Privacy

The short version

You can take the assessment and read your result without telling us who you are. We do not ask for a name, an email address, or a phone number, and there is no account to create. You get a code at the end; that code is the only thing that opens your report.

We do ask one thing about you, and it is not who you are: your age, as a plain number of years. Your age is required — you cannot start without it — and Knoi is for people aged 16 and over. An age names nobody. It is still a fact about you, though, so the rest of this page says what it is for, how long it stays, and what removes it.

If you choose to add an email address afterwards, we store it with that report so we can send you a copy and so you can get back in if you lose the code. That is the only reason we hold it.

What we collect

If you take the assessment

• Your age. One whole number of years, asked on the screen before the first question. Your age is required — without it, no session is started. We do not ask for a date of birth, and we do not work one out.
• Your answers. Each answer on the one-to-five scale, exactly as you gave it. With each one we also note two things about the screen: which kind of answer buttons it had, and which set of answer words was on them.
• Which questions we chose for you. Sixty of your hundred questions are picked from your own answers. So we keep a list of which questions we chose for you, and in what order. With each one we keep the numbers that made us pick it. The list is kept with the rest of your session. When you delete your report, it goes too.
• Where you put yourself. After the first set, you pick which of five short lines is most like you and which is least. We keep those two picks, exactly as you gave them. They are not scored. Your report can put them next to what the questions measured. If you started before September 30, 2026, you put all five lines in order and made one guess. We keep that order and that guess, exactly as you gave them. The guess is not shown back yet. We do not give you a rank in the group we compare you with.
• One thing you write, if you write it. Near the end there is one short question you answer in your own words. You can skip it. We keep what you typed, exactly as typed, and print it in your report. Nobody reads it and nothing scores it.
• Four cards you pick. Four cards are spread through the sets. They ask how you get your energy back, about a free Saturday, about a good work day, and how you like to be shown care. On each card you pick one, or none. We keep each card pick, exactly as you gave it, and show it back in your report. They are never scored.
• How long each question took. Used to notice when a set of answers was given too quickly to have been read, so we can tell you rather than quietly scoring it anyway.
• When you started and finished.
• Your report code. Generated by us; it is not derived from anything about you.
• If you started before September 14, 2026: story choices and card picks. Sessions from before that day had short stories and pick-one cards in them. They finish the way they began. What you chose in them is kept with the report, shown back to you, and never scored. A session started on or after that day has no stories. From September 22, 2026 it had one card, about care. Since September 30, 2026 it has four. They are the four named above.

Your answers are about your personality. That makes them personal in a way an ordinary form is not, and we treat them that way even though they are not attached to a name.

Only if you choose to give it

• An email address, after you have finished, to receive a copy of your report and to recover your code. It is optional, and everything works without it.
• Your "does this fit?" answers on individual findings, stored with your report. We use them to find out where our wording or our scoring is wrong. We will never use them to make results sound more agreeable — a report that everyone nods along to is a report that has stopped saying anything.

An email address is still personal information, even without a name. Combined with answers about your personality it is the sensitive part of what we hold, which is why it is optional, why it is used for nothing else, and why deleting your report removes it along with everything else.

If you join the early-access list

Your email address, the time you consented, and a broad source such as direct, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, or a shared link.

Your age, and why 16

Before the first question, Knoi asks how old you are. Just the number, in years. This is the one place where the promise on the first screen — no account, no email, no name — needs finishing rather than repeating. It is still true: we do not ask who you are and we could not tell you who you are. But an age is a thing about you, you do have to give it, and saying so plainly is better than leaving you to notice.

What it is for

Two things, and nothing else.

• Whether this test fits you well enough for the result to mean anything. Where it fits less well, your report says so, instead of sounding just as sure of itself. This is the half that matters.
• Which words you read. Your age is allowed to change the wording of the parts that are not scored. That means the lines you pick from, the one thing we ask you to write, and a sentence in the report. Today it changes none of them. We built the mechanism and have not used it yet, so every word you read is the same at every age. If that changes, this page changes with it.

It never changes the questions that are scored. Those statements, and the five choices underneath them, are word for word the same for everyone who takes Knoi, whatever age they gave. They have to be: the numbers behind them were worked out from those exact words, and a reworded statement is a different question wearing somebody else's numbers. Which of them you get, and in what order, depends on your answers and on chance. It never depends on your age.

We do not use your age for anything else. It is not used to advertise to you, it is not sold, it is not shared, and it is not combined with anything to work out who you are.

