Privacy Policy

Introduction

This policy explains what personal information PurposeBook collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it. It applies to the PurposeBook mobile and web application, our administrative website, and email we exchange with you. It supersedes our policy dated May 21, 2024.

Accounts are established by PurposeBook rather than opened by members; the service operates no open sign-up. Most members are enrolled through an institution that has arranged access on their behalf. Others hold individual accounts, established either at our invitation or following a request for access that we approved. Where we have invited you directly, that invitation may take the form of a code that lets you complete your own registration on our sign-up form; the form cannot be used without one. We do not sell subscriptions to individuals, and the application contains no payment features.

The route by which an account was established affects one matter only: the information available to an institution. The Who We Share Information With section sets out that boundary, including the position of individual members not associated with any institution.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it for advertising ourselves. There are no advertising networks, tracking pixels or cross-site trackers in our applications.

Who This Policy Is For

PurposeBook is not intended for anyone under 18 years of age, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe we hold information about someone under 18, contact us at info@purposebook.com and we will delete it.

Information We Collect

Information you give us

• Account details — your name, email address, role, and, if you joined through one, the institution you belong to.
• What you write — your reflections, answers and messages. This material is central to the service and is frequently sensitive, concerning your history, values, relationships and sense of purpose. It is subject to the strictest handling described in this policy: it is not sold, is not used for advertising, is not transmitted to any third-party AI provider, and is not made visible to the institution to which you belong.
• Photographs you choose to add to your reflections or profile.
• Voice input. If you dictate instead of typing, your device converts your speech to text and the text is saved with your reflection. See the Voice Input section for how the audio is handled.
• Support requests, feedback and anything you send through our contact page.

Information we generate about you

To produce your PurposeBook profile we analyse what you have written and derive:

• Evidence — short direct quotations of your own words, stored together with the question you were answering.
• Strengths, impacts and a purpose statement, generated from that evidence.
• Progress indicators describing where you are in the programme.

Information collected automatically

• Sign-in records, including IP address and browser or device information, used to secure accounts and detect abuse.
• Application version, platform, and a per-device identifier used to manage notifications across your devices.
• Push-notification tokens and your device’s timezone (used to avoid notifying you at night), if you enable notifications.
• Crash diagnostics when the application fails, collected by Google on our behalf and tied to an app installation rather than to your identity.

We do not use advertising identifiers, advertising cookies or cross-site tracking. Our applications use only the storage necessary to keep you signed in and remember your preferences.

How We Use Your Information, and Our Lawful Bases

We use your information to:

• Provide the service, including generating your profile — on the basis that it is necessary to deliver the service you, or the institution that arranged your access, asked us for (performance of a contract, or our legitimate interest in operating the service).
• Keep accounts secure and prevent abuse — on the basis of our legitimate interests.
• Respond to support requests and send service communications — on the basis of performance of a contract.
• Improve the service, using de-identified data only — on the basis of our legitimate interests. See the Analytics section.
• Meet our legal obligations — for example, responding to a valid request from a court or public authority, retaining records we are required by law to retain (such as the record that an account was deleted), responding to privacy requests within the statutory time limits, and notifying you and the relevant regulator of a qualifying security breach — on the basis of compliance with a legal obligation to which we are subject.

We do not use your information for marketing without your consent, and we do not make decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you by automated means.

Automated Analysis of What You Write

PurposeBook uses artificial intelligence to hold conversations with you, to identify passages of your writing as evidence, and to draft the strengths, impacts and purpose statement you see.

This analysis runs on infrastructure we operate ourselves. Your reflections are not sent to any third-party AI provider. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and name the provider before it takes effect.

The output is advisory. It is presented for your consideration and does not constitute an assessment of, or a decision about, you. Corrections may be submitted from within the application.

Voice Input

When you dictate, transcription is performed by your device’s operating system — Apple on iOS, Google on Android — not by PurposeBook. We request on-device transcription where your device supports it. Where it does not, your device may send the audio to Apple or Google for transcription under their privacy policies. PurposeBook receives only the resulting text and does not retain recordings.

Who We Share Information With

We share personal information only with service providers acting on our instructions under written terms:

• Google LLC (Firebase) — authentication, database and file storage. United States.
• Google LLC (Google Cloud) — hosting, computing and de-identified analytics. United States.
• Google LLC (reCAPTCHA) — protecting our public forms from automated abuse. United States.
• ActiveCampaign LLC (Postmark) — sending and receiving service email. United States.

We may also disclose information where legally required, to protect rights and safety, or in connection with a merger or acquisition — in which case we will notify you.

What your organisation can see

If you joined through an institution: your organisation does not receive what you write. Administrators from your organisation can see membership and account information — who has an account, roles, and sign-up status — and aggregate usage statistics that do not identify individual members’ content. They cannot read your reflections, your conversations, or your generated profile. This restriction is enforced technically and not by undertaking alone: institution-scoped administrator accounts are not granted the permission required to access member content, and no interface is available to them through which it could be read.

