Privacy Policy

Jakesify Limited ("Balarnse," "we," "us," or "our") provides the Balarnse mobile application (the "App") and the website at balarnse.app (the "Website," and together with the App, the "Service"). This Privacy Policy describes how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use the Service, and the choices and rights available to you.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. By creating an account or otherwise using the Service, you acknowledge that you have read and understood this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with it, please do not use the Service. This Privacy Policy is incorporated into, and should be read alongside, our Terms of Service.

The entity responsible for your information (the "data controller," under laws like the GDPR) is:

You must be at least 17 years old to create an account or otherwise use the Service. We set this minimum deliberately, not just as a boilerplate number: the Service includes AI-generated mental-health guidance, a structured CBT toolkit covering topics like self-harm-adjacent distress and substance cravings, and crisis-adjacent material, all of which we believe require a level of maturity beyond a general-audience app.

By creating an account, you represent and warrant that you meet this age requirement. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone younger than 17. If we learn that we have collected information from someone under this age, we will take steps to delete it as described in Section 19, Children's Privacy.

We collect information in four broad categories: what you give us directly, what you create while using the Service, what we collect automatically, and what we receive from others.

4.1 Account & identity information

• Email address — used for passwordless sign-in codes and, if you set one, an optional password.
• Display name, avatar image, and phone number, if you choose to add them.
• Your chosen mode (Companion, Skills, Buddy) and identity preference for therapist sessions (anonymous or revealed).
• If you opt in to the WhatsApp companion channel: the WhatsApp phone number you link, and your opt-in/opt-out status.
• If you apply to use Balarnse as a therapist: your professional credentials, license information, licensing jurisdiction, title, timezone, languages, insurance information, and payout details.

4.2 Content you create

This is the heart of a mental-health app, and we want to be exhaustive about it rather than vague:

• AI companion conversations — every message you send to and receive from Buddy, Companion mode, or Skills mode, across every chat session, including any photos or voice notes attached to a message.
• CBT thought records — the issue you select (including sensitive categories like cravings & habits), the situation, automatic thought, named emotion and its intensity, evidence for and against the thought, any cognitive distortions you identify, your balanced thought, the re-checked intensity, and any AI-generated reflection on that record.
• Journal entries — the free-text content you write, the prompt you were shown (if any), and the mode you were in when you wrote it.
• Mood check-ins — your daily mood score and any note you add.
• Routine & activity completion — which structured, day-by-day programs you enroll in, which days you mark complete, and your streaks.
• Therapist booking messages — messages, attachments, and scheduling details exchanged with a therapist through the booking feature.
• Voice recordings — if you use voice features, including any audio you provide to clone a voice for text-to-speech playback.

4.3 Usage & technical information

• Log and diagnostic data — timestamps, session identifiers, error logs, and app version, collected automatically when you use the Service.
• Device information — device type, operating system and version, and locale/language settings.
• IP address, collected by our servers as part of ordinary network communication (used for security and abuse prevention, not for granular location tracking).
• Authentication data — hashed one-time codes, refresh-token hashes, and session metadata (user agent, last-used time). We never store a one-time code or password in plain text.

4.4 Information from others

• If you book a therapist, that therapist's profile information (name, credentials, specialties, rate) and any notes or messages they send you through the Service.
• Payment confirmations from our payment processors (see Section 12) — we receive confirmation that a payment succeeded and basic transaction metadata, not your full card number.

Much of what Section 4.2 describes is sensitive personal information under data protection laws — information about your mental or physical health, and in some cases information touching on substance use. We treat it accordingly:

• We collect it only because it's necessary to provide the specific feature you're using (an AI reply, a saved journal entry, a thought record) — not for advertising, and not for sale.
• Access inside Balarnse is restricted to what each system needs to function; broad, standing human access to your conversations, journal, or thought records is not part of how the Service is built.
• We deliberately exclude this content from the Insights feature's own display logic beyond aggregate, non-clinical summaries (streaks, counts, mood trend) — we do not surface raw crisis-risk history back to you as a casual "insight."
• The one exception is the safety flow described next: a message that trips our crisis-detection safety net is logged for a limited safety-review process, specifically because the alternative — nobody ever seeing it — is the greater risk.