Why 16

It is not that younger people were kept out of the numbers. They were not. The answers these questions were scored from came from people of every age: of the 307,313 people in that group, 38,804 were 16 or 17, 19,210 were 13 to 15, and 1,187 were 10 to 12. Children are in there. Saying otherwise would be a tidier reason and a false one, and this page said it for a while.

The real reason is that the questions work less well the younger the reader is — and that was measured rather than assumed. We worked the numbers out a second time, separately inside each age group, and compared them with the numbers Knoi actually scores with. The closer the two agree, the better those questions tell one person apart from another at that age.

• 18 to 24 — 0.994
• 16 or 17 — 0.979
• 13 to 15 — 0.941
• 10 to 12 — 0.661

0.981 is the agreement this set of questions had to reach before it could be used here at all. So 18 to 24 clears that line, 16 and 17 sits a hair under it, and every younger group sits well under.

It is not that we had fewer young people to look at, which would be the obvious explanation. Cut the oldest group down to the same 1,187 people and it still scores 0.972, and 13 to 15 still scores 0.922, against 0.661 for 10 to 12. Nor is the whole measurement drifting: where each answer sits on the scale carries across every age we looked at, from 0.969 to 0.998. The one thing that falls away is how well an answer separates one person from another, and it falls away steadily with age.

That is a quiet kind of wrong, which is why we would rather turn somebody away than serve them. A younger person's report would sound exactly as sure of itself as anybody else's and mean less than it sounded, and there would be nothing in it for them to notice. Nor can we rewrite our way out of it. That is exactly why the statements are locked word for word: the numbers are attached to those words and to no others, so there is no simpler phrasing that would make them fit a younger reader better.

Sixteen is a little further up than the measurement on its own asked for — 13 to 15 is thin rather than broken. Drawing the line there also means nothing about a child is collected here at all: below 16 no session is opened, so there is nothing of theirs for us to hold, share, or lose. That is a description of what this product does. It is not legal advice and not a claim about any particular law.

If you are under 16

Knoi will not start. You are turned away on the age screen, before the first question and before any answer: no session is created, nothing is stored, and the number you typed is not written down. There is nothing to delete afterwards because there is nothing there.

That check runs on our server and not only in your browser, which is the difference between a rule and a suggestion.

What we do not collect

• Your name, phone number, or address. We ask your age as a number of years; we do not ask when you were born, and we do not work it out.
• Health information, a diagnosis, or anything about medical history. Knoi is not a health assessment and does not ask health questions.
• Questions about trauma or childhood adversity. We have deliberately excluded them: those instruments describe populations and should not be used to draw conclusions about an individual.
• Payment information. There is nothing to pay for.
• Precise location.
• Advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. The site sets no analytics cookies and embeds no third-party trackers.

How we use it

To score your answers and show you your report; to say in that report how well this test fits someone of your age; to notice responses that were given too fast to be meaningful; to improve the questions and the wording; and to keep the service working and protect it from abuse.

Today your report compares you with a public research sample, and says so. In future we intend to build a comparison group of our own from responses. That use is aggregate only — it means counting many people's answers together, never publishing or sharing an individual's. If we ever want to use your responses for anything beyond this list, we will ask first.

We do not sell your information. We do not use it for advertising profiles. We do not share your report with anyone, and no one else can see it unless you give them your code.

Anyone with your code can open your report

That is the trade for not making you create an account. Treat the code like a password: do not post it anywhere public, and only give it to someone you are happy to show your results to.

If you lose it and have not added an email address, we genuinely cannot recover it. We have no other way to identify which report was yours, which is a direct consequence of not collecting anything about you.

Storage and retention

Data is stored on Knoi's own server, on a database that is not reachable from the public internet, and access is restricted to the people operating Knoi.

We keep what you give us until you delete it, and there is no timer on any of it. A finished report is kept until you delete it, and an unfinished assessment is kept in exactly the same way. Nothing in Knoi removes anything after a set number of days.

An earlier version of this page said unfinished assessments were kept for up to 90 days and then removed. Nothing here has ever done that, so rather than leave the sentence up while we built something to make it true, we have taken it out and written what actually happens. If we ever do put stored answers on a timer, this page will say so, and say how long, before it starts.

We keep backups so that a failure does not lose your report. A backup is a copy of the database as it stood at the moment it was taken, so a report you delete can still sit inside a backup made before you deleted it. We do not go into a backup to pull out one report, and we are not going to pretend we do. The script that makes them removes any backup older than 30 days, so that copy does not last indefinitely either.

Essential server logs may briefly record technical information needed for security and reliability; they do not contain your answers or your report code.

