Privacy Policy

Who we are

Smriti (“we”, “us”) is an early-pilot service operated from India for family caregivers of people living with memory loss. For anything in this policy, write to us at the contact address at the bottom of this page.

The short version

You make one short recording and tell us the name your family calls you, in one sitting. In that recording you talk to us about your loved one for two or three minutes, and it is what the copy of your voice is made from. We use it to send your loved one a short daily message in a digital copy of your voice: a gentle nudge arrives on their phone, and one tap plays it. Every message is AI-generated, and we never hide that from you. You decide how your family hears about it. You can also send us a photograph to go with the message, ask us to keep a paper safe so we can give it back before an appointment, ask Smriti a question of your own in the chat, and download the written record of everything that has been sent. Each of those happens only because you asked, and each is described below. Both of your controls live in the app: sign in at smriti.care, open Settings, and choose Stop or delete everything. Stopping pauses every message and keeps your data; deleting erases it, including the voice copy at our voice partner. Before you agree we hold only your phone number and your place in the setup; no recording is taken until you do.

If you join the waiting list

Neither app is open to everyone yet, so the front page offers a waiting list instead. Joining it is not an account and not the start of the service. It buys one thing: an address we can write to when we open, and a few answers that tell us which queue you are waiting in.

We keep what you type on that form. Your name and your email address, which are required, and, if you choose to give them, your phone number, your city and country, which phone you use, how you are related to the person you care for, which language you would want the messages written in, roughly when you would want to start, how you heard about us, and anything you write in the note. A phone number we cannot make sense of is thrown away rather than stored. We also keep the fact that you ticked the box, and the date of the wording on this page as it stood when you ticked it. We do not keep your IP address, the page that sent you here, or which browser you used.

None of the four consents described below are taken on that form, because none of them apply to a list. The tick means one thing, which is permission to write to you about Smriti. The list is never passed to anyone else and there is no advertising on it.

Coming off the list is an email to the address at the foot of this page, and we delete the entry. Because a waiting list entry is attached to no account, erasing an account does not reach it, and the two have to be asked for separately.

What we collect, and when

From the very beginning we keep two things, because the setup cannot continue without them: your phone number, and where you are in the setup. Apart from a waiting list entry, if you left one, nothing else is collected and no recording is taken until you have read our consent notice and tapped “I agree”. That single agreement covers four things, each recorded separately against the version of our wording in force at the time: use of your voice, the daily messages, your authority to arrange them for your loved one, and the disclosure, set out on this page, that the messages are AI-generated. After that, and only after that, we collect:

• Your phone number. This is how we reach you and how we know you.
• Your voice recording, the two or three minutes where you talk to us about your loved one, and the digital copy of your voice created from it. The heart of the service.
• What you say in your recording. It is turned into text, and that text is read by our AI provider to pull out the facts, routines and people you mention, including anyone you tell us has passed away, and, from the same reading, how simply and gently each day’s message should be written. Each day’s message then draws only on what you actually said, and never touches what it should not.
• The name your loved one calls you, which appears on the daily nudge so they can see who the message is from, and the name you give us for your loved one, which the messages use.
• Which verb ending your messages should use for you, and for your loved one. Hindi changes the verb depending on who is speaking and who is being spoken about, so we show you the two endings and ask which one sounds right. It is an answer about words, not a record of who either of you is, and either question can be left out, in which case we go on writing around it the way we do today.
• Your loved one’s phone number, which we confirm with a one-time code sent to their phone, so messages can only ever be set up for a number that is really theirs.
• Anything you write to us in the chat after set-up. It is kept and read by our automatic review, because a caregiver telling us something was wrong is exactly what that review must act on. If you ask Smriti a question of your own, that question is also sent to our AI provider so an answer can be written for you. The answer comes back to you in writing, in this chat, in Smriti’s name. It is never spoken in your voice and it never goes to your loved one.
• Photographs you send us. They are shown only to your loved one, alongside the daily message, and to nobody else. Nothing reads the picture. They are stored encrypted, with no public link, exactly as your recordings are.
• Songs you send us, if you choose to share any. A song is played to your loved one on a day the daily message did not reach them, announced in the chat as one you picked for them, and it is heard by nobody else. Nothing listens to it. It is stored encrypted, with no public link, in the same place as your recordings.
• Papers you ask us to keep for you: a prescription, a report, a discharge note, as a PDF or a photograph. We hold them for one reason, so that you can download them again in the Smriti app when you need them, before an appointment. We do not open them and no AI reads them, ever. They are stored encrypted, with no public link, exactly as your recordings are. Only you, and anyone in your family you have allowed to see Reports, can download them. We never email them.
• What your loved one sends back, if they reply. Their voice note reaches you in their own voice. It is also turned into text, so that if your family has already recorded an answer to what they are asking, that answer can be found and played to them in your voice. If you have turned on replies, the text is also sent to our AI provider so a short answer can be written and spoken back. See “When your loved one talks back” below.
• Where your loved one’s phone is, but only if they use the Smriti app on it and have agreed there. See “Where your loved one is” below.
• Delivery records: which daily messages were sent and whether they arrived, so the service actually works.
• A report, if the Smriti app on your phone stops working. It says what the app was doing in its own code when it broke, which version of the app it was, and what kind of phone and operating system it ran on. It carries none of the things above: not your number, not your name, not a word of any message, not a photograph, and never a picture of your screen. If a report looks like it is carrying any of those, the app throws the whole report away rather than send it.
• Your consent records: what you agreed to, when, and under which version of the wording.

