Last updated 18 September 2026

Privacy

Rhythm asks a question a day — one for you and a friend, and one for you alone — and keeps your answers private: what you write for a pair is read by that one person and nobody else, and what you write for yourself is read by no person at all. This page says what is collected, what is never shared, and how to stop. The commitments below are the ones the product is built around.

Rhythm runs no advertising, no analytics trackers, and no third-party marketing tools. Nothing about you is sold, at any point, for any amount.

Text messages

Rhythm does not share, sell, rent, or otherwise disclose mobile phone numbers or SMS opt-in consent to anyone. Not to affiliates, not to marketing partners, not to any third party, for any purpose. Your number is used only to send you your own daily question, a reminder that it is ready, or a line saying somebody in your circle started or answered a question with you in it, and to receive your reply. This applies to all text messaging originator opt-in data and consent, and no such information is shared with any third party.

Message frequency: at most one message per day once reminders are on — the day’s question, or a line saying somebody in your circle started or answered a question with you in it. None at all when reminders are off. Plus at most two messages when you first link your number.

Email

Rhythm emails you, at the address you sign in with, when a question is waiting for you and when somebody answers a question with you in it. At most one email in the morning, and one for each answer, capped at six a day. An email carries a name and a link — never a question, and never a word of what anybody wrote. It is on from the start; you can turn it off on your Settings page, and nothing else about Rhythm changes when you do. Rhythm keeps a record of each email — who it went to, what kind, when, and whether the provider took it — and not its text.

Message and data rates may apply. Rhythm does not charge for messages; your mobile carrier’s standard rates do.

Reply STOP to any message to end them immediately, or HELP for help. The full opt-in flow is described at Messaging.

Your replies are never published and never sold. They are private with one exception, which is described in full under what one friend may be shown of your words: when that is switched on, a short piece of something you wrote — at most a dozen words, lifted exactly as you wrote it — may be shown to one friend whose life is converging with yours, at the same moment as a piece of theirs is shown to you. Nothing longer, and nothing to anyone else.

What Rhythm collects

• Your name, your email address, the link to your Google profile picture, and Google’s stable identifier for your account, from Google when you sign in. Rhythm also records when you last signed in.
• Your mobile number, if you choose to link one, along with when it was verified, whether your text thread is active, paused, or stopped, the hour the question is sent, and your time zone. Rhythm does not give your number to anyone now, though a number sent back while that was offered is still shown to the person it was sent to. There was one way it could, by your own hand, inside a question put to the two of you; it is not on offer, and is described there.
• Your city.
• Your age, and your gender if you gave one. Asked once when you join. The age is there because the terms require you to be 18; both are used to write questions that fit your life, and neither is shown to another person.
• Your answers to the daily questions, and what an automated reader derives from them: the numbers it reads, and, when portraits are switched on, a short dated description of you in words, called a portrait (see how your answers are read). There is one portrait per person, and each update replaces the last. Rhythm also keeps a record of each reader, portrait and tidying call — which model, whether it worked, how long it took and what it cost — but never the text. The same record is kept for each question written for you (see writing your next question).
• Every message between you and Rhythm, in both directions, kept so that STOP requests can be proven honored. This includes questions and answers typed into the website, which are kept as a thread too, and, for texts, how many message segments each one used.
• The people you add to your circle, invite links you create, and links you accept. When you start one with someone, the name you typed for them, the opening question, and your sealed answer, held unread until the person who opens the link answers theirs; who opened it and when; and any link you took back.
• A record of each email Rhythm sent you: which kind, when, the address, and what the provider said. Never the text of it.
• Anyone you block or report, and what you write in a report.
• Your settings: whether you want to meet new people, how far away, whether you want the question in the app, by text, or as a text nudge, and whether Rhythm may email you.
• For each pair of friends, a single convergence number, its ingredients, and a day-by-day history of it. When portraits are on, the ingredients are eight small numbers a model gave when it compared the two portraits, and two or three sentences it wrote about the pair (see how two portraits are compared), along with a record of each comparison call — which model, whether it worked, how long it took and what it cost, never text. There is no number for you alone.
• When the exchange is on: for a pair of friends, the two short fragments traded between them, each stored word for word as its author wrote it, which day’s answer each came from, when each was shown, and the choosing model’s reason — with both fragments taken out of that reason before it is stored. A record of each choosing call is kept the same way as the others, and it holds no text at all.
• For each pair of friends, the questions put to the two of them: the two wordings — one for each of them, written by Rhythm or taken from the short list written once and kept — the whole answer each of them wrote, when each answer was locked, when the two were shown to each other, which day it was set and where it came from (the morning, one of you asking, or an invitation), whether a number was ever sent between you back when that was offered, and the writing model’s reason for the question. A record of each writing call is kept the same way as the others, and it holds no text at all. What you write in answer also goes into your own description of yourself, marked as written for somebody to read. See a question put to the two of you.
• If the person who runs Rhythm asks you, in person, who in your circle you feel closest to, your ranked answer and a note about the conversation. This is for checking whether the system works, and is never fed back into it.
• Technical records needed to keep your account secure: your IP address and browser identification at each sign-in, and the last time your session was used.

