Privacy Policy

Last updated October 5, 2026

The short version: Friendly doesn't look at what you journal about. Nothing in the product, including the admin tools used to run Friendly, shows anyone your conversations or entries. This page explains exactly what's collected, who else touches it, and how to delete it.

Who this policy covers

Friendly is currently built and operated by a single person, not a company. Throughout this policy, "we" and "Friendly" mean that operator. You can reach us at hello@myfriendly.app.

What we collect

• Account information: your email address, and either a password (stored as an irreversible cryptographic hash, never in plain text) or a Google account identifier if you sign in with Google. If you choose a voice for a journal's companion, we also keep which voice you picked for that journal.
• Your conversations and journal entries: when you talk to your companion, your speech is converted to text, used to draft a journal entry, and the resulting entry (along with the conversation transcript behind it) is saved to your account so you can find it again. This is encrypted before it's stored in our database, so a leaked backup or exposed database credential wouldn't expose readable entries. The app itself still needs to decrypt entries to show them to you, the same as any product that lets you read your own saved content back.
• Memory notes: after you finish a conversation, Friendly keeps a few short notes about what's worth remembering for that journal, like the people in your life, things you're in the middle of, and things coming up, so you don't have to repeat yourself. Notes are kept separately for each journal and stored the same protected way as your entries. You can read every note on the Memory page. Notes that touch on sensitive topics, like health or money, are blurred there until you tap them, and are left out of exports unless you choose to include them. Friendly never opens a conversation by bringing a note up. It only uses one if you mention something it relates to yourself.
• Basic usage information: when you signed up, when you last used Friendly, and which plan you're on.

We don't collect or store your card details ourselves. If you subscribe to a paid plan, you enter your card directly with Stripe, our payment processor. We only receive confirmation that you're subscribed and basic billing status (like whether a payment succeeded or your subscription is active).

Who else processes it, and why

Friendly relies on a small number of outside services to work. We don't sell or share your data for advertising; the only sharing that happens is what's needed to run the product:

• Anthropic (Claude): reads your conversation to draft your journal entry and to write your memory notes. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, this data is not used to train their models, and is retained by them for a short period (currently seven days) for safety purposes only.
• ElevenLabs: handles the voice side of your conversation, turning your speech into text and the companion's replies into speech. We've configured ElevenLabs to delete both the audio and the transcript of each conversation immediately after it's processed.
• Neon: hosts the database where your account and journal entries are stored.
• Render: hosts the Friendly application itself.
• Google: only if you choose "Sign in with Google," which confirms your identity and email; we don't receive your Google password.
• Stripe: only if you subscribe to a paid plan. Handles your card details and billing directly. We never see or store your card number.
• Resend: delivers transactional emails on our behalf, like password reset links, to the email address on your account.
• PostHog: product analytics that records how the app is used, things like when you sign up, how long your conversations last, whether you edit or copy an entry, which voice you choose, how you use Memory, and when you cancel a subscription. It is tied to your email so we can see patterns across a single account and make Friendly better. It only receives counts, timings and simple choices. It never receives what you say to Friendly or anything you write, including your journal entries, memory notes, and journal names and descriptions. We don't record your screen.

All of these providers are based in the United States, so your data crosses the Canada–US border in the course of being processed, even though Friendly itself is operated from Canada.

What we deliberately don't do

Nothing in Friendly, including the internal tools used to check on signups, usage, and billing, displays your journal entries or conversation content. Those tools only ever show account-level information: things like your email, when you signed up, and how many entries you've written, never what's in them.

Your controls

• Export: download every journal entry you've written, at any time, from Settings → Account.
• Memory: read, correct, or delete any note, clear all of a journal's notes, or turn memory off for a journal, from the Memory page. Turning memory off for a journal means Friendly stops using that journal's notes and stops adding to them, including for conversations that happen while it's off. You can also export your notes from Settings → Account.
• Delete: permanently delete your account from the same page. This immediately and permanently removes your account, your sessions, every journal entry tied to it, and your memory notes. We also ask our analytics provider to delete the usage records linked to your email, and it clears them in the background shortly afterward. There's no recovery period, and no copy is kept afterward.
• Correct: update your email address at any time from the same settings page.

How long we keep it

We keep your account and journal entries for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account, that data is removed immediately and permanently, as described above. Usage records at our analytics provider are kept until you delete your account, or until the provider's own retention period ends, whichever comes first.

Memory notes are kept until you delete them, with a few exceptions. A note about something coming up is dropped once its date has passed. A note about something you're in the middle of is dropped if it hasn't come up in about two months. A note is deleted along with a journal entry if that entry was the only place it came from, and all of a journal's notes are deleted if you delete the journal.

If there's ever a breach

If we ever discover a security incident that puts your personal information at real risk, we'll notify Canada's Privacy Commissioner as required by law, and email you directly to explain what happened, what was involved, and what we're doing about it. We won't sit on it or bury it in a quiet policy update.

Children

Friendly isn't intended for anyone under 16. We don't knowingly collect information from children.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Continuing to use Friendly after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data? Email hello@myfriendly.app.