Privacy Policy
Symkura is committed to protecting your data. This policy explains what we process, on which legal basis, for how long, and what your rights are.
1. Controller
Benjamin Straatmann, MakeByte, Thamaschstraße 2, 86687 Kaisheim, Germany. Email: privacy@symkura.app
2. Core principle
Symkura is privacy-first. Your health data is stored on your device and, if you use an account, synced to our own server in Germany. We never use your health data for advertising or profiling and never pass it to third parties.
3. What we process and why
Health data (special category, Art. 9 GDPR): symptom entries, pain intensity, body regions, triggers, mood, sleep, medications, notes, photos, the conditions you choose, the doctors you add (name, specialty, phone, address and the conditions they treat), optionally cycle and weight. Purpose: your personal symptom diary and the patient report for doctor visits. Legal basis: your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR), given during setup and revocable at any time by deleting your account.
Account data: email address and password (stored only as a hash); optionally first and last name, date of birth and gender for the patient report. Purpose: sign-in, cross-device sync, password reset, the patient report. Legal basis: performance of contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
Doctor appointments (optional): if you import appointments, Symkura reads the device calendars you select, read-only and with your permission. Title, time and location of the selected appointments are stored as part of your account data so the app can remind you and show your next appointment. Calendar data is never shared with third parties; Symkura never changes your calendar. Legal basis: performance of contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).
Weather data (optional): if you set a location, the app asks Symkura's own weather service for temperature, humidity and pressure; for the place search it sends the search term you type. The weather service runs on Cloudflare (Cloudflare Inc., USA, certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) and receives the coordinates of the chosen place or the search term, plus your IP address for technical reasons. The service uses the IP address only to fend off excessive requests; it does not write coordinates, search terms or IP addresses to logs. It obtains the weather values from MET Norway (Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Norway), which receives only coordinates rounded to about 1 km, never your IP address. Place searches are answered from the service's own place directory (GeoNames data) and are not passed on to any other service. No account or health data is transmitted. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR.
Purchase data: Symkura Pro purchases are processed by Apple or Google. To verify entitlements we use RevenueCat (RevenueCat Inc., USA), which receives a pseudonymous user ID and the purchase status, no health and no payment data. Transfers to the USA are covered by EU Standard Contractual Clauses (Art. 46(2)(c) GDPR).
Usage statistics (optional, opt-in): with your consent we store technical events (e.g. "entry created", "export created", selected theme). These events are linked to your account, i.e. pseudonymous, not anonymous. They never contain symptoms, values, notes or photos. Legal basis: consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), revocable in settings at any time. Retention: 12 months.
Community data (optional, opt-in): with your consent we transmit, at most once a day, aggregated statistics per condition (average intensity, most frequent triggers and body regions, averages for air pressure, sleep and mood). The transmission uses a random device token; the values are stored without your name and without your account ID, and the token only serves to update your contribution instead of duplicating it. As the values are derived from your entries, they are health data under a pseudonym, not anonymous. Only the app's built-in condition names are transmitted, never your own text and never individual entries. Insights are shown only from 10 contributions per condition upwards. If you switch the contribution off, we delete your values. Legal basis: your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR), revocable in settings at any time.
Feedback (optional): messages sent through the feedback form are relayed to us by a Cloudflare Worker (Cloudflare Inc., USA, certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) and delivered by email. We store the text without any link to your account, together with the app version, platform and language, in our database on our server in Germany; the email goes to our mailbox at mailbox.org (see section 4, Contact). Please do not include health details you do not wish to share. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR (improving the app).
Email delivery: password-reset and confirmation emails are sent through Brevo (Brevo GmbH, Köpenicker Str. 126, 10179 Berlin, Germany, a company of the Brevo group based in Paris, France) as our processor; Brevo receives your email address and the content of the email for this purpose. Brevo adds a tracking pixel to these emails that cannot be switched off: if you open such an email and your email app loads images, Brevo receives your IP address and the time. If your email app does not load images automatically, this does not happen.
App updates: on launch the app asks Expo (650 Industries, Inc., USA) for bug fixes and downloads them when available. For this, your IP address (technically required), operating system, app version and a random installation ID are sent, never account or health data. Purpose: delivering fixes quickly without a new store download. If the app failed to start after an update, the next request also carries the text of that error once and the identifiers of the failed updates; Expo deletes the raw logs holding the error text after three days. Legal basis: legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Transfers to the USA are based on Expo’s certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR) and on the standard contractual clauses (module two) in Expo’s terms.