Signing in on our website

Once your Smriti is running, you can also open a private page on our website to look back over what has been sent, tend the things you have told us about your loved one, and see the photographs you shared. Nothing there reaches your loved one; it is your own view of what is already happening. Signing in is the only way into it, and it means we hold a little more:

• If you sign in with Google, Google tells us your email address and a lasting identifier for your account, and we keep both, with a note of when each was last confirmed. We ask Google for nothing else: not your name, not your picture, not your contacts, and nothing in your mail. Signing in this way also tells Google that you use Smriti.
• Your email address on its own never opens an account and never reaches one. Your phone number is what a Smriti belongs to, so an address that already belongs to a caregiver is refused rather than joined to theirs.
• If you sign in with a code instead, we send a six-digit code to your phone number and keep a short record of that request: your number, a scrambled form of the code, and a scrambled form of the internet address the request came from, so that nobody can sit and try numbers all day.
• If you begin with Google and have not yet proved your phone number, that half-finished sign-in is held on its own, with no account behind it, until you finish it or it lapses.
• While you stay signed in, we keep one row for each browser you signed in from: a scrambled form of the key that browser holds, and when it was last used. No name, no number, and nothing about your device. Signing out ends it, and so does erasing your data.

Cookies, and what your browser keeps

Smriti sets one cookie, and only one. When you sign in, your browser is given a session cookie so that the next page knows it is still you. It holds a random token and nothing else: not your name, not your number, not what you looked at. Your browser keeps it until you sign out or until it expires, which is why signing in on Monday still works on Friday.

That cookie is strictly necessary. Without it there is no way to stay signed in, so there is nothing to agree to and no banner asking you to. We set no advertising cookie, no analytics cookie, and no cookie on anybody else’s behalf. Nothing on this website reports your visit to a third party, and there is no tracking pixel on any page.

Signing out deletes the cookie from your browser and ends the session on our side, so the token cannot be reused even if a copy of it survives somewhere.

What we use it for, and what else you can ask us to do with it

Everything above serves one purpose: creating and delivering your daily message, safely. There are six other things it can be used for, and every one of them happens only because you asked us for it, never on its own:

• A paper you ask us to keep is held for exactly one reason: so that you can download it again.
• A song you send us is played to your loved one on a day the daily message did not reach them, and heard by nobody else.
• The written record. If you ask for it, we compile what has been sent, and the facts you told us about your loved one, into a PDF that you download in the Smriti app. We never email it. It goes to you and to nobody else. Once it is saved on your phone it is yours, and we cannot take it back.
• Notes for a visit. If you ask for them, we put what you have told us about your loved one into one page you can hand to whoever is with them next, which you download in the Smriti app. Nothing in it is written by AI, and we never email it.
• A question you ask Smriti in the chat is answered for you, in writing, in this chat.
• If, and only if, you turn on replies, a short answer is written and spoken back to your loved one when they talk to Smriti. It is off unless you say yes, and one message turns it off again.

