Your privacy

Plain language, version v0.3, last updated 31 August 2026. This page covers the Everyday Buddhist Companion; the Everyday Buddhist website and school have their own privacy policy. Everything here is written so you can check it against what the companion actually does.

What the companion keeps

Only what it needs, and only what you allow:

• Your email address, used to sign you in and to reach you about your account.
• Your consent record: that you agreed, when, which version of the terms, and the retention choices you made.
• Your conversations, kept only if you turn memory on. With memory off, an exchange is shown once and never written down.
• Your journal: only the notes you choose to keep.
• Notes to the people who tend the companion: anything you send with /feedback or the report form, plus a referral you ask for. These ride your export and leave with your record if you withdraw.

Our server also keeps routine access logs: which pages were requested, when, and whether the request was signed in. They never contain what you write.

How long it is kept

On your schedule. Conversations age out after the number of days you set (90 by default), and you can change that, or clear everything, any time from Your record.

What you can do, any time

From Your record you can read everything the companion holds, remove a single exchange or clear all of them, adjust how long things are kept, edit or clear your journal, and download the whole record.

Who can see your conversations

• Other practitioners never can. Your record is yours alone. It is not visible to anyone else who uses the companion, and it is not a pool anyone browses.
• The small team that runs the companion does not read your conversations as a matter of course. Someone on the team may look at stored data for a specific reason: to run the service, to investigate a problem you report, or to check the quality of the companion's answers.
• A crisis disclosure is not saved to your record. If you tell the companion you are in danger, it points you to real human help, and that exchange is not written into your record, your export, or any quality-review log. Like every exchange, it is still processed by our AI provider to compose the reply, under the retention practices described below. We keep a count of how often crisis referrals happen, with nothing about who or what, for safety monitoring.

What the companion does not do

• No engagement metrics. The companion does not measure or optimise for how often you come back. There is nothing to be hooked by.
• No advertising, no analytics, no tracking. The only cookies are the ones that keep you signed in.
• Never sold, and never shared for advertising, behavioral targeting, or any unrelated commercial purpose. What you write goes only to the services that operate the companion, listed below, or where the law requires disclosure.
• Never used to train AI models. We do not use your conversations or the teachers' material to train AI, and our AI provider is barred by contract from doing so.

The services the companion runs on

The companion is built on a small number of services that process data on our behalf, under terms that limit what they can do with it:

• Anthropic provides the AI that composes each reply. Your message and the relevant teaching are sent to it for each turn. Anthropic states that this data is not used to train its models, and that under its standard API policy inputs and outputs are deleted within 30 days, subject to the exceptions its policy states, which include retention needed to enforce its usage policy or to comply with law.
• Supabase hosts the database where your record lives, and its encrypted backups.
• Render hosts the application.
• Resend delivers sign-in and account email.

No other service receives what you write.

Backups, and what leaving really deletes

If you ever leave, your record goes with you. Everything above is deleted from the running service, including the operator notes. We keep encrypted backups of the whole system, so a copy of your record sits in those for up to seven days before it ages out of every backup we control. Data already sent to the services above may remain for the limited retention periods described here, or longer where the law requires it of them. We also keep one note saying that you withdrew and when, with nothing else in it, so that restoring a backup can never bring your record back. That note is removed once the last backup that predates your withdrawal is gone.

How it is protected

We use reasonable administrative and technical safeguards appropriate to the small amount of data we hold: encrypted connections, encrypted backups, and access limited to the few people who run the service. No internet service can guarantee absolute security, and we will not pretend otherwise; what we can promise is to hold little, and to tell you plainly if something goes wrong.

Children

The companion is for adults. It is not offered to, or directed at, anyone under 18.

When this policy changes

This page carries a version and a date, and we keep prior versions. If a change matters, we say so before it applies.

Questions about any of this? See Contact, or write to support@everydaybuddhist.org.