Your gender, if you gave one, is used in one place: when Rhythm writes your questions, so that a scene it puts to you is not pitched wrongly. It is not shown to anyone, and it plays no part in who you are placed near.

That list is meant to be complete. If you find something Rhythm holds that is not on it, that is a mistake worth telling us about.

What Rhythm will never do

• Show your answer to a daily question to anyone. Nothing you write in answer to the morning question is shown whole, to a friend, to a match, or on a profile. The one thing that may leave it is a fragment of a dozen words or fewer, only to the one friend your life is converging with, only in trade for one of theirs, and only when that is switched on: the exchange, below.
  There is one thing you write that is different, and it is different on purpose. If somebody in your circle puts a question to the two of you, the answer you write to that question is shown to them, whole and exactly as you wrote it, once you have both answered. You are told so before you write it, it is a separate question in a separate place, and your answers to the daily question are never used for it: a question put to the two of you, below.
• Show anyone a score, a trait list, or a reason two people were matched.
• Sell your data, or sell extra introductions.
• Run a feed, a follower count, or a public profile.

How your answers are read

Rhythm has to understand an answer before it can tell whether two lives are converging. It does that with an automated reader, not a person. There are two ways it can do that, and which one is in use is a switch set by the person who runs Rhythm. The first reads an answer into numbers and keeps nothing else. The second, the portrait, also keeps a short description of you in words. Both are described here, so that the switch can be turned on without this page being a day behind.

• Your answer is sent to an AI model to be read. The model receives the question and your answer and — when portraits are on — your current portrait and today’s date. Nothing else: not your name, not your email, not your number, not who your friends are.
• It returns readings, which are numbers. At most three, each one a named trait, a position between two ends of it, and how sure the model was. It is instructed never to quote, paraphrase or describe what you wrote in a reading. With portraits off, those numbers are the only thing Rhythm keeps from the model, and it stores no sentence about you. With portraits on, the model also returns your updated portrait, which is in words, and Rhythm keeps that too. What it is and what it may hold is set out under the portrait, below.
• There are nine traits and they are fixed. Social pace, planning, novelty, how deeply you tend to share, group size, who gets plans going, morning or night, how full your week is, and how you show up for people. No reading outside that list is kept. The portrait, when it is on, is the one other thing kept, and it is words, not a position on a line.
• Some things are never read, however plainly you say them. The reader is instructed to report nothing about health, mental state, religion, politics, sexuality, money, family situation, substances, or any protected characteristic. The portrait has its own list, below.
• Your answer itself stays with Rhythm. It is not published and not sold, and it is never shown to another person whole — only, when the exchange is on, as the fragment described under what one friend may be shown of your words. The model provider, Anthropic, receives it in order to read it, through its standard commercial API. Anthropic’s terms for that API say it does not train its models on what is sent through it. Rhythm relies on those terms and has not negotiated anything beyond them.
• No decision about you is made by the model alone. Whether two people are ever shown as converging is a separate calculation Rhythm runs on the numbers, behind a switch the person who runs Rhythm holds; it is on today.

Instructed is not the same as prevented. The rule about health, mental state and the rest is an instruction to the model, written in plain words. It is not a filter, and no code checks the model’s work against it. For the readings, two things do hold by construction: the model can only return positions on the nine named lines, because anything else it says in a reading is thrown away before it is stored; and no reading is kept except those numbers. What that does not stop is subtler. If you write about your health and the model quietly lets that color where it places you on, say, how full your week is, nothing catches it. The portrait is a different case and is taken up below. The safest thing is not to write about health, or anything else you would not want read, in an answer. Skipping a day is normal and costs you nothing.

If you would rather your answers were not read this way, the way to stop is to stop answering, or to leave, below.

The portrait

When portraits are on, Rhythm keeps a short private description of you in words, and the model that reads your answer updates it. It is at most 300 words, under seven headings: what is going on right now; longings — what you have said you want, miss or ache for; loves — what lights you up; the week; with people; fading, for things that have not come up in a while; and one more, called close, which is private and is described below. Every line carries the date it was said. It is written from your own words, one answer at a time, and the instruction is to keep close to how you said a thing rather than to characterise you. Each update replaces the whole portrait; the previous version is not kept. If the portrait model fails twice on an answer, that answer is read into numbers by the plain reader instead, so a day is never lost.

