Privacy Policy

Your privacy is fundamental to what we do. This policy explains how encouple collects, uses, stores, and protects your personal information when you use our platform.

1. Information we collect

Account information

When you create an account, we collect your email address, name, and authentication credentials. If you sign in via Google, we receive your name, email, and profile picture from Google.

Conversation data

Your conversations with encouple, including messages, questionnaire responses, and therapeutic insights generated during your sessions — including the observations and impressions the AI forms about you to personalize its guidance. This data is central to providing personalized relationship support. How encouple understands and remembers you explains what it keeps, what you see, and how to request a copy.

Usage data

We collect basic usage information such as session timestamps, feature usage patterns, device type, and which ad, search, or link brought you here — both to improve the platform and to see which of our campaigns actually work. Most of this is collected through Google Analytics; section 6 explains what that means and what is never sent to it. Encouple does not follow your activity on other websites, and we do not buy information about you from anyone else.

Payment information

Payment processing is handled entirely by Stripe. We never see, store, or have access to your full credit card number. We receive only a confirmation of payment status and subscription details.

2. How we use your information

• Providing personalized relationship guidance based on your conversation history and assessment results
• Maintaining clinical-grade memory of your therapeutic journey across sessions
• Generating insights and progress tracking for your relationship growth
• Sending account-related emails (password resets, verification, subscription updates)
• Improving the platform through aggregated, anonymized usage patterns
• Measuring how the site, the signup flow, and our advertising perform, using aggregate site-usage data

We do not sell your personal information. We do not use your conversation data to train AI models. Your conversations, questionnaire responses, clinical scores, and insights are never shared with advertisers or used to target ads at you — the only data involved in advertising measurement is the site-usage data described in section 6.

3. Data storage and security

Your data is stored in encrypted databases with access controls. We use industry-standard security practices including:

• Encryption in transit (TLS/HTTPS) and at rest
• Bcrypt password hashing (12 rounds)
• HTTP-only, secure session cookies
• Rate limiting on authentication endpoints
• Regular security reviews

Conversation data is stored in PostgreSQL databases with row-level access controls ensuring users can only access their own data.

4. AI and third-party services

Encouple uses Anthropic's Claude AI to power conversations and OpenAI's embedding service for memory retrieval. When you send a message:

• Your message and relevant therapeutic context are sent to Anthropic for response generation
• Anthropic does not use your data to train their models (per their API data usage policy)
• Conversation embeddings are generated via OpenAI for semantic search within your own session history

No third party receives your full conversation history. Only the context necessary for generating a response is transmitted.

Separately, we use Google Analytics to measure how this website and the app are used. It receives no conversation content of any kind — see section 6.

5. Data retention

Your data is retained as long as your account is active. Guest accounts expire after 7 days. Upon account deletion:

• All conversation data, insights, and session records are permanently deleted
• Account information is removed from our databases
• Deletion is irreversible

You may request data export or deletion at any time by contacting privacy@encouple.com.

6. Cookies

Session and functional cookies

Encouple uses a session cookie to maintain your login state. This cookie is:

• HTTP-only (not accessible to JavaScript)
• Secure (HTTPS only in production)
• Same-site restricted (protection against CSRF)

We also set a small number of functional cookies that our own pages read to render correctly: a flag recording that you are signed in, so this site can send you straight to the app instead of showing you the marketing page; and, if you arrive through a partner invitation, the inviter's first name and photo so the invitation can be displayed, plus the invitation code itself so that the button you click carries you into the right invitation. These are readable by this site's JavaScript, are never sent to a third party, and carry no advertising or cross-site identifiers.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics on this website and in the app to measure how they are used: which pages are viewed, which buttons are clicked, what kind of device you are on, and which ad, search, or link brought you here. It sets its own cookies, which are first-party — readable only by encouple.com and app.encouple.com — and are used to tell one visit from another and to recognize a returning browser. The site-usage data it collects is shared with Google, and is used among other things to measure how well our advertising performs.

What never reaches Google Analytics: your messages, your questionnaire responses, your clinical scores, the insights generated for you, your name, or your email. The app sends analytics events through a fixed list of permitted fields — counts, durations, and short labels such as which mode you were in — and anything outside that list is discarded before it leaves your browser. For the demo conversation on our home page we record only that it happened, roughly how many exchanges it ran, which topic button you started from if you used one, and that it ended; never anything you typed.

If you would rather not be counted, Google's opt-out browser add-on and most browsers' tracking protection will block it. Everything on the site works the same either way.

7. Your rights

You have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you
• Request correction of inaccurate data
• Request deletion of your data
• Export your data in a portable format
• Withdraw consent at any time

To exercise any of these rights, contact privacy@encouple.com. How access, correction, deletion, and export requests work — including what you receive and how long we take — is described in How encouple understands and remembers you. Washington residents: that page also contains our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy.

8. Children's privacy

Encouple is not intended for use by individuals under 18 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. Significant changes will be communicated via email to active account holders. The "Last updated" date at the top reflects the most recent revision.

10. Contact

For privacy-related questions or concerns, contact us at privacy@encouple.com.