Plain Help collects no information that could identify you.
There are no accounts, no login, no email address, no name. Your conversation is not stored. When you close your browser tab, it is gone. Plain Help has no way to connect any conversation to any person.
What we do collect: anonymous, aggregate usage signals that help us understand whether the tool is working and who it is reaching. Specifically, we log events like session start and end, how many messages were exchanged, what broad topic category the assistant's response covered (for example: housing, benefits, legal aid), whether a resource link was clicked, and whether you used the listen feature or left feedback. We also record your device type (phone or computer), browser language, and approximate region (state or country, derived from your network connection and then discarded).
What we never collect: the content of your messages, the text of AI responses, your IP address (it is discarded after region is extracted), or any identifier that persists across sessions. We use a short-lived anonymous signal to estimate how many people return within a week — it resets weekly and cannot be used to track you over time.
Why we collect this at all: Plain Help is a nonprofit. We need to show funders and resource partners that the tool is reaching people who need it and connecting them to real help. We cannot do that with zero data. We can do it without knowing who you are, and that is the approach we have taken.
Third parties: Your message is sent to Anthropic's API to generate a response. Anthropic's privacy policy governs how they handle API data. We use Supabase to store the anonymous usage logs described above. No other third party receives any data.
Plain Help will never sell, share, or use data to identify users. There is no advertising, no data brokerage, no research use without explicit community consent.
If you are a domestic violence survivor, an undocumented person, an LGBTQ+ person in a hostile jurisdiction, a human rights defender, or anyone for whom being identified through a tool like this could cause real harm: the architecture above is why this tool was built the way it was. Privacy here is not a feature. It is a safety measure.
Questions: plainhelp.feedback@gmail.com