How Encouple understands and remembers you

Encouple works because it remembers. This page explains, in plain language, what it remembers, how it forms its understanding of you, what you can see and control, and how to ask us for a copy of your information. It is part of our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service; for the topics it covers, this page governs.

1. Encouple is an AI, not a clinician

Every conversation you have in Encouple is with an artificial-intelligence system, not a person. Encouple is not a licensed therapist, counselor, psychologist, or medical provider, and nothing it says is a diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice. It is built on established relationship and psychology frameworks and is designed as a complement to professional care, not a replacement for it.

If you are in crisis, in danger, or thinking about harming yourself or someone else, contact emergency services or a crisis line now: 988 (Suicide and Crisis Lifeline), 1-800-799-7233 (National Domestic Violence Hotline), or text HOME to 741741.

We tell you that you are talking to an AI before you start, again whenever you return after seven or more days away, and any time you ask. Encouple is for adults only.

2. What Encouple forms an understanding of

To give you guidance that fits you rather than generic advice, Encouple builds and keeps an internal understanding of you. That understanding includes things you tell it directly, and also impressions it forms from your conversations and questionnaires. Concretely, it stores:

• What you tell it about your life. Names of people you mention, your relationship history, events, circumstances, and goals.
• Questionnaire results. Scored results from the assessments you complete, which are based on validated psychological instruments.
• Observations and patterns. The AI's working notes about patterns it notices across your sessions: for example, how you tend to respond in conflict, what you avoid, what seems to help, and how your mood or outlook appears to it over time. Some of these observations concern sensitive things such as emotional state, mental-health indicators, and personality tendencies.
• Summaries. Condensed summaries of your sessions and of each topic, so the AI can pick up where you left off.
• Your own words. Short quotes from your conversations, attached to observations as the evidence for them.

These impressions are provisional and can be wrong. They are the AI's best current read, updated as it learns more, not established facts about you and not a clinical assessment by a professional. Encouple is designed to revise them as new conversations and your real-world results come in, and to treat your disagreement as important evidence (see section 5).

3. Why some of it is internal

Encouple keeps its working notes in the precise, sometimes clinical language it needs in order to give you accurate guidance. When it talks with you or shows you a summary, it translates that understanding into plain, careful language. So what you see in the app is a faithful translation of what the AI understands, not a word-for-word copy of its internal notes. We do this for the same reason a good therapist's session notes read differently from what they say to you: precise internal language produces better guidance, and blunt clinical shorthand shown out of context can mislead or hurt.

This means there are things the AI has observed about you that you will not see verbatim in the app. Section 6 explains how to request a copy of your information.

4. Who and what can see your understanding

• No human at Encouple reads your conversations or the AI's notes about you in the ordinary course of business. A small number of authorized staff can reach production systems only when strictly necessary to keep the service running or to fulfil a request you make.
• AI providers. To generate each reply, the relevant parts of your understanding are sent to Anthropic, whose Claude models power the conversation, under terms that prohibit training on your data. OpenAI generates the numeric "embeddings" used to find related past conversations; it receives short summaries for that purpose only. No provider receives your full history.
• Your partner never sees any of it unless you explicitly choose, topic by topic, to share, and you can turn sharing off at any time. Partner notes are sent one at a time with your approval.
• Advertisers and data brokers: never. Nothing about your conversations, questionnaires, or the AI's understanding of you is sold, shared for advertising, or used to train AI models.

5. What you can control

• Privacy Mode. Turn it on for any session, and that session is kept out of Encouple's long-term understanding entirely. It is never summarized, never contributes an observation, and is not used to update anything the AI believes about you. Nothing from a Privacy Mode session is kept beyond the session itself.
• Delete a session. Deleting a session removes it and withdraws every observation that came from it. The AI's summaries and understanding are rebuilt without it.
• Say it doesn't fit. When Encouple offers you its read of a pattern, tell it if it is wrong or has changed. It takes disagreement seriously and will not repeat a reading you have pushed back on in that conversation. Your disagreement becomes part of the record; it does not erase the AI's observation, for the reasons in section 6.
• Partner sharing is off by default and always your choice.
• Delete your account. Everything is permanently deleted: conversations, questionnaire results, observations, summaries, safety records, and account details.

