Privacy
Every claim on this page is derived from what the code actually does. If you find a sentence here that the app does not honour, that is a bug and we want to hear about it.
The short version
- You do not need an account or an email address to use Mythkin.
- Your conversations are sent to Anthropic to generate replies. Character artwork and painted chat moments are generated by OpenAI. We ask your explicit permission before either happens.
- We do not sell your data, and we never use your conversations to target advertising.
- You can export everything, and you can delete everything, from inside the app.
- Mythkin is for adults (18+).
What we collect
| Data | Why it exists | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| A device identifier — a random ID your device generates. Not your email, phone, or advertising ID. | It is how your characters, conversations and memories are yours without an account. | Our server, and your device. |
| About you, if you fill it in — Settings → About you holds the name you want characters to call you, your pronouns, and anything you choose to write about yourself. All three are optional and all three are free text you typed; we never read them off your phone. | So a character addresses you the way you asked to be addressed. This is the only place Mythkin holds a name for you, and it is the name you chose to give it. | Our server, one row per device. Sent to Anthropic as part of the prompt on every reply, which is what makes it work. Editable and clearable in Settings at any time. |
| Characters you create — name, description, personality, greeting, backstory, artwork. | The product. If you publish one, its text and artwork become visible to other users. | Our server. |
| Conversations — the messages you send and the replies you receive. | So a conversation can continue where it left off. | Our server, and cached on your device. |
| Memories — short facts about you that a character has learned, each linked to the message it came from. | So characters remember you. This is the feature the app exists for. | Our server. Visible and editable by you in the app. |
| Age confirmation — that you confirmed you are 18+. | Legal requirement. | Our server, as a dated event against your device ID. |
| Crisis referral counts — that a referral was shown, and when. Not what was said. The row also holds a salted hash of the network the request came from — never an address, and it cannot be turned back into one. | California SB 243 requires operators to report these annually from July 2027. The network hash is what stops one caller looking like a crowd: crisis turns skip the free-tier limit, and without it anyone could mint a fresh device ID per message and take unlimited free replies. | Our server. |
| Subscription status — an Apple- or Google-signed receipt. | To unlock Plus. We never see your payment details; the store handles payment. | Verified in memory per request; not stored as a payment record. |
| Sparks, if they go on sale — sparks are a planned one-off purchase that would pay for paintings, and they are not on sale yet. If they are offered, we would store the store's transaction ID, which pack it was, and your remaining balance. | The transaction ID is how the same receipt could not be redeemed twice. The balance is what you would still own. | Our server. A balance would survive "Delete everything", still keyed to your device — deleting it would destroy something you had paid for and we cannot refund it. See below. |
| Usage counts — how many messages you have sent in the current window. | To enforce the free tier fairly. | Our server. |
| What you heart, borrow, block and report — one row per action, holding your device ID, what it pointed at, and when. A report also holds the reason, anything you typed into it, and a salted hash of the network it came from, for the same reason the crisis row does — so one reporter cannot look like a crowd. | Hearts and borrows are how the shelves rank and how your library knows what is in it. Blocks are how a creator stays hidden from you. Reports are how a human can review something you flagged. | Our server. Hearts and borrows appear as counts on the creator's card, never as your identity. All of it is in your export. Hearts, borrows and blocks are deleted when you delete everything; a report you filed stays open with your identifier removed, because it is evidence about someone else's content. |
We do not collect: your email address, phone number, contacts, your photo library, precise location, health data, or an advertising identifier. We never ask your phone for your name — the only name Mythkin ever holds is one you typed into Settings → About you yourself, and you can clear it there. There is no third-party analytics SDK and no advertising SDK in the app.
Photos you choose to send
Mythkin never reaches into your photo library. It only ever receives a photo you pick yourself, and only in two places:
- Making a kin from a photo. You choose up to three photographs — with the camera or from your library, you pick either way — and we paint a portrait from them. The photos are deleted the moment the painting is finished — or the moment the painting fails. They are never stored beyond that, never shown to anyone, and never used to train anything. Location and camera details are stripped before anything is sent. A kin made this way stays in your library: it cannot be shared or borrowed.