Technical data: when your device contacts our server, IP address, timestamp and request type are processed briefly in logs to keep the service secure and prevent abuse (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
4. This website
This section covers the website symkura.app. Fonts, images and videos are served from symkura.app itself; the website loads nothing from Google Fonts, YouTube or social networks. The services otherwise involved are described in the following paragraphs.
Hosting: the website is hosted on Cloudflare Pages, a service of Cloudflare, Inc., 101 Townsend St., San Francisco, CA 94107, USA. For every request, Cloudflare processes the data the request technically involves, in particular your IP address, the address requested, date and time, and your browser's identifier (user agent). Purpose: delivering the pages and protecting the website against attacks and abuse. Cloudflare acts as our processor for the content it delivers and for the logs it makes available to us; it processes the other data about the requests as an independent controller under its own privacy policy. Cloudflare does not state a fixed retention period for this data; according to its privacy policy, Cloudflare keeps data for as long as needed for the respective purpose and to comply with legal obligations. Cloudflare is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (Art. 45 GDPR). Cloudflare also hides the email addresses on our pages from programs that harvest addresses: for this it adds a small script, loaded by your browser from symkura.app, that makes the addresses readable for you again.
Error reports: Cloudflare also instructs your browser to report failed connections (Network Error Logging). If your browser supports this, it keeps the instruction for up to seven days and sends a report to Cloudflare only when a connection fails, for example with the address requested, the type of error and timing information; successful requests are not reported. From your IP address, Cloudflare derives only the network operator, country and metro area and, according to Cloudflare, does not store the IP address.
Security check: if Cloudflare considers a request suspicious, it may show a check in your browser. For this, a Cloudflare script evaluates characteristics of your browser; sometimes you also have to tick a box. In that case Cloudflare sets cookies: cf_clearance records that you passed the check so it does not appear again; the cookies cf_chl_rc_i, cf_chl_rc_ni and cf_chl_rc_m are used internally by Cloudflare to identify technical problems on visitors' devices. Legal basis for hosting, error reports and security checks: legitimate interest in a secure and reliable website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Audience measurement: to see which pages are used, we use Umami. Umami runs on our own server in Germany (IONOS SE, Montabaur, see section 6) at analytics.makebyte.de. On every page view, a script from there sends the page address and title, the page you came from (referrer), your screen size and browser language to this server. From your browser's identifier and the screen size, the server derives browser, operating system and device type, and from your IP address the country, region and city; the location lookup uses a database on our server, without asking any third party. Umami does not store your IP address. It combines your IP address, your browser's identifier, our website's identifier and a value that changes every month into a session identifier that cannot be reversed: this lets visits within one calendar month be counted together; Umami does not link visits across the change of month or across other websites. Umami sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. The web server in front of Umami keeps no access log; only for technical errors does it write an entry with the IP address to an error log. Apart from IONOS as the operator of the data center, nobody receives this data. We delete the measurement data automatically 24 months after it is collected, and the data of a session 24 months after its last page view. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in improving the website based on how it is used (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). You may object to this at any time on grounds relating to your particular situation (Art. 21 GDPR). The easiest way is the button below this paragraph: it creates the entry umami.disabled in your browser's local storage, and as long as it is there, the Umami script sends nothing from this browser to our server.
Performance and audience measurement by Cloudflare: for requests that reach Cloudflare through a data center outside the EU, the EEA, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, Cloudflare adds a small script from static.cloudflareinsights.com to our pages (Cloudflare Web Analytics); requests through data centers in those countries are not measured. The script sends performance data from your browser to Cloudflare, such as load and paint timings, the page address and the page you came from. Cloudflare also uses this to count page views and visits. According to Cloudflare, it sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser, and Cloudflare discards your IP address at the nearest data center instead of storing it. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a fast, reliable website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
Storage in your browser: if you choose a language or light or dark mode on the website yourself, pause the film on the home page or turn off audience measurement, the website remembers this in your browser's local storage (entries symkura-lang, symkura-theme, symkura-film, umami.disabled). These entries stay on your device and are never sent to us; you can remove them by clearing the site data in your browser. Apart from these, the website stores nothing in your browser except the cookies of a security check and the instruction for error reports (both described above).
