Your conversations stay yours

Overview

Hearing Buddy is two things: an iOS app that captions the world around you, and this website (hearingbuddyapp.com). They handle your information very differently, so this policy covers them separately.

The app is built privacy-first. All speech recognition and language processing happens entirely on your device. We do not collect, store, or transmit your audio or transcripts to any servers.

The website does collect some information — mostly things you type in yourself, like your name and email when you take the Buddy+ quiz. The sections below list all of it: what we collect, why, who helps us process it, how long we keep it, and how to ask us to delete it.

One promise up front: we never sell anyone's personal information. Ever.

And one more: our website isn't directed to children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information. If you think a child gave us theirs, email us and we'll delete it.

The Buddy+ quiz

Our Buddy+ pages (the ones that start with /go) include a short quiz. It asks for your first name, your email address, and which buddy you'd like. It also asks a few questions about your hearing: how much hearing loss you have, and — depending on the version you see — how often you find yourself asking people to repeat themselves, whether someone has called your name and you only found out later, the situations where hearing is hardest, what the hardest part is for you, what you already use (hearing aids, cochlear implants, captioning apps, lip reading, AirPods, or nothing), and how stressful it all feels.

Your answers are saved in your own browser as you go. Once you enter a valid email address, we also save your answers, name, and email on our server, and keep that record updated as you continue. We use it to:

• ·Build your personalized Buddy+ plan
• ·Get your Buddy+ link to you by email
• ·Send up to three reminder emails if you start but don’t finish signing up (each has an unsubscribe link)
• ·Connect your purchase to your quiz if you buy Buddy+

Along with your answers, we record which version of the page you saw (we test different versions), how far you got, which plan you picked, and whether you purchased.

Your quiz answers are never sent to Google, Meta, or any advertising company. They stay between you and us.

Follow-up emails

If you enter your email in the quiz but don't finish signing up, we send up to three reminder emails over the following three days. They come from [email protected]. Every one includes a one-click unsubscribe link and our postal address.

We may also email you later about Hearing Buddy — new features, or an offer on Buddy+. We don't send these on any fixed schedule, and we never hand your address to another company to email you.

Unsubscribing stops all of it immediately and for good, and it applies to any future emails too — not just the reminder series. It doesn't erase your quiz record by itself; if you want that gone too, email us and we'll delete it (see “Your rights” below).

Buying Buddy+ on this website

When you buy Buddy+ on the web, checkout is run by RevenueCat, our billing partner, and card payments are processed by Stripe. The seller (merchant of record) is Krager Labs LLC. Your card details go directly to Stripe — they never touch our servers.

To save you typing, we pass the email you entered in the quiz to the checkout page to pre-fill it. After a purchase, RevenueCat sends us a confirmation that includes your email and purchase details (the product, price, and currency). We keep those records to mark your purchase, get you your redemption link, and handle support and refunds. Your receipt, your cancel link (for subscriptions), and your redemption link all come from RevenueCat by email.

The online hearing test

Our free online hearing test works differently from the quiz: it's anonymous by design. When you finish, we save your age group, your sex if you chose to share it, and your tone-test results (the volume levels you could hear at each frequency) so we can show you how your results compare with peers. We store no name, no email, no account, and no other identifier with those results.

Because nothing links a result to a person, we genuinely cannot find or delete “your” result — there is no way to tell which one is yours. That's not a loophole; it's the point.

For audiologists, and the contact page

If you fill out our partner interest form, we collect your clinic name, your name, your email, your social handle, and your role. We use it to set up your clinic in the partner program and connect your promo code to you. Email us any time to have it deleted.

Our contact page collects nothing — it's just email links. Whatever you send us lives in our mailbox like any other email.

