Privacy Policy

1. Who we are, and how to reach us

Sorty is operated at gosorty.com from the State of Georgia, United States. For anything in this policy, including a request about your own data, write to hello@gosorty.com. We are the data controller for the information described here.

2. What we collect

Information you give us

• ·Account details. Your email address and a hashed password. We never see or store your password in a readable form; authentication is handled by Supabase Auth.
• ·What you tell the companion. Everything you write in a conversation, including during onboarding.
• ·What you write elsewhere. Loads and their titles and notes, your answers at each step, journal entries, mood check-ins and their notes, reminders, and anything you attach such as a photo or a document.
• ·Community posts and replies. If you post in the community, that content is visible to other people using Sorty.
• ·Preferences. Your display name, the areas you said weigh on you, your check-in rhythm, and your notification and privacy settings.

Information the companion creates about you

This is unusual enough to describe plainly. As you talk, the companion writes short notes so it does not ask you the same thing twice: who the people in your life are, situations you are living through, patterns it notices, things you worked out yourself, and how you want to be spoken to. It also keeps provisional working theories, which are its own interpretations and may simply be wrong.

These are stored with the same encryption as everything else, are never shown to anyone but you, and are included in your export and deletion. You can see all of them by exporting your data.

Information we collect automatically

• ·Session cookies, to keep you signed in. These are strictly necessary and are described in section 8.
• ·Basic server logs kept by our hosting provider, which may include IP addresses and request timestamps, used to keep the service running and to investigate abuse.
• ·Your timezone, read from your browser so the companion knows whether it is your morning or your evening.

We do not use analytics, advertising trackers, session recording, or third-party scripts that profile you. There is no advertising network in this product.

What we do not collect

We do not ask for your real name, address, phone number, date of birth, or any government identifier. We do not collect location data. We do not buy information about you from anyone.

3. How your writing is protected

Everything you write is encrypted before it is stored, using AES-256 with authenticated encryption. The key lives in our application environment and is not held by the database, so a copy of the database on its own is not readable. Each value is encrypted separately with a random initialisation vector, so identical text does not produce identical stored values.

Supabase additionally encrypts the underlying storage at rest, and every connection to and from the app runs over TLS. These are separate layers: ours protects against a database copy, theirs protects against physical access to the disks.

Access is enforced by the database, not just the app

Every query runs under row-level security, which means the database physically refuses to return another person’s rows rather than relying on the application to ask correctly. A bug in our code cannot hand you someone else’s conversation.

The limits of this, stated honestly

Encryption at rest protects against a leaked database copy, a stolen database credential, or anyone browsing the database directly. It does not protect against someone who has both the database and our application environment, because the application must be able to decrypt your writing in order to show it to you.

This is not end-to-end encryption. We could, in principle, read what you have written. We do not, as a matter of policy and practice, and section 5 describes the only circumstances in which anyone here would. If you need a system where that is technically impossible, this is not that system, and we would rather tell you now than imply otherwise.

4. Why we use your information, and on what legal basis

For people in the UK, EU, or anywhere with similar law, the lawful bases are as follows.

• ·To provide the service (performance of a contract): storing what you write, showing it back to you, letting the companion respond, and remembering things between sessions.
• ·Because you have explicitly consented: the content you write is likely to include information about your health, which receives special protection in law. You provide it voluntarily and can withdraw by deleting it or your account at any time.
• ·Our legitimate interests, where they do not override yours: keeping the service secure, preventing abuse, and fixing faults.
• ·To comply with the law, where we are legally required to retain or produce something.

We do not carry out automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects about you. The companion responds to what you write; it does not make determinations about your rights, your access to anything, or your care.

5. Who can see your information

You

Your conversations, loads, journal, check-ins and companion memories are visible only to you.

Anthropic, because the companion cannot work otherwise

When you send a message, that message and relevant context from your history are sent to Anthropic’s API so the model can reply. There is no way to have an AI companion without this, and we would rather be direct about it than bury it.

Anthropic does not use data submitted through their API to train their models. They act as our processor under contract. This is the only third party that sees the content of your conversations.

Our infrastructure providers

• ·Supabase hosts the database and handles authentication. They store encrypted content on our behalf and do not use it for their own purposes.
• ·Netlify hosts and serves the application.
• ·Stripe processes payments if you subscribe. They receive your email and payment details. We never see or store your card number; it goes directly to Stripe and never touches our servers. Stripe does not receive anything you have written.