We use the information described above to:

• Provide the Service — run your conversations through our AI providers and return a reply, save your journal and thought-record entries, track your routine progress, and show you your own history.
• Personalize the Service — tailor journal prompts to your current mode, match CBT techniques to the issue you select, and build the Insights screen's aggregate view of your own activity.
• Operate the safety net described in Section 7.
• Facilitate therapist bookings, messaging, and payments.
• Maintain the security and integrity of the Service — detect fraud, abuse, and technical problems.
• Communicate with you — service notices, security alerts, and (only with your consent, where required) product updates.
• Comply with legal obligations, and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
• Improve the Service over time, in aggregated or de-identified form wherever we reasonably can.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your conversation, journal, or thought-record content to serve you third-party advertising.

We want to be fully transparent about this, because it is the one place we deliberately look at content you might otherwise expect to be entirely private:

• Every message you send to an AI companion is screened by an automated keyword-based safety check for signals of acute self-harm, suicide risk, or severe crisis-level distress, before the AI even generates its reply.
• This check is a pragmatic safety net, not a clinical diagnosis — it looks for concerning language patterns, not a certified risk assessment.
• If a message trips this check, that fact — the risk level and a short excerpt — is recorded in an internal, access-controlled safety log, specifically so a real pattern of risk is never silently missed.
• When this happens, the App also shows you crisis resources directly (a local emergency number and crisis organizations), regardless of how the AI responds in the conversation itself.
• This logging exists for safety review and, where legally required, to respond to a genuine emergency — it is not used for marketing, profiling, or any purpose unrelated to user safety.

To generate replies in Companion, Skills, Buddy, and the CBT toolkit's one-shot reflections, we send the relevant conversation content to third-party AI model providers (currently Anthropic and/or OpenAI, depending on configuration) via their standard API products. These providers act as our data processors: they process the content to return a response and do not independently decide what to do with your data for their own purposes.

Per our agreements with these providers and their own API data-use terms as of this policy's effective date, content submitted through their business/API products is not used to train their general-purpose models. We encourage you to review each provider's own privacy and API terms for the most current commitments, and we will update this section if that ever changes.

If you use voice playback or voice-cloning features, we work with third-party voice providers (currently Cartesia and/or ElevenLabs) to generate speech audio and, if you explicitly opt in, to create a synthetic voice model from a recording you provide.

• Voice cloning is opt-in only — we do not create a voice clone from your audio without your affirmative action to do so.
• A voice sample used to create a clone can reasonably be considered biometric-adjacent data in some jurisdictions; we treat it with the same sensitivity as the mental-health content described in Section 5.
• You can delete a voice clone you've created; contact us at the address in Section 23 if you don't see a way to do this directly in the App.

Live voice sessions with the AI voice agent, and audio/video calls with a booked therapist, are carried over real-time infrastructure provided by LiveKit (or a similar real-time media provider). Call metadata (when a call started and ended, and with whom) is stored to show your session history; call content itself is processed only as needed to carry the call and is not retained as a recording unless a feature explicitly tells you a session is being recorded.

Images and files you attach to a chat message or send to a therapist are stored with our file-hosting provider (currently Cloudinary) and linked to your account so they can be displayed back to you and to the relevant recipient (the AI companion or your therapist). Do not attach anything you would not want stored for the lifetime of the relevant conversation or booking.

Subscription and session payments are processed by third-party, PCI-DSS-compliant payment processors — currently Paystack, Flutterwave, and/or Stripe, depending on your region and currency — or, where you purchase a subscription through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, by Apple or Google under their own payment systems and privacy terms.

• We do not receive or store your full card number, CVV, or bank credentials. We receive a payment confirmation, an amount, a currency, and a transaction reference.
• Purchases made through Apple or Google's in-app purchase systems are governed by Apple's or Google's own privacy policies for payment data — we only receive confirmation of the purchase and its status.

We share information only as described here. We do not sell it.

13.1 Service providers (processors)

Companies that process data on our behalf, under contractual confidentiality and data-protection obligations, including:

• AI model providers (Anthropic, OpenAI) — to generate companion and CBT-reflection responses.
• Voice providers (Cartesia, ElevenLabs) — for text-to-speech and voice cloning.
• Real-time communications infrastructure (LiveKit) — for voice/video calls.
• File hosting (Cloudinary) — for images and attachments.
• Payment processors (Paystack, Flutterwave, Stripe) and, for in-app purchases, Apple and Google.
• Cloud hosting and database providers that store the Service's data.
• Messaging infrastructure providers, if you opt in to the WhatsApp companion channel.

13.2 Therapists

If you book a therapist session, we share what that therapist needs to provide the session: your booking details, your messages to them, and — only if you choose "Share my identity" instead of staying anonymous — your name and identifying details. A therapist you book with may also see your identity if a safety escalation under Section 7 genuinely requires it for your protection.

