Security
Your data stays yours.
How Identity First protects your account — from the moment you sign in to every time you open the app.
How Identity First protects your account — from the moment you sign in to every time you open the app.
Identity First uses a straightforward email and password to log you in. There's no complicated OAuth flow or social login — just your email and a password you choose.
If you've forgotten your password, tap Forgot Password and you'll receive a reset link by email.
Creating a new account sends a confirmation email. Once you click the link inside, you're in. The app knows you've signed up but aren't confirmed yet and shows you the right message to check your inbox.
After signing in, Identity First offers to protect the app with Face ID or Touch ID. When enabled, the app locks whenever you leave — and unlocks the moment you look at your phone.
This is biometrics only. There's no PIN fallback — if biometrics fail, you authenticate as normal rather than entering a short code that's easier to shoulder-surf.
Changed your mind? The preference is saved and you can adjust it in Settings at any time. If you skipped it initially, you'll have the option to enable it later.
With biometric lock on, every time you open the app you're greeted by the lock screen. Identity First immediately begins authenticating — you don't even need to tap a button.
While Face ID or Touch ID is working, the lock icon gently pulses. A successful scan takes you straight to the app. If it fails, you get one more try automatically.
After 5 failed attempts in a row, the app signs you out entirely. This is a safety net against someone repeatedly trying to brute-force their way past biometrics.
When something goes wrong during sign-in, Identity First shows you a plain-English explanation — not a raw server error you'd need to decode.
Typed the wrong password? You'll see "Invalid email or password" — consistent phrasing that doesn't hint which one was wrong (which would help an attacker narrow things down). Hit too many failed attempts? You'll be told to wait before trying again.
Creating a new account uses the same clear approach: if your email is already registered, you're guided to sign in instead. Nothing is left ambiguous.
Everything you create — your identities, habits, the evidence you log, even the reasons you mark a day as exempt — is tied to your account and visible only to you.
This isn't a setting you have to switch on. The database itself enforces it: every request is checked against your signed-in identity, so there's simply no way for one person's data to show up in someone else's app.
When you log a piece of evidence, the app also verifies that the habit it belongs to is really yours — so nothing can be attached to an account that isn't yours.
To make the app fast and usable when you're offline, Identity First keeps a local copy of some things: your identities, your habits, your profile, and your display preferences like theme and layout.
Two of the most sensitive things are deliberately never cached: the private notes you attach to your evidence, and the token used to send you notifications. These are loaded fresh from the secure server each time you open the app, so they never sit on your device's local storage.
It means that even a copy of the app's on-device cache wouldn't reveal what you wrote in a reflection or expose your notification identifier.
When you delete your account, Identity First removes all of your data — not just your login. Your evidence, habits, identities, profile, notification settings, exemptions, and notification history are all wiped.
It happens in the right order behind the scenes: your content is cleared first, then your account itself is removed, and anything still attached to it is cleaned up automatically. Nothing is left orphaned in the database.
This is permanent. There's no soft-delete or hidden archive — once it's done, it's gone.
Your data isn't locked in. At any time you can download a complete copy as a single, readable file — your profile, every identity and habit, all the evidence you've logged, your exemptions, and your notification settings and history.
The file is plain JSON, so you can open it, archive it, or move it elsewhere. It's the same picture the app has of your account, handed straight to you.