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Health app data privacy: why we keep your data in Europe

5 August 2026 · 3 min read

Health app data privacy sounds like a dull subject until you think about what you actually put in. One weight is a number. Six months of weights, workouts and empty days is something else entirely: it shows when things were going well, when you stopped, and usually roughly why. That is not information we want to be casual about.

A shopping list is not a weight chart

If someone knows you bought pasta last week, very little is at stake. If someone sees a year of weigh-ins, they know something about your body, your habits and your moods. You cannot undo that by choosing a new password.

There is also the awkward fact that health data has value to people outside the app: advertisers, data brokers, analytics firms. Not every app does that, and we are not going to name anyone here. But once the data exists somewhere, the temptation exists too. In plenty of apps, data passes through third-party trackers on its way, the servers sit outside Europe, and deleting your account turns out to be a different thing from deleting your data. Usually that is not malice. It is simply what happens when nobody makes the choice deliberately, up front.

We made ours up front. Everything you put into OurPace sits on servers in Europe and falls under European privacy law. We do not sell it or trade it.

What we store

To build a plan that makes any sense, we need a handful of things:

That is the lot. The app runs on those: the chart, the streaks, your shared weekly rhythm, a plan that takes your partner's plan into account.

What we deliberately do not store

No medical details. No free text box where people can describe their health situation, because a box like that fills up sooner or later with exactly the data we do not want to hold.

And no answers from the safety check. You do that once, before your plan is put together. Exactly one thing comes out of it: how cautiously your plan is built. The questions and your answers are gone the moment you click on. If something worries you, your GP is a better place for it than an app — which is another reason not to leave those answers sitting in a database.

Gone means gone

Deleting your account here means everything goes: weigh-ins, workouts, your plan, your preferences, anything you reported to us. Not archived, not held for thirty days, not "kept in anonymised form for research". Gone.

This is a design choice rather than a selling point. An app you type your weight into every week does not earn trust automatically. So we keep the amount of data small, we know in advance where it lives, and you can be out again in a single step.

OurPace is in closed testing at the moment. If you want to hear from us when it opens up, you can join the waiting list on the home page.

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