A period tracker that doesn’t sell your data
Exactly what Bloom keeps, who else touches it, and how to delete it — including where Bloom is not the most private choice.
The short answer
Bloom never sells your data, shows no ads and contains no third-party advertising or analytics trackers. Your logs are kept on your phone and synced to your account, protected so no other account can read them, and you can delete everything from inside the app. Bloom does need an account, and it is not end-to-end encrypted.
A period tracker holds some of the most personal information you have: when you bleed, how you feel, whether you might be pregnant. Before you trust an app with that, you should be able to find out exactly where it goes. This page is that answer for Bloom, in plain words, including the parts that are less flattering.
What Bloom keeps, and where it lives
Bloom needs an account. What you log is kept on your phone so the app works quickly, and it is synced to your account so a new phone picks up where the old one left off.
| What | Where it lives | Who can read it |
|---|---|---|
| Period dates, check-ins (energy, mood, symptoms, notes), focuses and plans | On your phone, and in your account with our database provider, Supabase | You, signed in. The database is set up with row-level security, so one account can never read another account’s rows. |
| Your profile (name, birthday, the goals and health considerations you chose) | On your phone, and in your account | You, signed in |
| Your conversations with Bloom AI | On your phone, and in your account | You, signed in. To answer, a short summary goes to our AI provider (see below). |
| Your email address | In your account | Used to sign you in and to answer you if you write to us |
Everything travels between your phone and Bloom over encrypted connections (HTTPS), and our database provider encrypts the data it stores. When you sign out, the data synced to your account is removed from that phone, so the next person to use it does not inherit your history.
What Bloom never does
- No ads. Bloom is paid for by subscriptions. There is no advertising in the app and no advertising business behind it.
- No third-party advertising or analytics trackers. The app contains no ad network and no analytics kit that reports what you do to another company.
- Never sold. Bloom does not sell or rent your data to anyone, and does not use it for advertising.
- No location, no contacts. Bloom does not ask for either. It asks for the microphone only if you use hold-to-talk with Bloom AI, and then your phone’s own speech recognizer, from Apple or Google, turns your words into text.
There is one thing we do measure, and you should know about it. During setup and on the subscription screen, Bloom records anonymous steps: which screens are reached, which plan is tapped, whether a purchase or restore went through, and whether you chose email, Apple or Google to sign in. Each step carries only the platform, the time and a random number created on that phone. It contains no health data, none of your cycle or health answers, and no name or email, and it is not linked to your account. We use it only to see where people get stuck.
Where your data goes, and why
A few companies help run Bloom. Each gets only what its job needs.
- Supabase stores your account and synced data, and handles sign-in.
- Anthropic writes Bloom AI’s replies, the insights Bloom writes for your phase, and its answers to your check-ins. Each request goes through Bloom’s own server with a summary of your context: your first name, your current phase or week, your recent logs and notes, the goals and health considerations you chose, your focuses, and, in a chat, the conversation so far. Anthropic processes it under commercial terms that do not allow it to train AI models on that data.
- Apple or Google take your subscription payment, and RevenueCat keeps track of whether your subscription is active, under your account’s ID. It does not receive your health data, and Bloom never sees your card details.
- Cloudflare hosts the Bloom website and app, and Google Fonts supplies the website’s fonts, which means Google sees your IP address when they load.
What Bloom doesn’t do
Honesty matters more here than a long list of reassurances, so here is where Bloom is not the most private option available.
- Bloom is not end-to-end encrypted. Your data is protected by access rules and encrypted in transit, but it is not locked with a key that only you hold.
- Bloom does not work without an account. There is no anonymous mode. Sync and the AI need to know which data is yours.
- Bloom does not keep data only on your phone. If you want an app whose data never leaves the device, a local-only tracker is a better fit, and that is a reasonable choice.
- Bloom can be legally required to disclose information. Like any company, we have to follow the law, and our privacy policy says so. The less an app stores off your phone, the less there is to hand over.
Why this matters for a period tracker
These questions are not hypothetical. In 2021 the U.S. Federal Trade Commission finalized an order against the maker of a popular period app, which it said had shared users’ health information with marketing and analytics companies after promising to keep it private.[1] A study of 30 period-tracking apps found that most of their privacy policies did not properly cover the reproductive data the apps collect.[2]
It is also worth knowing that HIPAA, the U.S. health privacy law, generally does not protect health information you keep in apps on your own phone.[3] What protects you is the app’s own design and the promises in its privacy policy, which is why both should be easy to read.
How to delete everything
- In the app, open Settings → Profile → Delete account. This permanently erases your account and the data stored with it, straight away.
- No longer have the app? Use the account deletion page or email [email protected]. Email requests are completed within 30 days.
- To clear just one phone and keep your account, sign out. Everything synced to your account is removed from that phone.
Questions to ask any period tracker
Whichever app you choose, these five questions get to the truth quickly:
- How does it make money? If not from you, then from what?
- Does it contain advertising or analytics kits from other companies?
- Is your data kept only on your phone, synced to an account, or end-to-end encrypted?
- Who does it share data with, and is that list in the privacy policy?
- Can you delete everything yourself, from inside the app?
Bloom’s full legal policy is the privacy policy. If anything on this page and the policy ever disagree, the policy is what governs, and we would want to hear about it.
Questions people ask
Does Bloom sell my data?
No. Bloom is paid for by subscriptions, not by your data. It shows no ads, contains no third-party advertising or analytics trackers, and never sells or rents your information to anyone.
Is my data encrypted?
It is encrypted in transit between your phone and Bloom, and our database provider encrypts the data it stores. It is not end-to-end encrypted: it is protected by access rules that stop any other account from reading it, not by a key that only you hold.
Do I need an account to use Bloom?
Yes. An account is required so your data can sync between phones and so Bloom AI knows which logs are yours. You can delete the account, and everything stored with it, from Settings at any time.
Is a period app covered by HIPAA?
Generally not. HIPAA covers health care providers and insurers, and the U.S. health department says it generally does not protect health information you keep in apps on your own phone. That is why an app’s own design and privacy policy matter.
Sources
- U.S. Federal Trade Commission. FTC finalizes order with Flo Health, a fertility-tracking app that shared sensitive health data with Facebook, Google, and others.
- Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (Shipp L & Blasco J, 2020). How private is your period?: A systematic analysis of menstrual app privacy policies.
- U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Protecting the privacy and security of your health information when using your personal cell phone or tablet.