Privacy Policy

For the Aura iOS app.

Last updated 14 August 2026

Who this covers

This policy applies to the Aura iOS app (“Aura”, “the app”), which helps people track Palindromic Rheumatism. Aura is an independent app maintained by Peter Barnett.

What Aura stores, and where

Everything you enter — flares, pain levels, affected joints, symptoms, triggers, relief methods, medications and doses, appointment notes, and your profile details — is written to a database on your device. It is not uploaded anywhere, and it is covered by your device's own encryption when your iPhone is locked.

Aura has no user accounts, no login, and no backend service holding your records. We cannot see your data, and we could not retrieve it for you if you asked.

Apple Health (HealthKit)

If you grant permission, Aura reads the following from Apple Health so it can be displayed alongside your flare history: steps, active energy, flights climbed, heart rate, resting heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep, respiratory rate, blood oxygen, body temperature, and menstrual cycle data.

Specifically, and in line with Apple's requirements:

• Health data is read on your device and stays on your device.
• Health data is never used for advertising, marketing, or any similar purpose.
• Health data is never sold, and is not shared with any third party, data broker, or advertising network.
• Health data is not used to build a profile of you or to make decisions about you outside the app.
• Aura does not write to Apple Health.

Granting Health access is optional. The app works without it; you will simply see fewer charts. You can change or withdraw access at any time in Settings › Privacy & Security › Health › Aura.

Location

If you grant permission, Aura requests your location only while you are using the app, and only at approximately one-kilometre accuracy — enough to identify local weather, not enough to identify a street address.

Those coordinates are sent to Open-Meteo to retrieve the current weather. Open-Meteo receives a latitude and longitude and nothing else: no name, no device identifier, no health information, and nothing that links the request to you. Aura stores the resulting weather reading on your device so it can compare flare days against days without one. Your precise location is not retained beyond that.

Location access is optional and can be withdrawn at any time in Settings.

Network connections

Aura contacts exactly two services, both over HTTPS:

• Open-Meteo — for weather, as described above.
• NCBI / PubMed Central — to fetch published research about Palindromic Rheumatism. The search terms are fixed and identical for every user; no personal data is included in these requests.

Aura contains no analytics, crash reporting, attribution, or advertising SDKs, and no third-party libraries of any kind.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, Aura schedules medication reminders locally on your device. They are not sent through a push server, and their contents never leave your iPhone.

Reports you export

Aura can generate a PDF summary of your history to bring to a clinician. It is created on your device and shared only through the iOS share sheet, only when you choose to. The file is written with full file protection and removed once sharing finishes. Where it goes after that is determined by whichever app or service you hand it to.

Research

Aura shows published papers about Palindromic Rheumatism, fetched from PubMed Central. That is the only sense in which the app involves research: it is reading material.

Aura does not conduct research, and does not collect data for anyone else. It is not a study, there is nothing to enrol in, and nothing you log contributes to anything beyond your own record. Earlier versions carried a settings screen describing a possible future data-sharing programme; no such programme ever ran, nothing was ever collected under it, and both the screen and the stored preference have been removed.

Children

Aura is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from them.

Deleting your data

Profile › Delete All Data erases every record Aura holds, permanently and immediately. Deleting the app removes its database along with it. Because nothing is stored on a server, no further request to us is necessary or possible.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page will be updated. Material changes affecting how your information is handled will also be surfaced in the app.

Medical disclaimer

Aura is not a medical device. It does not diagnose, treat, or prevent any condition, and nothing it surfaces should be interpreted as medical advice. Any correlation the app reports is descriptive only. Talk to a clinician about your care.

Contact

Questions about this policy or about privacy in Aura: peter.barnett03@gmail.com.