6. Asking for a copy, a correction, or deletion

You can ask us at any time, at privacy@encouple.com, to:

Access a copy of your information

We will provide the information you have given Encouple, your questionnaire results, your session summaries, and the plain-language topic summaries the app shows you. We will also tell you which topics the AI holds additional internal observations about and the general nature of those observations. Because those working notes are written in clinical shorthand and were never meant to be read on their own, we do not include them by default; if you ask for them, we will provide them together with a plain-language guide to reading them. Some may be uncomfortable to read. They are the AI's provisional impressions, not judgments about you.

Correct information that is wrong

If a fact we hold is inaccurate (a name, a date, something you said that we recorded wrongly), we will correct it. Where what you dispute is an observation or impression the AI has formed, we cannot "correct" an impression the way we correct a date, but we will record your statement of disagreement, in your words, so that it stays with that observation and is weighed in all future guidance.

Delete your information

You can delete individual sessions in the app at any time. To delete your whole account, write to us and we will do it promptly and confirm when it is done. Section 8 lists the few things we keep for a limited time afterward.

Export your information

On request we will provide your information in a portable format.

How requests work

We will verify that the request comes from you, normally by asking you to confirm from the email address on your account, and respond within 45 days; if we need longer, we will tell you why and when. We will not deny you service, charge you, or treat you differently for making a request. If we cannot fulfil part of a request, we will tell you why, and you may appeal by replying to our response; we will answer the appeal within 45 days.

7. Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy (Washington residents)

Encouple is available throughout the United States and is not offered outside it. If you live in Washington, the My Health My Data Act treats the observations described in section 2 about your emotional and mental state as "consumer health data," including where they are inferred by software. This section is our consumer health data privacy policy under that law.

• What we collect and why. The categories in section 2: things you tell us about your life, questionnaire results, the AI's observations about emotional and mental state and behaviour, summaries, and short quotes from your conversations. We collect them for one purpose: to provide the personalized guidance you asked for. We do not use them for advertising, and we do not sell them.
• Where it comes from. From you: your conversations, your questionnaire answers, and, if you use partner sharing, what your partner has chosen to share with you. We do not buy or obtain health data from anyone else.
• Who we share it with. Only the processors that provide the service on our behalf, under contracts that limit them to that purpose: Anthropic (generates the AI's replies) and OpenAI (generates embeddings for memory retrieval). No other third party, affiliate, or processor receives consumer health data. Google Analytics, Stripe, and our email provider receive no health data.
• Your rights. To confirm whether we collect your consumer health data and receive a copy of it; to receive the list of third parties we have shared it with (the two above); to withdraw consent for its collection or sharing; and to have it deleted, including from our processors. To exercise them, use the process in section 6. You may appeal a decision the same way, and if you are not satisfied with the outcome of an appeal you may contact the Washington Attorney General.
• Consent. Collecting this data is necessary to provide the service you requested. Sharing beyond the processors above would require your separate consent, which we do not ask for because we do not do it.

Residents of other states with consumer-health-data laws have similar rights and may use the same process.

8. How long we keep it

Your understanding is kept for as long as your account is active, because it is what makes the guidance yours. Guest accounts expire after seven days. When you delete a session, the related information and observations are removed and the AI's summaries are rebuilt without it. When you delete your account, everything in section 2 is permanently deleted along with your account details. A few things are kept for a limited time or for a specific reason:

• Safety records. If a message in a regular session suggests a risk to someone's life or safety, we keep a separate record of that message, even if you later delete the session, so that we can review how the system responds to safety situations. Privacy Mode sessions produce no safety records. These records are deleted with your account.
• Billing records. Stripe keeps payment records under its own policy; we keep subscription and payment-status records for as long as tax and accounting rules require, up to seven years.
• Backups. Encrypted backup copies of our database roll off within 30 days of deletion.
• Legal obligations. Anything we are required by law to retain, for as long as we are required to retain it.
• Aggregate usage data that does not identify you.

9. Changes to this page

If we change how Encouple forms or keeps its understanding of you in a way that matters, we will tell active account holders by email before the change takes effect, and update the date at the top.

10. Questions

Write to privacy@encouple.com. Encouple LLC, 6708 W Spring Hollow Ln, Highland, UT 84003.