Earkick is anonymous but persists anonymized aggregate data. Shift stores nothing at all. The difference between anonymous and stateless.
updated 2026-06-13 · etthore labs · methodology
Earkick is the closest thing to Shift on the market. No name. No signup. A mental-health self-care bot you can talk to without handing over your identity.
So this comparison is narrow, and it is fair. We are not going to claim Earkick does anything sinister. It does not.
There is just one question worth asking, and it is the same question for both tools.
What does each one keep about you after you close the tab.
Earkick is anonymous. You do not create an account, and you are not asked for a name or an email. That is a real privacy choice and it is more than most apps offer.
But anonymous is not the same as keeping nothing.
Per its own privacy policy, Earkick persists anonymized aggregate data. So there is still a server-side record. It is stripped of identity, it is pooled, but it exists. Something is kept.
That makes Earkick anonymous and not stateless. Those are two different properties, and the gap between them is the whole point of this page.
Anonymous means no name is attached to the data.
Stateless means there is no data, period.
Shift stores nothing.
No name, because there is no signup. And no anonymized record either, because the server does not persist your conversation in any form. When the session ends, there is nothing left to anonymize, pool, or aggregate.
This is not a promise written into a policy. It is how the thing is built.
The server is stateless. There is no account, no email, no cookie, no analytics, no log of what you said. You can open view-source and check. The architecture is the guarantee. A policy can change with an edit. A stateless server has nothing to hand over because nothing was written down.
That is the line between the two tools. Earkick is anonymous and keeps an aggregate trace. Shift keeps no trace at all.
The reason "stored but anonymized" is not the same as "nothing stored" is that anonymized data still sits on a server, and servers get breached, subpoenaed, and re-identified.
We have a public record of what happens when health-adjacent tools retain data. GoodRx was hit with a USD 1.5M FTC civil penalty in February 2023 for sharing health data with Google and Facebook for advertising (source: FTC, February 2023, ftc.gov). BetterHelp got an FTC final order, USD 7.8M, in July 2023 for sharing sensitive mental-health data for advertising (source: FTC, July 2023, ftc.gov). Cerebral followed with a USD 7M FTC action in April 2024 for disclosing patient health data to advertisers (source: FTC, April 2024, ftc.gov).
None of those are Earkick. Earkick is in a different and better category. The point is only this: data that exists is data that can leak. The single way to make that risk zero is to not keep the data. That is what stateless means and it is what Shift is.
Honest answer: sometimes it is.
If you want trend tracking over weeks, a mood graph, streaks, or a record of your own progress you can scroll back through, Shift cannot give you that. Shift keeps nothing, so it cannot show you your history. Earkick keeps an anonymized record and can.
If you specifically want continuity, a tool that remembers where you left off across sessions, Earkick fits and Shift does not.
Pick the tool that matches what you actually want. If a stored, anonymized history helps you, Earkick is a reasonable pick and a privacy-conscious one.
Shift is for the other case. When you want to say something out loud and have nothing exist afterward.
Shift is not a mood log and not a therapist. It is a coaching conversation grounded in real method: Person-Centered Theory, Self-Determination Theory, Motivational Interviewing, and the Transtheoretical Model. You can read how it works on the method page.
It is not medical advice, and it is not for emergencies. If you are in crisis or thinking about harming yourself, please reach a person now. In the US you can call or text 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, any time.
You do not need a name to use Shift. You do not need an email. And unlike anonymous tools that still keep an aggregate trace, Shift keeps nothing once you are done.
No one is listening. That's the point.
Start a session when you are ready. Nothing is saved.
no signup · no email · no account · no trace