# SoberSide.ai — Privacy Policy
**Effective Date: June 4, 2026**
**Last Updated: June 4, 2026**
This Privacy Policy explains how SoberSide.ai ("SoberSide," "we," "us," or "our"), operated by **SoberSide, a brand of BEELO Inc.**, together with its parent **Papa Ray Inc.**, collects, uses, stores, and shares information when you use our website, mobile-installable application, and related services (collectively, the "Service").
We know recovery is personal. We take privacy seriously. If anything here is unclear, email **contact@soberside.ai**.
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## 1. THE SHORT VERSION
- We store what you tell us in conversations and what you share in your profile. We use it to make the Service work for you and to remember your story.
- We do not sell your personal information.
- We are not a HIPAA-covered entity. What you share is not protected health information under HIPAA.
- We use a small number of trusted vendors (described below) to operate the Service.
- You can delete your account and data anytime by emailing contact@soberside.ai.
- If you are in crisis: **call 988 (Suicide & Crisis Lifeline)** or **911**.
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## 2. INFORMATION WE COLLECT
### 2.1 Information You Give Us
- **Account information** — username, email address, password (stored as a salted hash, never plain text), recovery code, optional phone number.
- **Recovery profile** — sobriety start date, substance you are in recovery from, recovery goal, zip code (used to find local AA meetings and resources).
- **Conversations and content** — messages you send, voice memos, check-ins, mood logs, and any other content you submit.
- **Emergency contacts** — names, phone numbers, and relationships of people you choose to list.
- **Terms acceptance** — timestamp, version, and IP address when you accepted these Terms (legal audit trail).
### 2.2 Information We Collect Automatically
- **Device and connection data** — browser type, IP address, operating system, time zone, language.
- **Usage data** — pages viewed, features used, time spent, message counts.
- **Cookies** — we use a single session cookie (named `soberside-session`) to keep you logged in. We do not use third-party advertising or tracking cookies.
### 2.3 Information We Do NOT Collect
- We do **not** access your microphone, camera, or contacts unless you explicitly grant permission for a specific feature.
- We do **not** track your location in the background.
- We do **not** use third-party advertising trackers (no Google Analytics, no Meta pixel, no ad networks).
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## 3. HOW WE USE YOUR INFORMATION
We use your information to:
1. **Provide the Service** — log you in, deliver messages, store your conversations, and remember your profile.
2. **Personalize your experience** — generate proactive encouragement based on what you have shared, the day of the week, your sobriety milestones, and upcoming events you have mentioned.
3. **Send communications** — confirmation emails, password reset emails, and important account notices. We do not send marketing emails unless you opt in.
4. **Protect users and the Service** — detect crisis signals (and surface 988/SAMHSA resources), detect abuse, prevent fraud, and enforce our Terms.
5. **Improve the Service** — analyze aggregate usage to improve features. We do not use your personal conversations to train any general AI model.
6. **Comply with the law** — respond to lawful legal requests, court orders, or regulatory requirements.
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## 4. AI PROCESSING
The Service uses third-party AI models (currently **Anthropic Claude**) to generate responses, detect events, and provide encouragement. When you send a message:
- Your message is transmitted to Anthropic's API along with relevant profile context.
- Anthropic processes the message and returns a response.
- Anthropic's data-use terms apply to that processing. As of the effective date, Anthropic states that API inputs and outputs are **not used to train their models** unless you separately opt in directly with Anthropic.
- We may also send a copy of your recent messages to a fast classification model (currently **Claude Haiku**) to detect upcoming events and crisis signals.
You can review Anthropic's privacy practices at https://www.anthropic.com/privacy.
If we change AI providers or our data-handling practices, we will update this Policy.
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## 5. VOICE PROCESSING
If you use voice features:
- **Speech-to-text** — your microphone audio is processed by your browser's built-in Web Speech API (typically Google or Apple). The audio does not pass through our servers. We only receive the resulting text transcript.
- **Text-to-speech** — when the assistant speaks back, we use **ElevenLabs** to generate audio. The text of the response is sent to ElevenLabs, audio is returned, and may be cached briefly on our servers to avoid re-generating identical audio.
If you do not want voice features, you can disable them in Settings.
