CognaType
Privacy
Last updated 10 September 2026
The short version
- You sign in with Google. We receive your email address and your name. Nothing else from your Google account.
- Everything you tell CognaType about yourself is stored so it can be shown back to you.
- No other user can read your rows. That is enforced by the database itself, not by our good intentions.
- There is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking of any kind. Nothing is sold or shared for marketing.
- Ask, and all of it is deleted.
Who is responsible
CognaType is run by a small team. Right now that team is one person, Jody, and it grows with the help of the people using it. For anything on this page, including a request to see or delete your data, write to support at cognatype dot com.
What is collected
When you sign in
Signing in uses Google. CognaType asks Google for two things only: your email address and your basic profile, which is your name and your Google account identifier. That is the whole request. CognaType has no access to your Gmail, Drive, contacts, calendar, photos or anything else in your Google account, and it cannot gain that access without asking you again on a new consent screen.
What you tell it about yourself
CognaType exists to hold a picture of how your mind works and show it back to you, so most of what is stored is what you deliberately entered.
| What | Stored because |
|---|---|
| Your chosen name, full name, pronouns, and the initials or emoji you pick as an avatar | So the site can address you the way you asked to be addressed |
| Your energy windows, screen preferences, life context, what works for you, and your goals | These are the profile itself, the thing you came to build |
| Your current declared state, if you record one | So the site can reflect where you are today rather than only where you are in general |
| Surveys you have taken, when you took them, and your individual responses | So results can be produced and so you can see change over time |
| Which patterns you have claimed as yours | So the site knows which parts of the atlas you recognise in yourself |
| Feedback you submit, along with which page you submitted it from | So a report about a specific page can be traced back to that page |
| An email address you type in to have results sent to you | So the results email can be sent. This is kept separately from your account |
| Your account tier, and whether you have allowed your data to be used for improving the model | Both default to the least permissive setting. Neither can be changed by you or by anyone else from the browser |
What is never collected
Some things are off the table permanently, not merely absent for now. CognaType carries no advertising, no tracking pixels, no session recording, and no third party marketing cookies. There is no Meta pixel and no ad network of any kind. Nothing you do here is used to target you, on this site or anywhere else.
The commitment is specific and worth saying in plain words: the goal is never to market things at you. It is to understand the community and improve the site around what that community actually needs.
Understanding how CognaType is used
CognaType is a research project as well as a website, so it does look at how the atlas is being used, in aggregate. That work is the point of the thing, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Aggregate means questions about many people at once, never about you:
- Which patterns do people recognise in themselves most often?
- Do people who express one trait strongly tend to express some other trait weakly?
- Which parts of the atlas do people reach for, and which never get read?
Answers to those questions make the underlying model more accurate and the site more useful. They are reported and used as counts and distributions. Nothing in that work identifies you, and no result is ever tied back to a named person.
As of the date at the top of this page, none of this is switched on yet. There is currently no analytics package of any kind installed, not even a privacy-preserving one. It is described here because it is designed in, it is coming, and you should know about it before you sign up rather than discover it in a changed policy later.
There is a separate and stricter line for using your specific responses to refine the model itself. That is governed by a setting on your profile, described below, and it is off unless you turn it on.
Where your data lives
Your account and everything attached to it are stored in a Supabase project hosted on Amazon Web Services in the United States, in the US West region in Oregon. If you are outside the United States, using CognaType means your data is stored there.
The pages themselves are served by Netlify.
Who else can see it
CognaType does not sell your data, does not rent it, and does not share it for advertising. It never will; if that ever changes it will not be by quietly editing this page.
A small number of services necessarily handle data in order for the site to work at all:
- Google handles signing in. Google knows you signed into CognaType, in the same way it knows about any site you use Google to sign into.
- Supabase hosts the database and the authentication service. This is where your rows actually sit.
- Netlify serves the pages. Like any web server, it sees the IP address a request came from.
- Resend sends the results email, and only if you asked for one by typing your address in. If you never request an email, Resend never sees your address.
- Google Fonts serves the typefaces. This one is easy to leave out of a privacy policy and it should not be: because the fonts load from Google's servers, Google receives your IP address when a CognaType page loads, whether or not you have an account and whether or not you are signed in.
Other people cannot read your data
Every table holding personal data has row level security switched on and forced, and every policy is scoped to the signed-in account. In plain terms: the database will not return your rows to another user even if the website asks it to. This is not a promise about how carefully the site is written. It is a rule the database applies underneath the site, which is the only kind of promise worth making.
An anonymous request for any of these tables is refused outright.
What is kept in your browser
CognaType stores a small amount of data in your browser's local storage. None of it is advertising related.
sb-afathcrpfvbbvfhshggd-auth-tokenkeeps you signed in so you do not have to sign in again on every page.- Two small keys remember whether the feedback tool is switched on and what your feedback role is, so the site does not have to ask the server on every page load.
Clearing your browser data removes all of these and signs you out. It does not delete your account.
Using your data to improve CognaType
There is a single setting on your profile that records whether you are willing to have your specific responses used to refine the underlying model. It is off unless you turn it on. While it is off, your individual responses are used to show you your own results and for nothing else.
This is a narrower thing than the aggregate counts described above. Aggregate statistics ask how many people recognised a pattern; the training setting is about your particular answers contributing to the model directly. If you would rather only the first ever happen, leaving this setting off is exactly how you say so.
Getting your data, and deleting it
You can have a full copy of everything CognaType holds about you, and you can have all of it deleted. Both are real, and both are done by asking.
Being straight about the current state: the export and the delete are working functions in the database, but there is no button on your profile page that calls them yet. Building those controls is on the list. Until they exist, email support at cognatype dot com from the address on your account and the request will be run by hand.
A deletion removes your account and everything attached to it. It is not a flag or a hidden state, and it cannot be undone.
How long it is kept
Your data is kept for as long as you have an account, and is deleted when you ask. There is no fixed retention schedule, and it would be dishonest to publish one CognaType does not actually operate.
Children
CognaType is not intended for children under 16, and accounts should not be created for them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to support at cognatype dot com and it will be removed.
This is beta software
CognaType is early and changes often. What it stores will change as features arrive. When that happens, this page changes in the same breath, and the date at the top moves. If something changes materially in how your data is handled, you will be told rather than left to notice.
Questions
Write to support at cognatype dot com. A real person reads it.