Your age sits on the same record as the rest of that session, beside the answers, and it lasts exactly as long as they do — no longer. It is held in one place and not copied into a second one, which is why deleting the report is enough to be rid of it. We hold the number you typed, and nothing is worked out from it beyond the two uses named above.

Deleting your data

You delete a report yourself, from the erase page: knoi.me/report.html#forget. Enter the report code, confirm, and it is gone. You need the code, because it is the only thing that tells us which report is yours.

There is deliberately no delete button on the report itself. We took it off: a destructive control sitting under someone's results suggests throwing them away, and we would rather not put that in front of anybody who did not come looking for it. Nothing about your right to delete changed. The page linked above is always there, it needs no account and no permission from us, and it removes everything listed below.

Deleting removes the report, every answer behind it, your age, your feedback, and your email address if you added one. It also removes the list of which questions we chose for you. It is immediate and permanent, your code stops working, and we do not keep a copy.

An assessment you did not finish has no code, so the erase page cannot reach it. The code is made at the end. This is a real gap and it is worth being exact about how wide it is: if you gave your age, started, and then closed the tab, we are holding that age and whatever you had answered, no timer takes it away, and you have nothing to type into the erase page.

One thing does work, and it is not elegant. Finish it. Open Knoi again in the same browser you started in and it offers to carry on where you left off — that half-done session is remembered by your browser, not by anything that knows who you are. Finish, and you are given a code. The erase page then removes that session, every answer in it and the age you gave, the same as any other.

If that is not open to you — a different browser, or you cleared it — email privacy@knoi.me and say roughly when you started. With no code we may not be able to work out which session was yours, and where we cannot, we will say so rather than delete somebody else's.

To delete an early-access signup instead, email privacy@knoi.me from the address you joined with. To ask what we hold about a report, email us with the code. If you have lost the code and never added an email address, we cannot delete that report for you either, for the same reason we cannot show it to you: we hold nothing else that identifies it.

Under 16

Knoi is not for people under 16. Since September 9, 2026 the server refuses to open a session for anyone younger, so a person under that age cannot take the assessment and nothing of theirs is recorded.

We do not knowingly hold information about a person under 16. If you believe we do — a report made before that date, or one made by someone who gave an age that was not theirs — email privacy@knoi.me with the report code and we will delete it. If a person under 16 has a report and a parent or guardian asks us to remove it, we will, on the same terms.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or how we use it, we will update the date above and say what changed. We will not quietly broaden what we do with answers already given.

What changed on October 1, 2026. Sixty of your hundred questions are now picked from your own answers. So we now keep a list of which questions we chose for you, and in what order. We also keep the numbers that made us pick each one. We keep it with your session. When you delete your report, it goes too. If you started before that day, you finish the way you began. The four cards did not change.

What changed on September 30, 2026. Three new cards came in. Every new session now has four cards, so we keep up to four card picks. They ask how you get your energy back, about a free Saturday, about a good work day, and how you like to be shown care. The guess is gone. You now pick the line most like you and the line least like you, and we keep those two picks. With each answer we now also note which kind of answer buttons you saw, and which set of answer words was on them. Sessions started before that day finish the way they began.

What changed on September 22, 2026. One card came back. Every new session now has one card in it. It asks how you like to be shown care. You pick one, or none. So we collect that one card pick again from anyone who starts on or after that day. It is kept with the report, shown back to you, and never scored. Nothing else changed in what we collect.

What changed on September 14, 2026. New sessions no longer have short stories or pick-one cards in them. So we no longer collect story choices or card picks from anyone who starts on or after that day. The scored questions went from 24 to 100. Every question in a new session is scored. Two unscored things are still asked and still kept: where you put yourself, and the one thing you write. Nothing new is collected. Two things stopped being collected. Sessions started before that day keep their stories and finish as they began. Deleting your data removes their choices along with everything else.

What changed on September 9, 2026. Knoi began asking for an age and began requiring it, and it stopped opening a session for anyone under 16. The sections above named Your age, and why 16 and Deleting your data are the ones that say what that means for you.

Three corrections made the same day. The reason given for the minimum age was wrong — it said the questions had been worked out from adults and older teenagers, and they were worked out from people of every age; Why 16 now gives the measured reason instead. A promise that unfinished assessments were removed after 90 days came out, because nothing here ever removed one. And the deletion section now says plainly what somebody who started and left can and cannot do, rather than pointing them at a timer that did not exist. Nothing about what we collect changed; three sentences about it were wrong and are now not.

Contact

Questions about any of this: privacy@knoi.me.