Contact: the form at symkura.app/contact does not send anything to us itself: it opens your email app with a prepared message that you send from there. Emails to our addresses at symkura.app are delivered to our mailbox at mailbox.org (Heinlein Hosting GmbH, Schwedter Straße 8/9A, 10119 Berlin, Germany), which processes them on our behalf. We use your message to reply to you. Please do not include health details you do not wish to share. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR where your request concerns your account or a purchase, Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR for requests about your rights (section 8), otherwise our legitimate interest in answering inquiries (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). The feedback form in the app is covered in section 3.
Links to other websites, such as Google Play, take you to their providers; only there is data processed under their privacy policies.
5. What we do not do
No advertising, no cross-app or cross-site tracking, no sale of data, no automated decision-making, no analysis of your health data for our own purposes.
6. Storage location and security
Account and health data are stored on our own server in Germany (IONOS SE, Montabaur). We do not use US cloud services for this data. Transfers are TLS-encrypted; row-level security limits access to your own account. On your device you can additionally lock the app with a PIN or biometrics; the PIN is kept in the operating system's protected storage. App data is excluded from Google device backups. On iPhone your entries are excluded from iCloud and computer backups, but attached photos are not: if you back up your iPhone, they are part of that backup.
7. Retention
Health and account data are kept until you delete your account. Account deletion removes your account and your data, including photos, from our server; data on your device remains until you delete it in the app or remove the app. What remains on our server after that, and for how long, is listed at symkura.app/en/delete-account. Usage statistics: 12 months. Server logs: 14 days. Database backups (daily, encrypted, on our server): 15 days; if no new backup succeeds for a while, we keep the last successful one until a new one succeeds. Until then they may still contain data of a deleted account, though not the photo files themselves.
8. Your rights
You have the right of access (Art. 15), rectification (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18), data portability (Art. 20) and objection (Art. 21 GDPR), and the right to withdraw consent at any time. In the app you can view your data, export your entries as CSV and a report as PDF, and delete your account together with your data on our server without contacting us. For a complete copy of all your data, including photos, doctors, appointments and profile details, and for anything else: privacy@symkura.app.
You may lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority; the authority responsible for us is the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection Supervision (BayLDA), Promenade 18, 91522 Ansbach, Germany, www.lda.bayern.de.
9. Children
Symkura is not directed at persons under 16. We do not knowingly process data of children under 16.
10. Changes
We update this policy when the app or the legal situation changes and notify you of material changes in the app.
11. Contact
privacy@symkura.app
MakeByte, Thamaschstraße 2, 86687 Kaisheim, Germany
12. Information for people in the United States
This section adds what US state laws such as those of California, Connecticut, Nevada and Washington require. It applies wherever you live in the United States. It is effective as of November 12, 2026.
No sale, no targeted advertising, no profiling. We do not sell personal data, do not use or share it for targeted advertising and do not use it for profiling that leads to decisions with legal or similarly significant effects. Symkura shows no ads.
No training of language models. We do not collect, use or sell personal data to train large language models. Symkura has no AI features.
Do Not Track. Neither this website nor the app tracks you across other websites or apps, and we do not allow third parties to collect information about your online activities over time and across websites through our services. Because there is no such tracking, nothing changes whether or not your browser sends a “Do Not Track” or Global Privacy Control signal.
Your rights. You can ask us to confirm whether we process your personal data, to give you access to it and a copy in a portable format, to correct it and to delete it. You can also opt out of the sale of personal data, targeted advertising and profiling; we do none of these. Much of this works in the app (section 8); otherwise write to privacy@symkura.app. We may ask you to send the request from the email address of your account. We answer within 30 days; if a request needs more time, we may extend this once by up to 45 days and tell you why within the first 30 days. Requests are free of charge.
Appeals. If we decline your request, you can appeal by replying to our answer or by writing to privacy@symkura.app with the subject “Appeal”. Within 45 days we tell you in writing what we did or did not do, and why. If we deny your appeal, you can complain to the attorney general of your state, for example in Connecticut at portal.ct.gov/ag/common/complaint-form-landing-page (subject “Consumer Data Privacy”) or in Washington at atg.wa.gov/file-complaint. For consumer health data, our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy applies as well.