The portrait is shown to the person who runs Rhythm and to nobody else — except the part under close, which is shown to nobody at all. Not to you, not to your friends, not to anyone Rhythm might introduce you to. Its only other reader is the model that compares two portraits, below.

It may hold hard things you chose to say about your own life. A relationship you are in, including one you want out of; work you like or hate, a job that started or ended; grief, loneliness, a hard stretch, said in your own words; a move, a change of hours, something that ended and left room; a want you have not said out loud anywhere else; and longing — for company, for a person, for being known — as you said it. Those are what a friend would know, and they are what lets Rhythm tell that two lives have room for each other right now. They only ever move where you sit in a circle of friends you chose; the comparison below runs only between friends who have accepted each other, and the portrait plays no part in suggesting anyone new.

The part called close is private. Rhythm does not draw a line between friendship and anything more, and neither does the portrait: a person can find that someone in their circle has started to look different to them, and Rhythm should be able to hear that. So the portrait has a heading for what you want in closeness — romance, desire, sex, being held, being chosen, what draws you to a person, what you would want a relationship to be — and for anyone in your life you find yourself drawn to, described only by what they are and do, never by name. It is written the way the rest is, from what you chose to say, as a disposition in your own words (“wants slow”, “wants to be the one chosen”) and never as a label: the model may not write down an orientation, a type, or a category for you, however plainly an answer implies one. Rhythm never asks a sexual question; the questions are the same ones about your week and your life, and what goes under close is whatever you said back.

What is under close is stored apart from the rest of the portrait, and when the person who runs Rhythm has set a key for it, it is stored as ciphertext and exists in readable form only inside the request that is updating or comparing a portrait. It is never shown on the internal view; the internal view shows only that there is something there. It is read by the model that compares two portraits, like everything else in them, because a longing under close that a friend’s life answers is a longing like any other — but the sentences that model writes about a pair may never describe it. If it informed the comparison, the sentence the person who runs Rhythm sees is “Part of this rests on something private,” and nothing more. It only ever moves where you sit in a circle of friends you chose. It goes when your account goes.

Some things are never put in it, however plainly you say them: health, physical or mental, in any form — conditions, diagnoses, symptoms, medication, therapy, treatment, pregnancy; religion, politics, race, ethnicity, immigration status; a label for your sexuality, orientation or attachment; substances, including drinking as a habit; money figures, debts, income; and the names of other people, or anything about another person beyond their role in your life. When an answer is about one of those things, at most the shape of it is kept in neutral words — “in a hard stretch”, “a close friend” — and often nothing is.

Instructed is not the same as prevented, and that sentence carries more weight here than it does for the numbers. The list above is an instruction to the model, written in plain words. It is not a filter, and no code checks the model’s work against it; the code checks only that the seven headings are there, that the cap is kept, and that what is under close is stored apart. On one side a portrait is worse than the numbers: it is prose, and nothing in its shape stops a sentence about your health from landing in it if the model slips. On the other side it is better: a person can read a portrait and catch a leak, which nobody could do with a number. That person is the one who runs Rhythm, reading portraits, and that is the only check there is. The safest thing is still not to write about health, or anything else you would not want read, in an answer. Skipping a day is normal and costs you nothing.

Portraits are tidied. When a portrait grows past about 200 words, or about once a week for one long enough to be worth it, a model rewrites it shorter: repeated lines merged into one that keeps every date, lines that have gone quiet moved to fading, old faded lines dropped, and nothing added. A result that is longer than what went in is thrown away.

Once a day, two portraits are compared

At a set hour each evening, and whenever the person who runs Rhythm starts it by hand, Rhythm goes through every pair of friends where both people have a portrait and either portrait has changed since the pair was last looked at — or, when started by hand, every such pair. For each such pair a model reads both portraits and today’s date — no names; the two are called A and B — twice, with the two portraits in the opposite order the second time, and the two readings are averaged so that which of you happens to be first cannot tip the answer. It answers eight fixed questions about whether the two lives are converging, each with a whole number from 0 to 3: whether both lives have open time of the same kind; whether a longing in one life is answered by something in the other; whether they meet the world alike; whether the same thing is alive in both lives; whether both would talk properly, not small talk; whether the shapes of their weeks fit; whether anything is in the way; and how much there is to go on. Arithmetic, not the model, turns those eight numbers — together with the number the nine lines had already given the pair — into the pair’s place in the circle.

