About Settle
Settle is a free tool for getting through a tinnitus spike. It takes about ninety seconds. There is no account, nothing to install, and nothing to pay.
What it does
It gives you something to do with your attention while the worst of a spike passes — paced breathing, a grounding exercise, and a few of the thoughts that tend to show up during one, written down so they are easier to see from the outside.
It draws on the ideas behind cognitive behavioural therapy for tinnitus distress, which is the approach with the strongest evidence behind it for this problem.
What it is not
- Not medical advice. Nothing here is a recommendation about your health, your hearing, or your treatment.
- Not a medical device, and not registered or approved as one anywhere.
- Not a diagnosis or an assessment. It cannot tell you anything about your ears. It does not know anything about you at all.
- Not a substitute for seeing a doctor, an audiologist, or a mental health professional.
- Not monitored. Nobody is on the other end. This is a web page, not a service with people behind it, and it cannot respond to an emergency.
- Not a treatment for tinnitus, and it does not make the sound quieter. What it aims at is the distress, which is a different thing.
It has not been clinically tested. The ideas it is built on have been studied; this particular tool has not. It was published as an honest experiment rather than as a validated product, and you should weigh it accordingly.
If you need help now
If things are worse than the ringing right now, there are people who will talk to you, any time. Crisis lines and where to find help.
In an emergency in Malaysia, call 999.
Privacy
Settle has no account, no login, and nowhere to type anything. It never asks who you are, and it has no way to find out.
What stays on your device
Your language and region choices, so you do not have to set them again. They never leave your phone or computer, and clearing your browser data removes them.
Nothing about a session is stored. If you tap easier, same or worse on the last screen, that answer is used to decide what that screen shows you and is then gone. There is no history, no diary, and no record on your device that you used this.
What is counted
So that it is possible to tell whether anyone is using this and where people stop, four anonymous counters are kept:
- how many times the first page was opened
- how many times the flow was started
- how many times it was finished
- how many times the last screen's question was answered
Those are totals only. They are not tied to you, to a visit, or to each other, and there is no identifier that could join them up. Which answer you gave is not recorded — only that the question was answered. Nothing about the crisis pages is counted at all.
Page views are counted using Cloudflare Web Analytics, which does not use cookies and does not build a profile of you across sites.
What is never collected
No name, no email, no account, no cookies, no advertising or social media trackers, no location, no health information, and nothing you could be identified by. Your data is not sold or shared, because there is none to sell or share.
Turning it off
If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, the counters and the page-view script are both switched off automatically.
Where it is hosted
Settle is hosted by Cloudflare, who will see the technical details of the request — your IP address among them — in the same way any website host does. That is how the internet works rather than something Settle collects.
Malaysian PDPA
Settle is designed not to collect personal data as defined by the Personal Data Protection Act 2010. If you believe it has, or you have a question about any of this, write to hellosettle@proton.me.
For clinicians
Settle is a brief self-help tool intended for use between appointments, not instead of them. It is free, it requires no account, and it has no paid tier, so there is nothing a patient can be upsold. It does not collect patient data.
It deliberately makes no attempt to detect distress or risk. Instead a crisis referral link is fixed to every screen, and the wording never claims to reduce tinnitus loudness. If you think any of it is wrong or unsafe, please say so — the address above reaches a person.
Who made it
Settle is an independent project, not a company. It was built by one person, who has tinnitus.
There is no organisation behind it, nobody is paid to run it, and there is nothing to sell you. That also means there is no support desk — the address above reaches a person, but only one, and not instantly.