Where an account is not associated with an institution, the preceding paragraph does not apply. No institution is linked to the account, and accordingly no institution has visibility of the account, of what you write, or of any other information relating to you. The only third parties involved are the service providers listed above.

How we treat what you write

Access to what you write is restricted on a least-privilege basis. It is granted by role, only to those personnel whose duties require it, and only for the following purposes: operating and maintaining the service; investigating and resolving faults; responding to a support request or a report you have raised; investigating misuse of the service or a risk to safety; and complying with a legal obligation. It is not accessed for any other purpose.

It is not used for marketing or advertising. It is not used to construct any record of you other than the PurposeBook profile the service produces for you and the de-identified analysis described in the Analytics and De-identification section. It is not disclosed to your organisation, and it is not disclosed to any third-party AI provider.

We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have not done either in the preceding twelve months.

Analytics and De-identification

We analyse aggregate patterns in order to improve the service. Before that data reaches our analytics warehouse it is de-identified: account identifiers are replaced with pseudonyms, IP addresses are removed in full, and free text is scanned automatically to redact names, email addresses, phone numbers, street addresses, dates of birth and financial identifiers. Preview, test and experimental records are excluded entirely.

International Transfers

PurposeBook is operated from the United States and your information is processed there. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, this is a transfer outside your home jurisdiction. We apply the protections described in this policy wherever your information is processed, and we are implementing formal transfer safeguards (standard contractual clauses); their current status is available on request.

How Long We Keep It

We retain your account and the material you have written for as long as the account remains active.

Security records are deleted automatically: sign-in codes within minutes, rate-limiting records within about an hour, and sign-in audit records after 90 days.

When you delete your account or your content, your information is removed from live systems after a 7-day recovery window and from encrypted backups within a further rolling 30-day cycle — see the Deleting Your Information section.

Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our processing of your information, to receive a portable copy of it, and to withdraw consent. Exercising these rights will not result in any reduction in the service provided to you.

Requests may be made by email to info@purposebook.com or through our contact page. We may be required to verify your identity. We respond within one month and will notify you if an extension of that period is necessary.

Concerns may be raised with us directly in the first instance, and we will seek to resolve them. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data-protection authority at any time; in the UK this is the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk).

Deleting Your Information

You may delete your account together with all of its contents, or retain your account and delete only the material you have written, at any time and by either of the following means:

• Within the application: open Profile, then Delete account.
• Through our website: the Delete Account page linked in the footer of this site, which remains available if you are no longer able to sign in.

Deletion is subject to a 7-day recovery window, during which the request may be cancelled using the link sent to you by email. After that period the deletion is irreversible, and it completes within 30 days of the request. The Delete Account page sets out precisely what is deleted and the limited set of records that are retained, such as the record of the deletion itself.

California Residents

We collect the categories of personal information described in the Information We Collect section: identifiers (name, email address, IP address), what you provide to us (your writing and photographs), internet activity (sign-in and usage records), audio-derived text if you dictate, and inferences drawn from your writing (your generated profile). We collect them for the purposes described above, from you directly and from your own use of the service, and we disclose them only to the service providers listed in the Who We Share Information With section.

We have not sold personal information, and we have not shared it for cross-context behavioural advertising, in the preceding twelve months. We do not sell or share the personal information of minors. We do not collect government identifiers, financial account numbers or payment card data.

California residents may exercise their rights to know, access, correct and delete through the channels in the Your Rights section, and will not be discriminated against for doing so. California’s “Shine the Light” law (Civil Code § 1798.83) permits requests about disclosures to third parties for their direct marketing purposes; we make no such disclosures, and you may confirm this through the contact channels below.

Bot Protection on Our Public Forms

Four of our forms are accessible to anyone holding the link: our contact form, our account and data deletion form, our password reset form, and our sign-up form. To protect them from abuse by automated scripts, they are protected by reCAPTCHA v3, a service of Google LLC.

No challenge is presented for you to complete. When you submit one of these forms your browser loads reCAPTCHA from Google, and Google receives your IP address, information concerning your interaction with the page, and information about your browser or device. It may also read and set cookies. Google returns a score estimating whether the submission came from a person or from a script.

We use that score to determine whether to accept the submission, and for no other purpose. It is not used for advertising and does not form part of your profile. reCAPTCHA does not operate while a page is merely being read; it loads only upon submission of one of those four forms.

Google’s handling of that data is governed by its own privacy policy (policies.google.com/privacy) and terms (policies.google.com/terms). If you prefer not to use it, you may email us at info@purposebook.com and we will process your request by that means, including a request to delete your account or your data.

Security

We hold ourselves to SOC 2 and ISO/IEC 27001 practices, and to ISO/IEC 42001 for our AI system. Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest; access is least-privilege; administrative accounts require two-factor authentication; and our systems use no long-lived credentials. No system is entirely secure. We will notify you and the relevant regulator of a qualifying breach without undue delay.

Changes to This Policy

We will post changes here and update the date at the top. For material changes we will notify you by email or in the application before they take effect.

Contact Information

For questions or comments regarding this policy and our privacy practices:

• By visiting our contact page: admin.purposebook.com/contact;
• Or by email at info@purposebook.com.