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## 6. WHO WE SHARE INFORMATION WITH
We do **not sell** your personal information. We share information only with the following categories of recipients:
### 6.1 Service Providers ("Subprocessors")
We use a small set of trusted vendors to run the Service. They are contractually limited to using your data only to provide their service to us:
| Vendor | What they do | What they receive |
|--------|--------------|-------------------|
| **Anthropic** (Claude) | LLM responses, event detection | Your messages, profile context, sobriety day count |
| **ElevenLabs** | Voice text-to-speech | Text of assistant responses |
| **Resend** | Transactional email delivery | Your email address, your username, links |
| **Stripe** | Payment processing (if you subscribe) | Name, email, payment card details (we never see your card number) |
| **Google Maps Platform** | Geocoding and Places search for AA meetings and kava bars | Your zip code |
| **Hostinger** | Hosting infrastructure (VPS) | All server-stored data |
### 6.2 Legal & Safety
We may disclose information when we believe in good faith it is necessary to:
- Comply with a law, subpoena, court order, or other lawful request;
- Protect the rights, property, or safety of users, the Company, or the public;
- Detect or prevent fraud, security incidents, or abuse;
- In the event of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets (subject to confidentiality obligations).
We will not voluntarily provide your conversations to law enforcement absent valid legal process or a credible threat to life.
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## 7. DATA RETENTION
- **Account and conversation data** — retained while your account is active.
- **Backups** — our database is backed up daily and retained for 14 days. Deleted data may persist in backups for up to 14 days before being purged.
- **Logs** — server logs (IP addresses, request paths) are retained for up to 30 days.
- **Deleted accounts** — when you request account deletion, we permanently remove your data within 30 days (allowing time for backup expiration).
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## 8. YOUR RIGHTS & CHOICES
You can, at any time:
- **View your data** — log in and review your profile, conversations, settings, and recovery code.
- **Update your data** — edit your profile, email, zip code, voice preferences, and other settings.
- **Delete your account** — email **contact@soberside.ai** with the subject "Delete my account." We will confirm and delete within 30 days.
- **Export your data** — email **contact@soberside.ai** with the subject "Data export request." We will provide a machine-readable copy of your conversations and profile within 30 days.
- **Opt out of non-essential emails** — we currently only send transactional emails (verification, password reset). If we add marketing emails, every one will include an unsubscribe link.
- **Disable voice** — toggle off in Settings.
- **Disable proactive messages** — adjust or turn off in Settings.
### 8.1 California, Texas, and Other State Residents
Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under state privacy laws (such as the California Consumer Privacy Act / CPRA, the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act, the Virginia Consumer Data Protection Act, and similar). These may include the right to:
- Know what categories of personal information we collect, use, and share
- Access your specific data
- Correct inaccurate data
- Delete your data
- Opt out of sale or sharing of personal information (we do not sell)
- Limit the use of sensitive personal information
- Be free from discrimination for exercising these rights
To exercise any of these rights, email **contact@soberside.ai**. We will not discriminate against you for exercising them.
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## 9. CHILDREN'S PRIVACY
The Service is for adults 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact **contact@soberside.ai** and we will delete it.
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## 10. INTERNATIONAL USERS
The Service is operated from the United States. If you access it from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S. and other countries where our service providers operate. By using the Service, you consent to that transfer. We have not certified to any cross-border data-transfer framework and the Service is not intended for users outside the United States.
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## 11. SECURITY
We take reasonable, industry-standard steps to protect your data, including:
- Encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS for all traffic)
- Hashed passwords (scrypt with per-user salt — never plain text)
- HTTP-only, secure session cookies
- Server access restricted to authorized personnel
- Daily database backups with restricted access
- Regular security review of dependencies
No system is perfectly secure. If you believe your account has been compromised, contact **contact@soberside.ai** immediately.
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## 12. NOT A HIPAA COVERED ENTITY
SoberSide is not a HIPAA-covered entity or a business associate of one. The information you share with the Service is not protected health information under HIPAA. We treat your data with care, but the legal protections of HIPAA do not apply.
If you receive care from a HIPAA-covered provider (a doctor, therapist, treatment program), do not assume their HIPAA protections extend to anything you share here.
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## 13. CHANGES TO THIS POLICY
We may update this Policy from time to time. We will post the updated Policy with a new "Last Updated" date. For material changes (for example, a new category of data sharing), we will notify you through the Service or by email before the change takes effect. Your continued use after the effective date of any update constitutes acceptance.
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## 14. CONTACT
For any privacy questions, requests, or concerns:
- **Email:** contact@soberside.ai
- **Legal entity:** SoberSide, a brand of BEELO Inc. (a subsidiary of Papa Ray Inc.)
- **Jurisdiction:** Texas, United States
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**By using SoberSide, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy.**