Each of these is bound by contract to process data only on our instructions. We do not sell, rent, or share your information with anyone for their own marketing, and we have never done so.

Nobody at Sorty, in the ordinary course of things

We do not read your conversations. The circumstances in which someone here could look at specific data are: if you ask us to while we are helping you with a problem, if we must investigate a serious security incident or credible threat to someone’s safety, or if we are legally compelled. Where we are permitted to tell you, we will.

Anyone you choose

You can set up a trusted supporter and choose what they would be allowed to see. Sharing is not currently switched on: no supporter can sign in and nothing is sent to anyone. If that changes we will say so here before it does, and it will stay off until you turn it on.

If the business changes hands

If Sorty were ever acquired or merged, your information could transfer as part of that. We would tell you before it happened, and any acquirer would be bound by this policy until you were given notice of any change and a genuine chance to export and delete your data first.

6. Safety, crisis, and what we do not do

Sorty checks messages for language suggesting you may be at immediate risk of harming yourself. When it finds it, the app shows crisis resources: phone numbers and text lines you can contact. That check runs automatically and is part of how the app responds to you.

We do not contact emergency services, your family, or anyone else on your behalf, and we do not monitor your account for signs of crisis outside of your own conversations. Sorty is not a monitoring service and nobody is watching. If you need someone to intervene, you have to reach out to the people and services who can, and the crisis page lists them.

We mention this under privacy because people reasonably want to know whether disclosing something here could trigger a call to someone. It cannot.

7. Community

What you post in the community is visible to other people using Sorty and is not encrypted in the way private content is, because it is shown to others by design. Anonymous is the default, and your display name is never your email address. Nothing connects your community activity to your private loads, journal or conversations.

Treat anything you post there as public. Reports of content are stored so moderation can act on them.

8. Cookies

We use strictly necessary cookies only. They keep you signed in and protect against cross-site request forgery. They are marked httpOnly, which means page scripts cannot read them: a readable session token is the thing an attacker wants most, and keeping it out of reach of JavaScript is worth the extra work.

We do not use advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, which is why you have not been asked to accept any. The only thing we keep in your browser’s own storage is which chat background you picked, and it never leaves your device.

9. How long we keep things

For as long as you keep your account. We do not expire or automatically delete what you have written, because coming back to something six months later is part of how this works.

• ·If you delete your account, your content is removed immediately, as described in section 10.
• ·Backupsheld by our database provider retain a rolling window of recent snapshots, currently seven days, before they rotate out. Deleted content can persist in those until they do. We cannot selectively erase a single person’s rows from a backup, and claiming otherwise would be untrue.
• ·Payment records are kept by Stripe and by us for as long as tax and accounting law requires, typically six to seven years. These contain no content you wrote.

10. Your rights, and how to use them

Two of these work immediately, inside the app, without asking us.

• ·Get a copy.Settings → Privacy and data → Export all my data downloads everything your account holds as a JSON file, straight away. It is free, including after you cancel a subscription.
• ·Delete everything.Settings → Privacy and data → Delete my account removes every conversation, load, journal entry, check-in, reminder, companion memory and community post. It is immediate and cannot be undone, so export first if you want a copy.

You also have the right to correct inaccurate information, to object to or restrict certain processing, to withdraw consent, and to ask us to transfer your data to another service. Write to us and we will act within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not make the service worse for you because you exercised a right.

If you are in the UK or EU and think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your data protection authority. We would rather you told us first so we can put it right.

If you are in California, you have the rights described above under the CCPA as amended, including the right to know, to delete, to correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined, and we do not process it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

11. Where your information is held

Our database is hosted in the United States. If you are outside the US, using Sorty means your information is transferred there. Where that transfer is from the UK or EU, it is made under the standard contractual clauses our providers maintain for this purpose.

12. Children

Sorty is for people 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone younger. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will delete it and its contents. If you believe a child has given us information, write to us and we will remove it.

13. Security incidents

If a breach occurs that is likely to put your rights or freedoms at risk, we will notify the relevant authority within 72 hours where the law requires it, and we will tell you directly and without undue delay. We will say what happened, what was affected, and what we are doing, rather than issuing something vague.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that affects you, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and update the date at the top. We will not quietly broaden how we use your information and rely on you not noticing. Material changes to how content is shared would require your consent, not merely a notice.

15. Contact

Anything at all, including if something here does not match what you see in the app: hello@gosorty.com.

See also our terms of service.