The model also writes two or three sentences about the pair, and Rhythm keeps them. They are its account of what it saw in the two lives that made it answer as it did, with the two of you as A and B and nothing quoted. They are stored with the pair’s numbers and shown only to the person who runs Rhythm — never to you, never to your friend, never to anyone else. An earlier version of this page said Rhythm stored no sentence about you. When portraits are on, it stores this one, and this page says so before it happens.

The model is told that nothing about health, family, relationships or any hard circumstance lowers anyone’s standing; such a thing may only inform whether there is room and whether something is in the way, as you said it. It is told that what is under close is judged like any other longing, and that its sentences may never describe it. The first of those is an instruction, as above, not a filter. The second is also checked in code: before the sentences are stored, they are compared against what is under close, and if they carry a phrase from it, a rare word from it, or a word about attraction itself, the whole account is replaced by the one sentence “Part of this rests on something private.” That check is a word-match, not understanding; it can be too cautious, which costs the person who runs Rhythm a paragraph, and a sentence that says a private thing in entirely different words could pass it. The code also enforces that the private part is never selected by anything a person sees.

How far apart the curves are drawn is calibrated against everyone. The distance between two curves is placed on a scale taken from all the pairs in the system — roughly where the tightest tenth of pairs sit and where the loosest tenth sit — and the scale moves a little each night rather than all at once. So other people’s pairs influence how far apart your curves are drawn. They cannot change the order: who sits above whom in your circle is set by the pair’s own number, and the scale only stretches or squeezes the drawing.

This request carries no names, and it carries portraits, never answers. Until the exchange was built it was the only place your description and a friend’s were ever in the same request; the exchange is now a second place, and it carries more — the next section says exactly what. Block someone, or remove them from your circle, and the numbers and sentences about that pair are deleted with the pair.

What one friend may be shown of your words

This is the only thing on this page that takes something you wrote and puts it in front of another person. It is switched off. When the person who runs Rhythm switches it on, here is exactly what happens, and it is worth reading all of it before you answer another question.

When two friends are already being shown to each other as converging — the two curves, nothing less — Rhythm may take one short piece of what each of them actually wrote and show each of them the other’s. Both at the same moment, or neither at all. Rhythm calls this the exchange.

• It is always a trade. A piece of your words goes to someone only in the same act that brings you a piece of theirs. There is no one-way version and there is not going to be one. So you always know exactly who is holding something of yours: it is the person whose words you are holding. Nobody is read from at a distance.
• You are never shown what you gave. Not on the screen where you read theirs, not anywhere else, not later. There is no page that will tell you, and the code that fetches your circle can only reach the other person’s fragment, never your own. The only way to find out what you gave is to ask the person holding it. That is the point of it, and it is not a gap that will be filled in.
• It happens automatically. You are not asked first, and there is no preview. The reason is not convenience: the one person who cannot see why a line of yours matters to your friend is you, and asking you would turn the honest ones into performances. This is the part of the exchange most worth disagreeing with, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.
• It is short, and it is yours word for word. At most twelve words, copied exactly as you wrote them — never rewritten, never tidied, never a model’s summary of you. Code checks that what is stored is a run of words that actually appears in something you wrote, and throws away anything that is not.
• The bar is a feeling, not a fact. The rule the choosing model is given: if repeating it to a stranger would teach them something about you — a fact, a name, a place, an event, a job, who you live with — it is disqualified; if it would only teach them something about being alive, it can go. “Treading water” is the kind of thing that goes. Anything that reads as news about your life is meant not to.
• Some of that bar is code and some of it is not. Code refuses a fragment that is longer than twelve words, that contains a number, a date, a day of the week, or a capitalised name or place. Everything else — the whole feeling-not-fact judgement — is an instruction to a model. Instructed is not the same as prevented, and it matters more here than anywhere else on this page, because this is the one place a mistake does not stay inside Rhythm. A wrong choice is seen by another person and cannot be taken back.
• Nothing under close is ever a source. The private heading of your portrait is not read by any of this: it is not sent in the request, and no fragment can come from it. That is not an instruction to a model, it is that the code has nowhere to put it.
• The same piece of you is never shown to the same person twice, and a pair does not get a new one while the last is still standing. Most days, most pairs, nothing happens at all — silence is the normal state of this, not a failure of it.
• It arrives with nothing attached. No name on it beyond the one friend you are already looking at, no date, no label, no explanation, and no reason. It is not why the two of you are converging and Rhythm does not say that it is.
• Rhythm never tells either of you to reach out. There is no notification, no text, no nudge. It sits in the app and you do what you like with it, including nothing.

