Safety Policy

Version: 2026-08-26 · Draft pending review by a qualified lawyer

This document says what Comitry does about safety, and — more importantly — what it does not do. It is written to be read before you need it.

What Comitry is not

Comitry is not a crisis service. Nobody is monitoring conversations for signs of danger, nobody is on call, and there is no duty officer. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services.

Comitry is also not healthcare. It does not provide medical advice, and nothing here is a diagnosis, an assessment, or care of any kind. Coaches on Comitry guide and encourage; they do not treat anyone, and they are not employed by us.

We say this plainly and repeatedly in the product because the alternative — a vague impression that someone is watching — is worse than saying nothing.

We do not direct you anywhere, and we do not watch you

Comitry does not list crisis or support services. It used to, and that was removed deliberately. A directory of other people's helplines invited a reading Comitry cannot support: that we are somewhere to turn in a crisis, that we had chosen the right service for you, and that somebody here was involved. None of those was ever true, and the page said so in its own text — which is a sign the page was wrong, not that the wording needed work.

The implementation made it worse rather than better. It picked a country from the device's language rather than from where the reader was, so a member in Spain with an English phone was shown British helplines and the British emergency number. Confidently wrong is worse than absent.

Where somebody is in danger, the answer is the one every other page already gives: contact your local emergency services. That sentence needs no directory, cannot go out of date, and promises nothing on our behalf.

We do not scan what you write. Comitry does not read your messages or your journal looking for signs of distress, and nothing you write triggers an alert to anyone. docs/legal/README.md A7 records the related decision not to build a distress detector, and it stands: it is the one feature that would plausibly make Comitry a medical device.

If we ever do surface support resources in response to something written, three rules are already settled and will not be traded away: they are shown only to the person who wrote it, they are never reported to a moderator, a coach, or an organisation, and the text that prompted them is never stored. The reasons matter more than the feature:

1. Surveillance destroys the trust that makes peer support work. People who believe they are being watched write less honestly, which makes them less safe, not more.
2. Alerting a moderator implies a duty of care we are not equipped to meet. A volunteer moderator is not a crisis responder, and pretending otherwise would be dangerous.

Reporting

Anyone can report a message, a person, a group, or a piece of content, and say why. Reports go to a queue that we work through, and every step is recorded.

• Reporting is free and needs no subscription. It always will be.
• We aim to look at reports about immediate physical safety first. We do not promise a response time, and a report is not a request for help on someone else's behalf.
• We tell the person we acted against what was decided and on what basis, unless the law stops us, and they can ask us to look again.
• Where a report gives us reason to suspect a criminal offence involving a threat to someone's life or safety, we are required to inform the authorities, and we will. That is a duty we owe under EU law, not a service we are offering, and it does not make us a route to emergency help.

Suspending an account

Where something is serious enough, we may suspend an account. A suspension stops somebody taking part — posting, joining a group, starting a conversation, publishing, subscribing — and nothing else. It does not lock anybody out of their own account: their journal, a copy of their data, closing the account, stopping anything they pay for, this page and the ability to report something all stay reachable, and so does asking us to look again at the suspension.

Anything the person was paying for is cancelled at the end of the month already paid for. We do not keep charging somebody we have restricted.

Blocking

You can block another member. It stops them contacting you or starting a conversation with you. A block cannot be overridden by anyone — not a coach, not a group moderator, not us. Unblocking is yours to do and nobody else's.

Moderation

Group moderators can mute a member, remove them from the group, slow a conversation down, lock it, or delete a message. Every action is recorded with who took it and why, and can be reversed.

Moderators see what is in the group they moderate, plus anything reported to them. They do not see private journal entries, and they do not see direct messages that were not reported.

Private by default

• Your profile is not discoverable until you choose to make it so.
• Your journal entries are readable only by you. Not by a coach, a moderator, an organisation administrator, or a Comitry operator. Deleting one deletes it outright rather than hiding it.
• The 1–5 mood you can attach to a journal entry is a note to yourself. Nothing scores it, averages it, or reads anything into it, and nothing about it maps to any clinical measure.

Content that is not allowed

Beyond the general rules, some content is specifically prohibited because of who uses Comitry:

• Promotion of self-harm or suicide, including methods or encouragement
• Disordered eating content — extreme calorie restriction, purging, fasting presented as a goal, or "what I eat in a day" framed as a target for others
• Extreme exercise content — training through injury, exercise as punishment, or volumes that would harm an untrained person
• Medical claims — offering a diagnosis, claiming to treat or cure anything, or telling someone to change prescribed medication
• Body shaming, including as motivation

This matters more here than on a general platform. A calorie-restriction post that is unremarkable on a fitness site can be actively harmful to someone with an eating disorder, and both audiences are on Comitry. Coaches agree to these limits before they can publish.

Coaches

• Coaches are independent, not employed by us
• Qualifications shown on a profile are declared by the coach. We do not check or certify them, and every profile says so
• Every coach accepts a scope-of-practice statement before their application is reviewed, and it is recorded with a timestamp
• Selling content is not self-service — an application is reviewed by us first, and approval can be withdrawn
• A coach who works outside that scope loses the ability to publish

Adults only

Comitry is for people aged 18 or over. You confirm your age when you create an account, and that confirmation is recorded with the date. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we close it and delete the data.

Nothing here scores you

Comitry has no points, no levels, no streaks and no badges. It had all four, with an unusually careful set of rules around them, and they were removed on 2026-08-21 along with the practices they measured — docs/adr/0028. Nothing in the product now counts how often you come back or shows you a number that can go down.

That means there is nothing to keep up, nothing to lose, and no reason for us to remind you about any of it. Notifications are for people contacting you and decisions about your account, never for getting you to open the app. There are no leaderboards and nothing ranks you against anybody else.

The mood you can attach to a journal entry is the one number in Comitry, it is a plain 1 to 5, and it is never averaged, trended or coloured. It is yours to look at and nothing else reads it.

If you find any part of the product pressuring, tell us. That is a bug here, not a growth feature.

Reporting a safety problem with the product itself

If you believe something about Comitry is unsafe — a feature, a piece of copy, a gap in this policy — tell us at safety@comitry.com.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, write to the same address and give us a reasonable chance to fix it before telling anyone else.