Privacy
A journal only works if you write like nobody is reading.
Which puts the burden on me to be straight with you about where your writing actually goes, and to look after it once it gets there. Here is how that works, in plain language.
Where your journal lives
On a server I run
Looking Back runs on an account. You sign in, and your entries are stored in a database on Supabase so your laptop and your phone show the same journal. Every row is fenced to your user id, so no other account can reach your writing through the app.
In your browser as well
The app keeps a working copy in the browser so it stays quick and keeps going when the connection drops. Photos sit in the browser's own database on the device you added them from. On a shared computer that copy stays behind after you sign out, until the site data is cleared.
In a file, whenever you want one
Export gives you a single archive: your writing as data, the same journal again as plain readable text, and every photo as an ordinary JPEG. It opens anywhere. Your journal should outlive this app.
How it is looked after. Your entries travel over an encrypted connection and are stored encrypted on Supabase's managed database. Access is fenced to your account in the database itself, so no other account can reach your writing through the app, and a lost or stolen laptop is a sign-in away from being locked out rather than an open journal. What Looking Back does not do is encrypt entries in your browser before they are sent, which is the step that would put them beyond the reach of whoever administers the server. Today that is me alone, and I don't read them. I would like to add it, and I am not going to promise a date I cannot keep.
Who else touches it
Four companies are involved in running Looking Back. Each of them is a business you are probably already trusting elsewhere, and here is what each one actually handles:
Netlify
Hosts the site and serves every page. It sees the usual web request logs, including your IP address.
Supabase
Runs the managed Postgres database your entries are stored in, and handles signing in. Your email address and your writing both live there, encrypted at rest.
Anthropic
Answers when Looking Back reads your journal back to you. The section below covers exactly what gets sent.
Google Fonts
Serves the 2 typefaces used across the site, which means your browser makes a request to Google on every page. Nothing about your journal goes with it.
There is no analytics in Looking Back. No tracking pixels, no product telemetry, no advertising, and nothing that follows you once you leave.
What the AI sees
Looking Back reads your entries back to you, which means the text has to reach a model. There are two ways that happens, and they are meaningfully different.
If you are here on an invite
The reading runs on Looking Back's own API key, so you don't need one. Your entries pass through Looking Back's server on the way to Anthropic and back. Nothing is stored there, but the request does go through a machine I operate, and I could in principle see it. If that is not a trade you want to make, add your own key in Settings and this stops happening immediately.
If you use your own API key
Your key is stored with your account so it follows you between devices, and your entries go straight from your device to your AI provider. Looking Back's server is not in the path and never sees the text.
Either way
Your journal is read for one reason: to hand the patterns back to you. It is never used for advertising, never fed into a recommendation system, and never used to train a model. Anthropic does not train on API traffic.
Getting it back out, or getting rid of it
Export is in the menu under Export & backup, and it doesn't ask for anything in return.
Delete my account is in Settings. It removes every entry, review, goal and setting on your account, every photo you uploaded, and the account itself. There is no undo and no grace period, so export first if you want to keep anything. If the button ever fails, mail me and I'll do it by hand.
Who makes this
Looking Back is made by Mathias Poulsen in New York. It started as my own weekly review, kept in a document, and became an app because the document was never read back.
It is early. If you are using it, you were invited personally, and the fastest way to change something is to tell me. Questions about your data, including deleting all of it, go to mathiastpoulsen@gmail.com.
Last updated 9 September 2026