When your loved one talks back

Your loved one can reply to the daily message. Their voice note always reaches you, in their own voice, whatever else is switched on.

Two things can then happen with what they said, and this is the part to read carefully. Their words are turned into text so that an answer your family recorded in your real voice can be found and played to them. That happens for everyone, and no AI writes anything: it is your own recording, played back.

Separately, you can turn on replies. With replies on, what they said is sent to our AI provider, a short answer is written by a computer, and it is spoken back to them in the digital copy of your voice. Your loved one will very probably believe it is you. We do not promise a fixed number of answers: every answer must first pass the same automatic safety checks as the daily message. Some things are never answered this way, whatever they ask: anything about someone who has died, where someone is, or a promise to visit. Those get the answer your family recorded, or no answer. Replies are off until you agree to them separately, in plain words, in the chat. One message turns them off again and nothing else about the service changes. You can ask us at any time to hear what was said in your voice.

Where your loved one is

When your loved one, the person Smriti is for, uses the Smriti app on their own phone, the app shares that phone’s location with their family’s caregivers: you, and anyone you have invited to share your Smriti. Each of you can see where the phone is now and where it has been over the last 24 hours. It begins only after your loved one has tapped once on that phone to agree, and it ends when the phone is unlinked.

You can also mark where home is on that map. We keep that one point, and if the phone leaves it, each of you gets one notification saying so. It says the phone has left home, because the phone is all we can see, and it comes whatever hours you have set for our other notices. Clear home and both stop.

The map in the app is shown with Google Maps, so when you open it Google receives the area of the map you are looking at, and we send Google nothing about your loved one beyond what showing that area needs.

We keep each location for 24 hours and then delete it, except the most recent one, which we keep until a newer one replaces it so you can still see where the phone last was. No AI reads it, and it is erased with everything else when you delete your data.

Who helps us run Smriti

Smriti is built on a small number of specialist providers. Each one processes only what its role requires, under its own data-protection terms:

• Meta Platforms (WhatsApp Business Platform): carries the chat and delivers the messages.
• Inworld AI: creates and holds the digital copy of your voice, and turns each day’s words into audio in it. Inworld AI is in the United States, so your voice recording is processed there.
• Anthropic (Claude): reads the text of your recording to pull out the facts, routines and people you mention, and drafts each day’s words from them. It writes the answer when you ask Smriti a question, and, if you have turned on replies, the short answer your loved one hears. When a message does not pass our checks, it is what rewrites it, and when the look back over messages already sent finds a subject to leave alone, it writes that down. It never decides by itself whether a message is safe to send. It is never sent a photograph, and it is never sent a paper you asked us to keep.
• TypeSafe, reached through OpenRouter: runs the automatic check every message must pass before it is sent, and every answer spoken to your loved one, and looks back over the messages already sent. To do that it is shown the message, and what you have told us about your loved one, including anyone you have told us has died and anything you have said must never come up, because those are the things the check is looking for. It answers yes or no questions about the message and writes nothing. OpenRouter, which carries each check to TypeSafe, is in the United States.
• Cloudflare: hosts this service and our database, stores your voice recordings, your photographs and any papers you asked us to keep, and turns speech into text: your own recording, so that what you told us about your loved one can shape their messages, and your loved one’s reply, so that an answer your family recorded can be found. Each day’s finished audio is stored there too, so a message can be played again without being made a second time.
• Sentry: receives the report when the Smriti app on your phone stops working, and holds it so we can find what broke. Sentry is in the European Union, so those reports are processed there. It is never given your name, your number, your email address, anything you or your loved one said, any photograph, or a picture of your screen.
• Google, but only if you choose to sign in with your Google account. Signing in tells Google that you are signing in to Smriti, and Google tells us your email address and an identifier for your account. Sign in another way and Google is no part of this.
• Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging), if you use the Smriti app on an Android phone: it carries the notification that tells your phone something is waiting, and to do that it holds an identifier for your copy of the app. The notification itself carries no message text, no name and no number.
• Apple, if you use the Smriti app on an iPhone: the same job, through the Apple Push Notification service, on the same terms.
• Apple and Google again, as the shops that sell the subscription. When you subscribe inside the app the payment is theirs and not ours: they take the money, they hold the card, and they tell us only that a subscription started, renewed, lapsed or was refunded. We never see your card.
• Apple again, in two more places. If you sign in with Apple, Apple tells us an identifier for your account, and your email address unless you choose to hide it. And when you type your loved one’s address in the app, what you type goes to Apple so it can suggest matching places. We keep only the one point you pin as home.
• Google Maps, if you open the map of where your loved one is in the Smriti app: when the map is shown, Google receives the area of the map you are looking at, and we send Google nothing about your loved one beyond what showing that area needs.
• YouTube, which is Google, if you add a song from YouTube. What you type to find a song is sent to YouTube to search for it, and the song is played in YouTube’s own player, so YouTube sees that it was played on the phone it was played on, yours or your loved one’s. Nothing you have told us about your loved one is sent to YouTube.
• Your own email provider, but only for a sign-in code you ask for. Email is not an encrypted channel and your mailbox is not ours: it may be backed up, forwarded, opened on a shared computer or inherited. That is why nothing about your loved one is ever emailed: our notices come as notifications from the app, and the written record, notes for a visit and your papers are only ever downloaded in it.