Analytics and advertising on this website

• ·Google Analytics (loaded through Google Tag Manager) runs across the site. It collects things like pages visited, device and browser type, approximate location, and how you got here, so we can understand traffic and improve the site.
• ·A Meta Pixel runs only on our /go pages — the Buddy+ quiz and checkout flow — and nowhere else on the site. It tells Meta when someone views those pages, starts or finishes the quiz, leaves their email (an event Meta calls a “Lead”), picks a plan, reaches checkout, or purchases (including the price paid), so we can measure whether our ads work. To connect an ad to a sale, we also share a scrambled version of your email address and first name. They go through a one-way process (SHA-256) before they leave us, so what Meta receives is a fixed string of characters it can compare against — not an address or a name it can read. We never send your quiz answers. Like most pixels, Meta's own code collects your IP address and browser information and sets its own cookie.
• ·The quiz-related events we send to Google and Meta carry a random session id, the name of the page version you saw, which step you reached, which plan you tapped, and the purchase amount. Google never receives your name or email. Meta receives them only in the scrambled form described above, and neither one ever receives your quiz answers.
• ·If you buy Buddy+ on the web, our server also reports that sale to Meta directly. Browsers often lose the last step of a checkout, so we send it ourselves: the amount, which plan, the random session id, and the identifiers Meta's own cookies already placed in your browser. It is the same purchase our website reports, sent a second, more reliable way — Meta counts it once, not twice. It carries the same scrambled email and first name, and never your quiz answers.

You can opt out of Google Analytics with the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on, manage Meta's tracking in your Meta ad preferences, or block third-party cookies in your browser — the site works fine without them.

Cookies and storage on your device

• ·hb_funnel — Set on the /go pages. Remembers which version of the Buddy+ flow you saw and your session id, so the pages stay consistent between visits. Lasts 30 days.
• ·hearing-buddy-session and XSRF-TOKEN — Standard security cookies that keep your visit working safely. The data stays in your own browser and expires after about 2 hours.
• ·_ga and similar — Set by Google Analytics, site-wide.
• ·_fbp — Set by the Meta Pixel, on /go pages only.
• ·Browser storage — the quiz saves your answers (including your name and email, once entered) in your own browser's local storage so you don't lose your place. That copy stays on your device until you clear your browser data. One heads-up: if you take the quiz on a shared or public computer, clear the browser data when you're done.

Who helps us run this

These companies process data for us. Most act only on our instructions; Google and Meta also use what their tools collect as described in their own privacy policies:

• ·RevenueCat — Web checkout, billing, receipts, cancel links and redemption links. Gets your email and purchase details.
• ·Stripe — Card payments for web purchases. Gets your payment details; we never see your card number.
• ·Google — Tag Manager and Analytics (see above).
• ·Meta — The pixel on /go pages only, plus a direct report from our server when a web purchase completes (see above).
• ·DigitalOcean — Hosts this website and its database. Like any hosting provider, it keeps standard server logs (which include IP addresses) for a short time.
• ·Resend — Delivers the quiz follow-ups and the emails we send you. Gets your email address and the email content.
• ·Apple — App Store purchases, plus the download and crash analytics Apple provides to developers for the iOS app.

How long we keep things

• ·Quiz records: we keep these for as long as we're running Hearing Buddy, so we can tell you about it later. There's no automatic expiry — ask us and we'll delete yours the same week.
• ·Purchase and billing records: kept as long as we need them for accounting, taxes, refunds, and legal obligations. The raw payment notifications behind them are kept alongside those records.
• ·Hearing test results: kept indefinitely — they're anonymous and power the peer comparisons.
• ·If you unsubscribe: we stop emailing you immediately and permanently, but the quiz record itself stays until you ask us to delete it.
• ·If you ask us to delete your data: we keep only your email address on a do-not-email list (so we never email you again by mistake), plus any purchase and billing records we have to keep for accounting, taxes, and fraud prevention. Everything else goes.

Your rights

These apply to everyone, no matter where you live:

• ·Ask what we have. Email us and we'll tell you what information we hold about you — including a list of anyone we've shared your health answers with (today: no one).
• ·Ask us to stop. You can withdraw your consent to our collecting or using your information, including your hearing answers.
• ·Ask us to delete. We'll delete your information from our systems and tell our service providers to do the same. We keep only your email address on a do-not-email list, plus any billing records we have to keep. Deletion reaches our backups too — backup copies can take up to six months to fully cycle out.

We'll respond within 45 days. If a request is unusually complicated, we may take up to 45 more days, and we'll tell you if so.

If we ever decline a request and you think we got it wrong, reply and say you'd like to appeal. A human will take a second look and give you a written answer within 45 days. If you live in Washington State and you're still not satisfied after an appeal, you can contact the Washington Attorney General.

To exercise any of these, email [email protected] from the address you used with us (or tell us which one you used).