13.3 Legal & safety disclosures

We may disclose information if required by law, subpoena, or court order, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Balarnse, our users, or the public — including responding to a genuine, imminent risk of harm identified through the process in Section 7.

13.4 Business transfers

If Balarnse is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any such change in ownership or use of your personal information.

We keep personal information for as long as your account is active, and for a reasonable period afterward to the extent needed to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, and maintain the safety log described in Section 7. When you delete your account (see Section 15), we delete or anonymize your personal information within a reasonable period, except where we are legally required or permitted to retain it longer — for example, safety-escalation records tied to a genuine crisis event, or financial records required for tax and accounting purposes.

Regardless of where you live, you can:

• Access and export your data — request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correct it — update your display name, avatar, email, and other profile fields directly in the App, or ask us to fix anything you can't.
• Delete your account — request full account deletion at any time. Email privacy@balarnse.app (or use the in-app deletion option, if shown under Settings) and we will delete your account and associated personal information within 30 days, subject to the retention exceptions in Section 14.
• Withdraw consent — for anything we process based on your consent (like voice cloning), you can withdraw that consent going forward.
• Object to or restrict certain processing — contact us and we will evaluate your request under applicable law.

To exercise any of these rights, email privacy@balarnse.app. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request.

16.1 European Economic Area, UK & Switzerland (GDPR / UK GDPR)

If you are located in these regions, our legal bases for processing are:

• Contract — processing needed to provide the Service you've signed up for (account, chat, bookings).
• Consent — for optional features like voice cloning, and for marketing communications.
• Legitimate interests — for security, fraud prevention, and service improvement, balanced against your rights.
• Legal obligation and vital interests — for the safety escalation described in Section 7, in a genuine emergency.

You have the rights described in Section 15, plus the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection supervisory authority. Our contact for data-protection matters is privacy@balarnse.app.

16.2 California (CCPA/CPRA)

If you are a California resident, you have the right to:

• Know what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and sell (we do not sell personal information).
• Delete personal information we hold about you, subject to certain exceptions.
• Correct inaccurate personal information.
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information (we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising).
• Limit the use of sensitive personal information — we already limit use of your health-adjacent content to providing the Service, as described in Section 5.
• Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

Submit a request via privacy@balarnse.app. We will not charge a fee or provide a different level of service for exercising these rights.

16.3 Other jurisdictions

If your local law gives you additional or different rights (for example, under Nigeria's Data Protection Act, Canada's PIPEDA, or Brazil's LGPD), those rights apply to you as well — contact us at privacy@balarnse.app and we will honor them.

We and our service providers operate in multiple countries. Your information may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in a country other than the one you live in, including countries that may have different data-protection laws than your own. Where we transfer personal information out of the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, we rely on recognized transfer mechanisms (such as Standard Contractual Clauses) with our service providers.

We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect your information, including:

• Encryption of data in transit (TLS) between your device and our servers.
• Password and one-time-code hashing — we never store a plaintext password or sign-in code.
• Access controls limiting which systems and personnel can reach sensitive data, scoped to what each function needs.
• Ongoing monitoring for unauthorized access attempts.

No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and relevant authorities as required by applicable law.

The Service is not directed to, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from, anyone under 17 years old (or the applicable age of digital consent in your jurisdiction, if higher — for example, some EEA member states set a higher age for a minor to independently consent to data processing). This complies with our intent to also meet the spirit of children's-privacy laws such as COPPA, even though 17 is itself above COPPA's 13-year threshold.

If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone below the applicable minimum age without the requisite consent, we will take steps to delete that information promptly. If you believe a minor has provided us with personal information, contact us immediately at privacy@balarnse.app.

The Website uses only the cookies or local storage strictly necessary for it to function (for example, remembering your light/dark theme preference). We do not currently use third-party advertising trackers or cross-site analytics cookies on the Website.

The App does not currently integrate third-party advertising or analytics SDKs. If this changes in a future version, we will update this Privacy Policy and, where required, request your consent before any such integration takes effect.

Some browsers offer a "Do Not Track" signal or Global Privacy Control (GPC). Because the Website does not use cross-site tracking technology, there is currently nothing for these signals to opt you out of — but where legally required, we will treat a GPC signal as a valid opt-out request for any sale or sharing of personal information.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by updating the effective date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, through an in-app notice or email before the change takes effect. Your continued use of the Service after a change becomes effective constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your personal information, contact us at: