of posture that clinicians, partners and institutional reviewers ask about first. Fuller governance detail and current standards documentation are available on request from [email protected].
If anything here
is not yet clear enough, ask.
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.