When that list changes

The list above is the whole list. If we add a company to it, we will say so on this page at least 30 days before it starts handling anything of yours, and we will tell you in the app as well. Thirty days is there so you have time to read who it is, and to leave with the deletion described below, before they receive a single byte.

A company leaving the list is not announced in advance. Fewer hands on your data needs no notice period.

How we protect it

Your voice recordings are stored encrypted with a key we hold separately, and there is deliberately no public link to them anywhere. Photographs, songs, and any papers you asked us to keep, are stored the same way, in the same place, under the same key.

Your recordings never leave us. There is no way to download them, and we will not email them to you or to anyone else. What you can download, in the Smriti app, is the written record, the words that were sent and the facts you told us, as a PDF; notes for a visit; and any paper you asked us to keep, exactly as you sent it. None of them is ever emailed, and nothing else is ever handed out.

Each day’s finished audio is kept the same way your recordings are: encrypted, under the same separately-held key, with no public link to it and no way to download it. We keep it so that a message can be played again without being made a second time, and it is erased with everything else when you ask. Access to our systems is restricted to the small team that runs Smriti, and our providers’ error logs are scrubbed of phone numbers before we ever see them.

If something goes wrong anyway and your data is exposed, we will tell you. We will write to you without undue delay and in any case within 72 hours of learning of it, and we will say what happened, what of yours was involved, what we have done about it and what you should do. We will notify the Data Protection Board of India, and, where the law requires it, the supervisory authority in your own country, on the same clock. We will do this whether or not anybody else has noticed.

How long we keep it, and how you erase it

We keep your data only while your Smriti service is active. You can end that at any moment, from the app:

Sign in at smriti.care, open Settings, and choose Stop or delete everything. Delete asks you to type one word to confirm, and that step expires ten minutes after you ask for it. When you confirm you are signed out, and we erase your data everywhere it lives: the voice copy at Inworld AI first, then every stored recording, photograph, song, paper and audio file, and then our records. This runs automatically and immediately, it finishes within 24 hours, and if any step fails the erasure is retried until it completes.

What survives erasure is three things, and here is each one. First, the log of your consents: that you gave them, and that you withdrew them. Indian data-protection law expects us to be able to prove both. Second, the record that you asked for deletion and that it ran, kept as counts only, with no voice data and no message content. Third, your phone number stays on the closed record as a marker, so that a later message from the same number starts again from the consent notice and never revives anything. Your name, your email address, every way you signed in and every browser you were signed in on, your loved one’s name and number, where their phone has been, your recordings, your photographs, the songs you sent, any papers you asked us to keep, what you told us about them and every message are gone. The one thing erasure cannot reach is a copy you already downloaded: a written record, notes for a visit or a paper saved on your phone is yours, not ours, and deleting it is yours to do.