Once someone has read it, it is theirs to remember. Rhythm cannot stop a friend writing your words down, repeating them, or showing someone else. The terms ask people not to, and asking is all any service can do. Twelve words with no name, no date and no fact in them are meant to be a poor thing to pass on, and that is the actual protection here, not a rule.

There is no setting that turns this off for you alone. It is one switch for the whole of Rhythm. If you would rather no part of what you write were ever shown to anybody, the way to do that is to stop answering, or to leave — both are always open, and skipping a day costs you nothing.

What goes to the model. Choosing the two fragments is one request to Anthropic that carries both people’s recent answers, as written, along with the two portraits. It is the first and only place two people’s own words are in the same request. It carries no names, no email addresses, no numbers, and nothing that says who either person is. It cannot reach the part of either portrait called close.

What is kept, and for how long. The two fragments are stored with the pair, along with which day’s answer each came from and when each was shown. They are kept while they stand, and afterwards, so that the same words are not sent to the same person again. They are deleted when either of you deletes their account, when one of you removes the other from your circle, and when either of you blocks the other. The person who runs Rhythm can see both fragments on the internal view — both, including your own, which you cannot see. That is the only way the bar can be checked at all, and it is the honest cost of checking it.

A question put to the two of you

This is the only thing on this page that takes something you wrote and shows it to another person whole, and the only thing in Rhythm that cannot be undone. It is on, and since 18 September it is the centre of Rhythm. Here is exactly what happens.

Every morning Rhythm puts one question to each pair in your circle — you and one friend — and anyone in your circle can also put a question to the two of you, and you to them, once Rhythm holds a description of both of you; until then that option is not there for either of you, and nothing is said about why. That threshold is about what each of you has written, never about the two of you as a pair: Rhythm does not decide which friendships deserve a question. You do not choose the question and neither do they: Rhythm writes it, as two different questions, one for each of you — not the same sentence twice. For a pair’s first days, and whenever Rhythm has nothing of its own to write, the question comes from a short list written once and kept, still as two wordings, and nothing tells you which kind you got. You answer yours without seeing theirs and without seeing their answer. When you have both answered, the two answers appear side by side, to both of you at once.

A question can begin before the other person is on Rhythm. When you start one with someone, you answer the opening question for the two of you and Rhythm gives you a link. Your answer is held, unread by anyone, until the person who opens the link signs in and answers theirs — then both open, and the two of you are in each other’s circle from that moment. The link shows whoever holds it your first name, the name you typed for them, and their side of the question; never your answer. A link opens once. You can take one back before it is opened, and your answer goes with it.

• Your answer is shown to that one person, whole, exactly as you wrote it. Not a fragment, not a summary. You are told so on the screen where you write it. Nothing you write there is shown to anybody else, ever, and it is not used to read you, to draw a curve, or to write any other question.
• Nobody reads it before they do. There is no moderation of it, no filter and no review. What you write goes to that person as written, and what they write comes to you as written. If somebody sends you something you do not want, block or report them — that deletes the question and both answers, both ways, at once.
• Neither of you sees anything until both have answered. That is enforced where your circle is fetched, not on the page: until both answers are in, there is no request that returns the other person’s words. You are told only that somebody has answered, never what they said, and once yours is in you cannot change it.
• Your answers to the daily question are never used to write it. This is a separate question with its own answer, kept apart from the morning one. The model that writes it is given the two portraits and the eight numbers from the comparison — and, when the two of you have already traded fragments, those two fragments, which are words each of you has already been shown. Nothing either of you has written that the other has not already seen ever reaches it.
• What you write here does go back into your own portrait, and it is the one kind of answer Rhythm treats differently: you wrote it knowing somebody would read it, so it is recorded as how you present yourself rather than as a plain fact about your life. It produces none of the readings the daily question produces, so nothing you write here can move a curve directly. The description it feeds is still compared with your friends’, as above.
• The question never says what Rhythm noticed. Not about you and not about them. Your question is written so that it gives away nothing about the other person — not their situation, not what they want, not that anything was noticed about them at all — and so that it hands you no verdict about yourself. Code throws away a question that names anyone, that mentions somebody who is not in the room, or that opens by telling you something about yourself. That code is strict and refuses more than it needs to; the result of a refusal is simply that no question is written.
• Sometimes nothing is written, and nothing is said about it. If Rhythm has no real question for the two of you, nothing happens. The person who asked is told that plainly; the other person is never told that anything was attempted. On a morning Rhythm has nothing for a pair, nothing is written and nobody is told. There is no request to connect, no pending anything, no decline, and nobody is ever informed that they were passed over.
• Three a day out, unlimited in. You can put out three questions a day, and there is no limit on how many you receive. The morning’s question is Rhythm’s and counts against nobody’s three. Only a question that actually gets written counts against your three: if Rhythm comes back with nothing, that is its miss and it costs you nothing. Asking somebody you have already traded a line with is free.
• No archive. Only the current question and its two answers are shown. If either of you asks a new one, the last one and both its answers stop being shown to either of you. Each morning’s question replaces the one before it once you have both answered, or the next morning if neither of you did; a question one of you has answered and the other has not stays until it is answered, however long that takes.
• You are told when the other person answers. By text, if reminders are on and today’s message is not already spent; by email, if that is on. A name and the fact — never the words.
• There is no per-person setting for this, only the global switch. You cannot turn it off for yourself while using the rest of Rhythm. If you do not want to be asked, do not answer — nothing happens, nobody is told, and no question is ever written from your side without you pressing the button.

