TL;DR
Your writing is personal. Guest drafts stay in this browser unless you choose to sign in, and signed-in entries are stored with your account behind access controls. Eternal clears signed-in browser copies after it confirms a safe sign-out. Journal text stays out of diagnostics, analytics, and reminder emails. Eternal’s public pages use Google Analytics cookies to measure how writers find it, which you can switch off below. YouTube may connect when you enter writing or choose a station. You can export your writing, recover recently deleted notes, or delete your account.
Writing and account information
Guest drafts are stored on your device and are not attached to an account unless you choose to sign in and save them. Signed-in entries are stored with your account and protected so other users cannot read them.
Eternal also stores the basic account details supplied by Google sign-in, such as your email address and profile image.
How Eternal uses information
Eternal uses this information to save and sync your writing, show your writing history, create exports, and provide optional commitments and reminders. Eternal does not use your journal text for advertising.
Diagnostics and feedback
Eternal may collect errors and performance measurements using an opaque account identifier. Error reports are configured to exclude your name, email address, journal text, request bodies, application logs, and session replay. Please avoid placing sensitive writing in feedback messages you intentionally send.
Anonymous product analytics
Eternal uses PostHog in its United States region to count broad page categories and a small set of actions: completing sign-in, starting to write, completing a first confirmed save, reaching a published guide from a broad source category, and choosing its writing-entry action. These measurements help improve the writing experience and understand which public resources are useful.
This product analytics never includes your journal text, titles, word counts, note addresses, email address, or account identifier. It uses no session replay and creates no profile that follows you across browser sessions. Its identifier lasts for one browser tab, its events disable location enrichment, and PostHog discards IP addresses.
Marketing analytics and advertising
Eternal uses Google Analytics to understand how people find it — which search results, referring sites, and advertising campaigns bring writers here — whether they come back, and how the advertising Eternal pays for performs. Unlike the product analytics above, Google Analytics stores cookies in your browser that recognize a returning visit, and Google receives your IP address and derives an approximate location from it.
It runs on Eternal's public pages and on your signed-in home page — including while you read a past entry or have Settings open, because both of those happen there. It never reports anything while you are writing, in your journal, in Trash, on an unsubscribe link, or during sign-in. Every address it reports is rebuilt from the page path and campaign parameters alone, and your home page is always reported as simply /home, so a note address, an unsubscribe token, or any other query information cannot reach Google. Your journal text, titles, word counts, email address, and account identifier are never sent.
In the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area, Google Analytics stores no cookies and sends no advertising signals until you accept it in the notice Eternal shows; before you answer, it still counts the page you are on. Everywhere else it starts on, and you can switch it off here at any time. Declining stops Eternal sending anything to Google at all, rather than only withholding the cookies. Your choice is remembered in this browser.
Marketing analytics are on in this browser.
Writing reminders
Daily commitments and reminders are optional. Eternal derives commitment progress from word counts or focused-writing seconds; it never copies journal text into commitment or reminder records. If you turn reminders on, Eternal stores the delivery address, timezone, chosen time, aggregate commitment progress, and delivery status needed to send at most one reminder on an eligible day. Reminder emails do not contain journal text and do not use open or click tracking. Every reminder includes a no-login unsubscribe link.
Sound and outside services
Eternal's reviewed ambient set may be served when you enter writing or choose a sound. A YouTube station may be requested when you enter writing or choose a station, under YouTube's own privacy practices.
“White Noise” is an edited use of “Russian Snow Camo” by Drake Stafford, available from the Free Music Archive under CC BY 4.0.
Deletion and backups
Deleted notes move to Trash for 30 days unless you delete them forever or empty Trash sooner. Those permanent actions remove the live database copy immediately and the note can no longer be restored in Eternal. Daily provider backups may retain a copy for up to seven additional days before they expire.
Backups are used only for service recovery. When the live database is available during a recovery, Eternal replays later permanent deletions before a restored copy is made available. A complete database loss can make that comparison impossible, so deletion replay is best effort in this version.
Your choices
You can download every active entry as Markdown from Settings, restore notes from Trash, or permanently delete them. You can turn marketing analytics off in the section above, turn reminders off, or use the unsubscribe link in any reminder email. Account deletion is also handled in Settings whenever that server operation is available.