Your data, honestly accounted for.

The Ashta Project (“Ashta”, “we”, “us”) is the data controller for the personal data described on this page. Ashta is operated directly by its founder pending formal incorporation of a dedicated legal entity; until that entity exists, the founder is the controller in their personal capacity. We will update this section, and notify members by email, the moment a company is incorporated to take on that role, this is a factual statement of where things stand today, not a placeholder we intend to leave stale.

You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@theashtaproject.com. See §14 for the full contact and complaints route.

Your psychometric answers, birth data, and, once combined with the report we generate from them, the inferences those produce can reveal or approximate information about beliefs, personality, and other traits that data-protection law treats as special-category data under Article 9 of the UK/EU GDPR. We do not treat a single bundled tick-box as sufficient consent for this. Instead:

• Consent for special-category profiling is captured separately from consent to core membership processing (which rests on contract, not consent, and so isn't something you “withdraw” while remaining a member, see §9).
• You can view and change this consent, on its own, at any time at /profile/consent.
• Withdrawing this consent stops future profiling processing; it does not retroactively make past processing unlawful, and it does not itself require us to delete the report already generated, you can separately request erasure (§9).

A Cluster session is a live group video call, and recording is standard operation of one. Each member is captured on their own track, as their own file, so a recording is per person and never a single shared mix. We transcribe it and attribute each utterance to the named member who spoke it, and that attribution is the point: an anonymised transcript of eight overlapping voices is not a usable research record.

Everyone currently seated in your Cluster can listen to the whole meeting recording while its audio is retained, under the same access rule as transcripts and notes. This means your recorded voice, and the words you say in a session, are visible, by name, to the other people seated in your Cluster, and to the small number of people at Ashta who review sessions for research and safety purposes. It does not mean it is visible to Ashta members outside your Cluster, and nothing is published without the de-identification described in §5.

Recording consent is checked before seating and session entry. A member who has withdrawn cannot join a Cluster or receive a room token. There is no option to remain in a session while being excluded from its recording or transcript.

Before your Cluster's first session, every member is shown a recording briefing and acknowledges it once, as its own record. It sets out who can hear a session, what is kept and for how long, how the machine notes are written, and when you are told how your Cluster was composed.

Your consent to being recorded is given once, with the terms, when you join, and it is a condition of taking part in a Cluster, together with inclusion in the research dataset (§5). You can withdraw it at any time at /profile/consent. Withdrawing it means leaving your Cluster: your seat ends and you cannot be seated or enter sessions again. Past recordings and transcript lines use the existing full account erasure process (§9), available in your consent settings. There is no separate transcript-retention switch: the transcript is covered by this same consent.

The one honest limit is microphone bleed. If your own microphone is off and the person beside you has theirs on in the same physical room, your voice can still reach their track. Segments that look like bleed are flagged, but flagging is not prevention, and we would rather say so than promise a guarantee we cannot deliver.

Ashta measures what real inner change looks like and publishes what it finds, that is the reason the platform exists. We report findings honestly: a null result is reported with the same weight and the same care as a positive one, and we never claim an intention, an outcome, or a Cluster's process has been “proven.” We report measured criteria, sample sizes, and dates.

Inclusion of your data in the dataset we publish or share with outside researchers is a condition of taking part in a Cluster, in the same way recording is (§4). A Cluster exists to generate that research, and one seat opted out of it would invalidate the data of the other seven, so there is no seat without it. You consent to it once, with the terms, when you join, and you can withdraw it at any time at /profile/consent (§9). Withdrawing it ends your seat: you leave your Cluster and cannot be seated or enter sessions again, and your rows are left out of any dataset published after that. It is not a switch you can turn off while staying seated.

Where your data is included, we publish it de-identified: names, exact birth data, and direct quotations that would identify you are stripped or aggregated before publication, unless you separately and explicitly agree to identified publication for a specific piece of work. Counts already published about your Cluster as a whole, such as how many people took part, do not change when a member withdraws.

We keep personal data for as long as you remain a member and the processing it supports remains active, and no longer than necessary after that:

• Account, profile, and Cluster data, kept for the life of your membership, then erased (not merely deactivated) within 30 days of a confirmed erasure request (§9), except where we are legally required to keep a minimal record for longer (for example, financial records for tax purposes).
• Session audio, deleted once its transcript has been produced. The transcript is kept; the audio file is not. This is stated on the recording briefing every member acknowledges before their first session, and it is what the system does rather than a target: the deletion runs on the transcript arriving. The one case where audio is kept is a transcript that came back empty, which is flagged for a person to look at rather than treated as a session in which nobody spoke.
• Transcripts, kept for as long as you are a member. The transcript is the research record the audio was captured to produce, and it is held under the same explicit consent as the recording itself (§4), not a separate one: there is no setting that keeps you recorded while discarding your transcript. To delete your past transcript lines, use full account erasure on /profile/consent (§9).
• Research/telemetry events (funnel and consent history), kept as an append-only audit log for as long as your account exists, since a consent history that could be silently edited would defeat the point of recording it; it is erased along with the rest of your account on a confirmed erasure request.
• Session chat, Cluster chat between meetings, and Lounge messages, kept while you are a member; moderation hides a message rather than deleting it, and every one of these is removed by full account erasure (§9).
• Community profile and connections, kept until you clear them or your account is erased (§9).

We do not sell your data, and we do not run advertising trackers. We use a small number of processors to run the platform, each bound by their own data-processing terms:

Ashta does not use session transcripts to train any AI model.

We share within your own Cluster by design (§4), that is the product. Your first name and the messages you post in the Lounge are seen by every member who can open it, which is every member who has completed the first stage of onboarding. Only while the community directory feature is switched on, the profile sections you choose to show are visible to the audience you choose there. We do not otherwise share your personal data with any other member, or with any third party for their own marketing purposes.

Under UK/EU data-protection law you have the right to:

• Access a copy of your personal data, self-serve at GET /api/privacy/export while signed in, which returns your full record as JSON immediately, or use the Download button on /profile/consent. Your Cluster's research arm is withheld from that file until your debrief.
• Rectification of inaccurate data, most fields are editable directly in your profile; email privacy@theashtaproject.com for anything that isn't.
• Erasure (“the right to be forgotten”), self-serve at /profile/consent, which routes to a confirmed POST /api/privacy/erase. This is a genuine, permanent deletion of your account and everything linked to it, not a soft deactivation.
• Restriction of processing in disputed cases, and objection to processing based on legitimate interests (§2's security row), email us.
• Portability of the data you provided us, in a structured, machine-readable format, the same export route above satisfies this.
• Withdraw consent for any consent-based processing at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of processing before the withdrawal, at /profile/consent. Profiling consent is its own switch there. Recording consent and inclusion in the research dataset are the two conditions of taking part in a Cluster: withdrawing either one withdraws both and ends your seat (§4, §5). They are still yours to withdraw at any moment, and the page tells you what it will cost before you do.

We respond to any rights request within one month, as required by law. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request that arrives outside your signed-in session.

Questions, requests, or concerns about your data: privacy@theashtaproject.com.

If you're unhappy with how we've handled a concern, you have the right to complain to your local data-protection authority. In the UK, that's the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). We'd genuinely rather you came to us first, we can usually fix things faster than a formal complaint process.