Your phone number is not sent to anyone. There was once a button here that sent your mobile number to the other person, one way and without undo. It is no longer offered and Rhythm refuses the request behind it, so there is currently no circumstance in which Rhythm gives your number to another person — not to somebody in your circle, not to anybody else. If that ever changes it will be for meeting people you do not already know, where handing over a way to reach you is the point, and this page will say so before it is offered to you.

A number already sent cannot be recalled. If you sent yours while that button existed, Rhythm cannot take it back and neither can you. Deleting your account removes it from Rhythm; it does not remove it from the person you gave it to. Rhythm only ever passed on a number you had confirmed was yours.

What is kept. Both questions, both answers whole, when each was locked, when the two were shown to each other, and whether a number was ever sent between you back when that was offered. They are deleted when either of you deletes their account, when one of you removes the other from your circle, and when either of you blocks the other — and deleting your account takes the other person’s answer with it, because that answer only ever existed beside yours. The person who runs Rhythm can see both questions and both answers on the internal view. That is the only way the rule about giving nothing away can be checked at all, and it is the honest cost of checking it.

Writing your questions

Rhythm’s questions are not chosen from a list. Every one is written for you — the handful it asks when you join, and one a day after that. The only exception is the very first question, which is the same for everyone and is the only one you share with anybody.

To write one, Rhythm sends your recent answers — the text, not just the numbers — to Anthropic, along with an instruction to write one new question. That is more than the reader receives: the reader sees one answer at a time, the writer sees a run of them together.

When portraits are on, your portrait goes with it too — the whole of it, including the part called close — so that the next question can be adjacent to what you have said you want, rather than to whatever the last answer happened to mention. The instruction is to aim by it and never to quote it, and never to let a question show that it exists. Questions about what you want from people are asked the way a good friend would ask — plainly, and never explicitly.

It is also told, in a phrase, how far along you are: how many questions you have answered and roughly how much Rhythm has heard of you (little, some, a good deal). That is so the question can be pitched one step past where you are rather than three — a first week is asked about concretely and outwardly, and depth is earned by what you have already said, not by the date. Two ways it may ask that a survey never does: about other people (a habit of a friend’s you envy; what you notice in others is kept as yours, and the friend is never kept at all), and about what you wish you wanted. It never asks a question shaped as a lapse — “when did you last” — on purpose.

It is also sent the two things you told Rhythm about yourself when you joined: your age and, if you gave one, your gender. They are used to pitch a question at a life you have plausibly lived, and the instruction says never to mention either one or ask you about them. If you would rather they were not used this way, leave the gender blank; the age is asked because the terms require you to be 18.

Nothing else about you goes with it — not your name, not your email, not your city, not your circle, not who you are converging with — and nothing anyone else has ever written goes with it either. The question that comes back is shown to you and to nobody else. Anthropic’s terms for that API say it does not train its models on what is sent through it. Rhythm relies on those terms and has not negotiated anything beyond them.

How far back it reaches is limited and is a setting, not “everything you have ever written”. Rhythm keeps a record of each of these calls the same way it does for the reader — which model, whether it worked, how long it took, what it cost, and how many of your answers went with it — but never the text of them.

When a question cannot be written, there is no question that day. Rhythm says so, and records it as its own miss rather than as a day you skipped. There is no stock list to fall back on, on purpose: a question nobody chose for you is not what this is.

Photos

When you sign in, Rhythm stores the link to your Google profile picture. You can also upload one of your own, and replace or remove it whenever you like. Either way it is shown, small, next to your name to people in your circle and to people Rhythm suggests you might know — and nowhere else. It is not on any public page and is never indexed.

