Privacy Policy

1. Our Commitment to Privacy

A personal AI assistant should know enough about you to be useful, and no more should leave your account. Keeping your information private is ongoing engineering work for us — not a marketing claim. We invest in our PII redaction pipeline (Section 5), access controls, and data minimization practices on a continuing basis, and we commit to continuing to do so for as long as we operate the service.

2. Data We Collect

We collect the following information when you use Neighborhood United:

• Account information — email address and display name provided during registration.
• Messaging channel identifier — if you connect a messaging channel, we store its account identifier to link your account and deliver AI assistant messages.
• Usage metrics — message counts and feature usage to monitor service health and enforce usage limits.
• Payment information — processed and stored by Stripe. We do not store your credit card details directly.

3. How We Use Your Data

• To provide and maintain the AI assistant service.
• To process subscription payments through Stripe.
• To communicate with you about your account, billing, and service updates.
• To monitor and improve service quality and reliability.

4. Third-Party Sharing

We share data with the following third parties only as necessary to operate the service:

• Stripe — receives your email and payment details for subscription billing.
• Messaging providers — if you connect a messaging channel, its provider receives the messages you send and delivers your assistant's responses.
• AI model providers (Anthropic, OpenRouter, and others) — receive prompts composed from your direct messages and relevant workspace context (notes, tasks, calendar events, tool results) needed to generate useful responses. Personally identifiable information is automatically redacted from the workspace context portion before sending — see Section 5 below. Each provider processes received data according to its own usage policies.
• Microsoft Azure — hosts our infrastructure. Data is stored on Azure servers.

We do not sell your personal data to advertisers or other third parties.

5. PII Redaction Before AI Processing

Before we send prompts to AI providers, we run an automated detection step that replaces personally identifiable information in the prompt's workspace context and tool-result portions with typed placeholders (e.g. [PERSON_1], [EMAIL_2]). The categories we redact include names, email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, dates of birth, payment card numbers, IBAN account numbers, government ID numbers, IP addresses, passwords, and account, tax, and social security numbers.

What gets redacted vs. what doesn't

Each prompt sent to an AI provider is composed from two sources:

• Background context — your journal entries, tasks, calendar events, email tool results, and other workspace data the assistant reads to be useful. This is where most third-party PII lives (your contacts' names and addresses, calendar attendees, correspondence content) and is the primary target of our redaction layer.
• Your direct messages to your assistant. These are sent to the provider unmodified, because the assistant needs your literal words to respond meaningfully — replacing names and contact details in your own message with placeholders degrades responses.

How detection works

Detection runs entirely on our servers — no third-party redaction service receives your data. We combine two methods: an open-source machine learning model (released under Apache 2.0) that reads context to distinguish PII from coincidental matches (e.g. “Jordan” the country vs. a person), and deterministic checksum and format validation that catches credit card and IBAN numbers regardless of surrounding text.

Limitations

No automated PII detector is perfect. Our model performs well on common PII formats but may miss unusual formats, transliterated names, niche identifier schemes, or PII embedded in code or structured data. The redaction layer is a meaningful reduction in third-party data exposure, not a guarantee that no PII will ever reach an AI provider.

Rehydration of responses

Because workspace context is redacted with placeholders before reaching the model, the model's responses come back with those same placeholders. To restore responses to readable form (your contacts' real names instead of [PERSON_1]) before they're delivered to you, we maintain a per-user placeholder-to-value mapping in our database. This mapping is scoped to your account and is deleted when you delete your account.

6. Data Retention

We retain your account data for the duration of your subscription. If you cancel your subscription and request account deletion, we will delete your personal data within 30 days, except where retention is required by law or for legitimate business purposes (e.g., billing records).

7. Cookies & Local Storage

We use browser local storage to store authentication tokens (JWT) for session management. We do not use tracking cookies, advertising cookies, or third-party analytics trackers.

8. Your Rights

You have the right to:

• Access your personal data — contact us to request a copy of the data we hold about you.
• Correct inaccurate data — update your display name and email through your account settings.
• Delete your data — request account deletion by contacting us at the email below.

9. Security

We use industry-standard security measures including encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), secure authentication tokens, and access controls. However, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

10. Children's Privacy

Neighborhood United is not intended for use by anyone under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we become aware that we have collected data from a child under 13, we will take steps to delete it promptly.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you via email or through the service.

12. Contact

For privacy-related questions or requests, contact us at mj@bywayofmj.com.