Security & Data Handling

Here are the questions that often come up when deciding to bring in Addness, answered along the lines of Addness's screens and how the AI works. Details on infrastructure, encryption, subcontractors, and authentication are on the Security page and in the Privacy Policy. System architecture diagrams and answers to security checklists are provided under a non-disclosure agreement. Request them through the free onboarding support form.

Can Addness employees see our data?

As a rule, no. Only when it's needed for support or incident response do authorized staff access it, and those operations are logged.

Organization admins inside your own company are a different matter. What admins can see is covered in Can we separate who sees what within the company?.

Where is data stored?

Databases, files, and backups are stored in Japan (the AWS Tokyo Region). AI processing, sign-in, error monitoring, hosting, payments, and similar are handled by external services in the United States. The list of subcontractors is in section "4" of the Privacy Policy.

Data is kept separate for each company (organization), and other organizations can't see it.

Is our data used to train AI?

AI is used in two situations, and they need to be considered separately.

How far does the AI read?

The AI can read only what the person using it can see in Addness. It can't read goals that person has no permission to view, or other companies' data. When the AI creates or edits goals, it's also limited to that person's permissions. AI connected by a guest can read goals but can't create or change them.

To connect an AI to Addness, you sign in to Addness in your browser and allow it. No API key is used to connect the AI.

The AI that runs is the Claude Code, Codex, or ChatGPT you use. "Ask AI" passes an instruction like "move this goal forward" to that AI. What the AI app may do on your computer is set in Claude Code's or Codex's own settings.

In the desktop app (Addness Desktop), only when you choose a working folder in "Remote control" in settings and turn on "Accept from phone" will requests sent from your phone or the web start the AI on that computer in the chosen working folder. If it's off, other devices can't start the AI on that computer.

To call the Addness API from a CLI or your own tools, create a key under "API Keys" in Organization settings › Integrations. An API key works with the permissions of the person who created it, and you can choose its expiration (30 days, 90 days, 365 days, or No expiration). If you choose "Integration API key" under "Type" in "Create", you can create one key per organization that only lets an external system read the organization's members and ToDos. An integration API key can't change any data and doesn't hand over email addresses.

The AI is instructed to check with you before deleting or publishing a goal. Goals deleted by mistake can be restored (→ FAQ).

Can we separate who sees what within the company?

For goals, yes. Who can see a goal depends on whether they're assigned to that goal or a goal above it. A goal someone isn't assigned to anywhere isn't visible to them, even if they're a member of the same company (→ Who can see how much). People who join as guests can only view, comment, and chat.

Outside goals, who can see something when it's created depends on the feature.

Change the visibility of anything you don't want others to see. If you link metrics (Analytics) to a goal, anyone who can see that goal can see the values.

Organization admins can see almost everything, regardless of assignment. They can access comments and activity on goals they aren't assigned to, the list of goals each member owns, Drive, Knowledge, customer lists, metrics, and recordings, and they can export conversations they aren't part of as CSV.

Comments: Comments written on a goal can be read by anyone who can see that goal and by organization admins. When you delete your own comment, it disappears from the comments, along with its attached files and the notifications for that comment. The goal's activity log keeps a record saying "Deleted a comment".

The AI reads whatever the person can see, but there's no system mechanism that stops it from writing what it read into another goal.

Sign-in and two-factor authentication

You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email, or with a Google or Apple account. Addness doesn't hold passwords.

Each person can set up two-factor authentication with an authenticator app in My Settings › Account. There's no setting yet to require two-factor authentication for everyone in the organization.

Single sign-on (SSO) with SAML, user provisioning with SCIM, and IP address restrictions aren't supported yet.

When you stop using Addness or delete data

• When you cancel: Your data isn't deleted. You can't open it while you have no contract, and if you subscribe again, you pick up where you left off (→ Plans & Billing: "How to cancel")
• When you want to take your data out: There's no button that exports everything at once. Ask your connected AI to "export this goal and everything under it, including the body and comments, to a file," and it exports what you can see. Drive files can be downloaded, and admins can export each conversation as CSV. You can't open anything once the contract ends, so export while the contract is still active
• Notifications: Notifications older than 180 days are deleted. Notifications for mentions of you in goal comments are kept
• When you delete the organization: No one can open the organization's data from that moment, and it can't be restored. It isn't erased from the database and is kept with no set time limit (→ Deleting an organization)

Do you have third-party certifications?

We haven't obtained ISMS (ISO/IEC 27001), SOC 2, or the Japanese PrivacyMark yet. We answer security checklists individually.

This article is written based on the content as of October 15, 2026.