• Where it is kept. A photo you upload is stored in Cloudflare’s object storage, not in the database, so it is one file that can be deleted rather than a copy inside every backup.
• Its address is public, and unguessable. Anyone who has the exact link can open the picture without signing in. That is how a photo can appear next to your name at all — a browser cannot prove who you are when it loads an image from another address. The link contains 128 bits of randomness, nothing lists the files, and nothing anywhere connects a name to a link except your own account row. It is the same arrangement your Google profile picture already had. Treat it as a picture that is not secret, rather than a private one.
• Replacing it deletes the old one, and so does removing it. Your old picture does not sit in storage because you changed your mind.
• Nothing you answer is ever attached to it. A photo is a face next to a name. It is not read, not looked at by a model, and has nothing to do with how anyone is placed or matched.

If you are under 18

Rhythm is for adults. If you tell Rhythm during setup that you are under 18, setup stops there: no question is asked, nothing is read, no circle is created and no portrait is written. The year you gave is kept, so that the same question is not simply asked again, and nothing further about you is collected.

That gate is on the website. Setting up an account asks your age before it asks you anything else, and an answer under 18 stops there. It is not on the text path: linking a mobile number does not ask how old you are, because by then you already have an account that did. Rhythm takes your word for the answer either way — it is a question, not a check. If you know a child has signed up, write to [email protected] and the account and everything under it will be removed by hand.

How long things are kept

Rhythm does not currently delete anything automatically. Answers, the numbers read from them, messages, sign-in records and everything else on the list above stay until an account is deleted. There is no retention schedule yet, and this page will not pretend there is one. A few things do get removed as you go:

• Signing out deletes that session’s record. A session that is simply left alone stops working after 60 days, but its row stays.
• A text verification code is stored only as a hash, stops working after 15 minutes, and is cleared once used.
• Blocking someone deletes the friendship and every pair record between you, including the comparison model’s numbers and sentences about the pair.
• A portrait is replaced whole each time it is updated or tidied. The previous version is not kept.
• Each day’s readings are replaced whole if an answer is ever re-read, so nothing doubles up.
• Removing someone from your circle, or blocking them, deletes any fragments traded between the two of you, in both directions, and any question the two of you were asked together along with both answers to it.
• A question put to the two of you is replaced whole if either of you asks a new one, and by each morning’s question once both of you have answered it or the next morning if neither did. The old one and both its answers stop being shown to either of you from that moment. There is no archive of them and no page that will show you one again.
• An invitation you take back before it is opened is never opened by anyone; the sealed answer in it stays with Rhythm, shown to nobody, until your account is deleted.
• Telling Rhythm by text that you are under 18 erases everything, as above.

Leaving

The delete button is inside the product. It is at the bottom of your Settings page, under “Leaving Rhythm”. You type the word DELETE, and your account is scheduled for deletion seven days later. During those seven days nothing of yours has been removed: you have left your friends’ circles and Rhythm has stopped asking you anything, but one button on the same page puts it all back. After seven days it happens on its own and cannot be undone. There is still no export button; for a copy of what Rhythm holds about you, write to [email protected] from the email address on your account. A person, not a form, will reply, and you should expect that reply within a week. You can also ask by email to be deleted, and the person who runs Rhythm will do it by hand, immediately, without the seven days.

What deletion means: your account row is removed, and with it your sign-in, your sessions, your circle, your invites, your answers, every reading and position derived from them, your portrait, your pair records, any fragments of your words that were traded with a friend and any of theirs that were traded with you, every question you were asked together with someone — including the answers they wrote to those questions, because those answers only ever existed beside yours — your blocks, your linked number and your photo. The message thread — texts and the website thread alike — is tied to the number rather than the account, so it is removed by number in the same pass. Two kinds of record survive, both on purpose:

• If you replied STOP, the record that you did is kept so it can be proven honored to a carrier. Your phone number’s row is detached from your account rather than deleted, and the STOP message itself stays. Nothing else you ever wrote by text stays with it.
• A report filed by or about you is kept, so a pattern of harm cannot be erased by leaving and coming back. Your account is removed from the report, and in its place Rhythm keeps a one-way hash of your email address — a scramble the address cannot be recovered from, salted so it cannot be guessed from a list of addresses either. It does one thing: if someone signs up again with the same address, the old report is still attached to them. It is the only thing about a deleted account that stays behind, and if nobody ever reported you or you reported nobody, there is nothing to keep and none is kept.

The record of each comparison call — which model, whether it worked, how long it took, what it cost — is kept under the pair’s internal ids rather than under the account, so deleting the account does not remove it; it holds no text.

What export means today: a copy of what Rhythm holds about you, sent to you by email, put together by hand. Ask, and it will be sent.

Who else receives your data

Rhythm is small, and the list of companies that touch your data is short. Each one gets only what it needs to do its job.

