Privacy policy

Will anything I type here be shown to my doctor, my partner, or child protective services? No. We do not send your information to anyone. We do not have a relationship with your healthcare providers. We will not contact anyone on your behalf, ever, and there is no feature that would let us do so.

Can my partner see this on a shared device? Anyone with access to your unlocked device and your browser history can see which sites you visited. The companion has a clear-screen button that wipes the visible conversation instantly. If you need to be certain, use a private browsing window — but be aware that also means nothing is saved for you either.

Does answering the self-harm question put me on a list? No. There is no list. The reflection tool does not transmit anything at all, so we do not know what you answered — including on that question.

The ten-question reflection based on the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale runs entirely inside your browser. Your answers and your score are never transmitted to us, never written to a server, never stored in a cookie, and never counted in analytics — not even anonymously.

They exist only in your device's memory while the page is open, and they are gone when you close the tab. This is a deliberate engineering decision, not a policy promise: there is no code path that could send them.

If you create an account, we store the email address and password you provide, the name you chose to be called (which does not have to be your real one), and which plan you are on.

Conversations with your AI companion are processed in order to generate a reply. Where we keep them so that you can see your own history, they are encrypted at rest and accessible only to you.

• We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to researchers.
• We do not use your conversations to train AI models.
• We do not build advertising profiles, and we do not run advertising on this site.
• We do not require your real name, your address, your date of birth, or your baby's details.

We measure aggregate, non-identifying usage — how many people visited a page, which sections get used — so we know whether the site is working. This never includes reflection answers or conversation content.

The crisis pages and the reflection tool are excluded from analytics entirely.

We count page views on our public pages — the homepage, the articles, the partner guide — so we can tell whether anyone is finding this and what they came for. It is cookieless, so there is no banner to dismiss and nothing following you between sites.

What we never count is the part that would matter to you:

• The reflection tool. Not that you opened it, not that you started it, not that you finished it, and certainly not what you answered. There is no counter anywhere in the code, anonymous or otherwise.
• Anything behind sign-in: the circles, your messages, your conversations with the companion.
• The page where you write to a person about what is happening.
• Query strings, ever. They are stripped before anything is recorded.

We honour Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends either, nothing is recorded at all.

The only payment on this site is a voluntary gift, and it is processed by Stripe. Card details go directly to Stripe and never touch our servers — we receive only a token, the last four digits, and whether the payment succeeded.

Using HoldMama involves no payment at all, so for almost everyone here we hold no payment information of any kind. Giving and using this site are not connected in our records: we cannot tell, and do not want to be able to tell, whether someone reading an article has ever given us anything.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it entirely — including your entire conversation history. Email us and we will action it within 30 days, usually much faster.

Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under the GDPR, the UK GDPR, or the CCPA and similar US state laws. We extend the same rights to everyone regardless of location, because drawing that line by geography would be arbitrary.

Deleting your account deletes your conversations. We do not keep a shadow copy.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it and logged.

No system is perfect. If we discover a breach affecting your data, we will tell you what happened, what was exposed, and what to do about it — promptly and in plain language, not buried in a status page.

HoldMama is not directed at people under 16 and we do not knowingly collect their information. The crisis resources on this site are, of course, available to anybody who needs them, with no account and no age check. Nobody should ever have to prove how old they are to reach a helpline.

If we change anything material about how we handle your information, we will say so on this page and email account holders before it takes effect. We will not quietly widen what we collect.

Questions, requests, or complaints: hello@holdmama.com. A person reads that inbox.