- Sending a photo in a chat. The photo is forwarded to the AI so the character can respond to it, and is not stored on our server afterwards.
Before either one leaves your phone, the location, the timestamp and the camera details recorded inside the image file are stripped off, and the image is re-encoded by us. Photos are sent to OpenAI (for painting) and to Anthropic (for a reply in chat) — the same two companies named on the consent screen when you first opened the app.
Who else receives your data
Anthropic — conversation content
To generate a character's reply, we send the character's description, the relevant part of your conversation, the memories that character is using, and — if you filled it in — what you wrote in Settings → About you, including the name you asked to be called. Anthropic does not use API content to train their models and deletes it on a contractual schedule.
OpenAI — character artwork and painted moments
When artwork is generated for a character you create, the description of that character is sent to OpenAI's image API. When a chat moment is painted, a short scene description written by the AI — a sentence or two, never your own messages — is sent along with the character's description and portrait. Your messages themselves are never sent to OpenAI.
Apple and Google — payments
Subscriptions are handled entirely by the app stores. We receive a signed receipt confirming an active subscription. We never see your card.
Fly.io — hosting
Our server and database run on Fly.io infrastructure in the United States.
We ask for your explicit permission before sending anything to Anthropic or OpenAI, during setup, as required by App Store guideline 5.1.2(i). If you decline, the parts of the app that need them will not work, and we will tell you which.
What other people can see
This matters most, so it is stated as a rule rather than as a description:
If you publish a character, other people can borrow it and talk to it. They cannot see your conversations with it. You cannot see theirs. A creator sees counts — how many chats, borrows and likes their character has — and never a word of anyone's conversation, and never anyone's memories.
A character kept private is visible only to you. A character shared by link is visible to whoever has the link.
Keeping and deleting
- You delete a memory — it leaves the recall set immediately and is never sent to Anthropic again. We keep the sentence itself, unreadable to the app, for one purpose only: so the character cannot quietly re-learn the same fact from your next message. You can always add it back yourself.
- You delete a conversation — its messages go with it. Memories a character learned from it stay, deliberately: a fact you chose to keep is yours, and forgetting is done on the memory screen, where you can see exactly what you are forgetting.
- You delete a character — it disappears from the marketplace and can no longer be borrowed.
- You delete everything — Settings → Delete everything. This removes your characters, conversations, messages and memories from our servers. Characters other people have borrowed are anonymised rather than yanked out of someone else's ongoing conversation.
What survives "Delete everything", and why
The app shows you this list at the moment you delete, rather than the word "everything". It is short, and each line is there for a reason we can defend:
- Crisis referral counts — kept, with the link to you removed. California SB 243 requires us to report referral counts for periods that have already passed, and a counter that can be erased cannot do that. No message text was ever stored.
- Reports you filed — kept, with your identifier removed. A report is evidence about someone else's content and stays open for a human to finish reviewing.
- Rate-limit counters for the window you are currently in. They hold a request count and nothing else.
- A record that a spark purchase was redeemed, if sparks go on sale — kept, with your identifier removed, so the same store receipt could not be redeemed twice.
- Any sparks you had not spent — kept, and still keyed to your device, because that would be the only way you could still spend them. This is the one thing on this list that would not be anonymised. If you would rather it went, spend the sparks first, or write to us and we will remove them for you.
Otherwise we keep your data for as long as you use the app. Server logs, which do not contain conversation text, are kept for up to 30 days for debugging.
Your rights
You can export everything we hold about you as a file, from inside the app, at any time, without asking us. Because we do not require an account, that in-app export is also the fastest way to exercise a GDPR or CCPA access request. One exception, stated so the export is not mistaken for a complete archive: memories you have already deleted are not in it. If you want those too, write to us and ask. For anything else, or if the app is not working, see Support.
Children
Mythkin is for adults. We ask you to confirm you are 18 or older before any character is reachable, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has used the app, contact us and we will delete the data.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who receives it, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect, not only on this page.