• Cloudflare hosts the website, runs the code, and holds the database. Everything on the list above lives on Cloudflare’s servers.
• Google handles sign-in. When you sign in, Google tells Rhythm your name, email address and profile picture link, and Rhythm tells Google nothing about you beyond that you are signing in. Separately, every page on the site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means Google’s servers see your IP address and browser when a page loads. That is a font request, not a tracker, but it is a request to Google and you should know it happens.
• Anthropic receives the question and your answer so that its model can read them, and, when portraits are on, your current portrait with them, and returns the updated portrait. For tidying, it receives your portrait alone. For each of your friends, it receives your portrait and theirs together, so that its model can compare them — the one place your description and a friend’s are in the same request; that request carries no names. When it is writing a question for you it receives a bounded run of your own recent answers together with your age and gender and, when portraits are on, your portrait, as described above. It does not receive your name, email, number or city, nor the name or identity of anyone in your circle; the comparison request tells it that two portraits belong to two friends and nothing about who they are. When the exchange is on, it also receives, in one further request per pair, your recent answers and that friend’s recent answers together, as written, so that its model can choose one short fragment of each to show to the other; that request carries no names either, and it never carries what is under close. When the paired question is on and somebody puts a question to the two of you, it receives, in one request, your portrait and that friend’s portrait together with the eight numbers from the comparison, and returns two questions — one for each of you. That request carries no answers beyond the two short fragments you have each already been shown, when there are any; it carries no names, and it never carries what is under close. What either of you then writes in reply is not sent to it — it is sent, once, to the model that keeps your own description current, marked as something you wrote for somebody to read. That request may go to a different and more capable model than the rest of Rhythm uses, chosen by the person who runs Rhythm. Apart from the exchange’s one request, it never receives anything a friend wrote — only, in the comparison and in this one, the portrait Rhythm derived from what they wrote. The comparison may instead be done by a model Rhythm runs itself, or through another provider, chosen by the person who runs Rhythm; if another provider is used, this page will name it before it is.
• Resend carries the emails. It receives your email address and the text of each email — a name, a line, a link — because that is what sending an email requires, and it reports back whether it was accepted. It receives nothing anybody wrote.
• Twilio carries the text messages. It receives your mobile number and the body of every text in both directions, because that is what sending a text requires. It also reports back whether each message reached your handset, and Rhythm keeps that receipt beside the message. Twilio is the company registered with the mobile carriers for the number Rhythm sends from. The commitments under Text messages, above, are unchanged.

Nobody else. No advertising network, no analytics service, no data broker, no marketing tool.

The person who runs Rhythm

Rhythm is run by one person, and that person has an internal view. It is worth saying plainly what it shows and what it does not.

It shows, for each person, their name, how many questions they have answered and when, and where the system currently places them on each of the nine lines, along with every individual reading and a record of each reader call. When portraits are on it also shows each person’s portrait — the six public headings in full, and for the part called close only that there is something there — and a record of each portrait and tidying call — which model, whether it worked, how long it took, what it cost, never an answer. It shows every pair of friends with both names and the pair’s numbers, and, for a pair the comparison model has placed, its eight answers, the two or three sentences it wrote about the pair, and whether the comparison rested partly on something private, along with the record of each evening’s round and the scale the curves are drawn on. When the exchange is on, a pair also shows both traded fragments — each person’s own words, next to their name — where each came from, when each was shown, the choosing model’s reason with both fragments removed from it, and the reason for every pair that was left silent. It shows every report, with the names of both people and what the reporter wrote. Every switch and setting change made there is logged.

It does not show answers, and it does not show messages. That view is built so that the answer text and the message text are never fetched into it. Two things come close and are there on purpose. The portrait is one: a person reading portraits is the only check on what the model puts in them. A traded fragment is the other, and it is a dozen of your actual words shown beside your actual name — the smallest piece of answer text anywhere on that view, and the only way anyone can check that the bar held before your words reached your friend.

The database itself is a different matter. The person who runs Rhythm can open it directly, and it contains your answers. The rule is that this is not done. The code does not enforce that rule; a person does.

Security

The site and the API are served only over HTTPS. Your sign-in session is a random token held in a cookie your browser will not hand to scripts; Rhythm stores only a SHA-256 hash of it, so a copy of the sessions table cannot be used to sign in as anyone. Text verification codes are stored the same way. Rhythm makes no claim about encryption at rest beyond what Cloudflare provides, and holds no security certification.

Changes to this page

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it. Rhythm can now email you, and will about a change that matters, at the address you sign in with; the date is still the record. If a change would give Rhythm more of your data, or share it with someone new, it will be written here before it takes effect, not after.

Contact

Rhythm is run by one person in Washington state. Write to [email protected].