We also erase without being asked. If you have not used Smriti for 24 months, we delete everything the same way, after writing to you first at the address we hold. Your voice recording and the digital copy made from it go sooner: they are destroyed within 30 days of your subscription ending, or within 30 days of your asking, whichever comes first. That is the whole schedule, it is published here on purpose, and it is the one we follow.

Your rights

Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP), you have the right to know what personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it erased, and to withdraw your consent as easily as you gave it. For Smriti, that is one tap: sign in at smriti.care, open Settings, and choose Stop or delete everything. You may also nominate someone to exercise these rights for you, and you have the right to have any grievance heard.

For your loved one: each day they receive a short nudge and tap it once to hear your message, and nothing more is ever asked of them. You, as their caregiver, confirm you have the authority to arrange this for them. Erasing your data erases theirs too.

Whichever right you want to use, the way to reach us is the contact address at the foot of this page. We answer every one of them, and we never charge for it.

Your voice, and the laws that call it biometric data

The copy of your voice is made from a biometric identifier: your voiceprint. Several places in the world, among them Illinois, Texas and the whole of the European Union, give that its own protection, above and beyond ordinary personal data. This page is written so that it holds wherever you are.

We collect your voice for one purpose, which is to speak your daily message to your loved one in it. We ask before we record, in writing, and no recording is taken until you have agreed. We never sell it, lease it, trade it, or profit from it in any other way, and we disclose it to nobody except the one provider named above who makes the voice copy for us.

We keep it while your Smriti is running, and destroy it within 30 days of your subscription ending or of your asking, whichever comes first. That schedule is the one printed above. It is published here because the law in some of those places requires the schedule to be public, and because you should be able to read it without having to ask.

If your loved one replies with a voice note, that recording is theirs, not yours. It reaches you, and their words are turned into text so that an answer your family recorded can be found. No voice copy is ever made from it, and it is destroyed on the same schedule as everything else.

Where your data is handled

Smriti is run from India, and our providers sit in India, the United States and the European Union. The list above says which is where. So your data crosses borders, and the country it lands in may not give it the protection your own country does.

Where we send personal data out of the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we do it under the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, with the UK Addendum where that applies, and we hold that paperwork with each provider before anything of yours reaches them. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant clauses at the address below.

For people in the European Union, our legal bases are these. Your voice, and the facts you tell us about your loved one, are handled with your explicit consent, which is the Article 9 condition special-category data requires, and which you can withdraw at any moment. What is needed simply to run the service you subscribed to, such as your account and your billing status, rests on the performance of our contract with you. Keeping the service secure, and keeping the record that proves your consents existed, rests on our legitimate interests and on our legal obligations where a law names one.

If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom

The GDPR gives you more than the paragraphs above. You have the right to be given a copy of your personal data and to be told how it is handled; to have it corrected; to have it erased; to have our handling of it restricted while a dispute is open; to receive what you gave us in a portable form; and to object to handling that rests on our legitimate interests.

Because your voice and the facts about your family are handled on your consent, you can withdraw that consent at any time, and withdrawing it is one tap: Settings, then Stop or delete everything. Withdrawing does not undo what was lawful before you withdrew, and it stops everything after.

No decision producing a legal effect for you is made by a computer alone. The automatic checks described on this page decide whether a message goes out or is held back, never anything about your rights, your money, or your account.

You also have the right to complain to your own supervisory authority, and you may do that without coming to us first, although we would rather you gave us the chance to put it right.

If you are in the United States

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have never done either, there is no mechanism inside Smriti that could, and that is truest of all of your voice.

Depending on your state, you may have the right to know what we hold, to a copy of it, to correction, to deletion, and not to be penalised for having used any of those rights. The way to use them is the contact address at the foot of this page, and the answer is the same for everyone who writes, whichever state they write from.

Where your state requires a written release before a voiceprint is collected, the agreement you give before your first recording is that release, and this page is the written policy it points at.

Children

Smriti is for adults. We do not knowingly collect data about anyone under 18, and the service is designed for adult caregivers arranging messages for adult family members.

Grievances and contact

If anything about how we handle your data worries you, write to us and a founder will personally respond. If you are unsatisfied with our response, you may escalate to the Data Protection Board of India.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you before the change takes effect, in the same place you gave your consent. The date at the top of this page shows when the current wording took effect.