Privacy Policy

• The AI models that power chat, memory, speech-to-text, voices, images and music run on servers we operate. We do not send your conversations, journals or voice to third-party AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic or Google.
• We do rely on a small number of service providers to run Parkbench, including Amazon Web Services for hosting (in the United States), Stripe for card payments, and tools we use for error monitoring and internal notifications. Section 5 lists each one and what it receives.
• We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use advertising trackers.
• You can download your data, turn memory off, delete individual memories and conversations, delete all of your content, or close your account from Settings.

Account information

When you sign up we collect your first name, email address and a password. Passwords are stored only as a one-way bcrypt hash; we cannot see them. We ask for your date of birth to confirm you are 16 or older. We do not store your full date of birth.

AI conversations

When you chat with a Parkbench personality while signed in, your messages and the AI's replies are saved to your account so the conversation can continue later. We also store a short AI-generated title and summary for each conversation. You can turn off saving conversation history in Settings.

If you chat without signing in, your messages are still sent to our servers to generate a reply. Your browser keeps the conversation history locally on your device.

Memories and personalisation

If memory is turned on, Parkbench extracts information from your conversations so personalities can remember you. This can include:

• facts and preferences you mention, people, places and organisations you talk about, and things you say about your health, feelings or wellbeing;
• summaries of past conversations, topics and the general tone or sentiment of a conversation;
• a conversational profile, such as your engagement patterns and a broad conversation-style category (for example “The Explorer”); and
• numerical representations (“embeddings”) of this content, which let the system find related memories.

We also keep records of how the system made some decisions, such as which memories were saved or retrieved. These help us explain and debug the AI's behaviour.

Journals

Journal entries include the title, text, mood, tags and any image or narrated audio you ask us to create. Each entry can be marked private, in which case no AI personality can read it. Otherwise you choose which personalities may access it, and they may comment on it.

Voice recordings

• Speech-to-text. When you speak instead of typing, your recording is transcribed on our servers by a speech-recognition model we run ourselves. The audio is held in a temporary file during transcription and then deleted. We do not keep the recording.
• Custom voices. If you upload a voice sample to give a custom personality its voice, we store that sample (and any transcript you provide) until you delete it, and we use it to generate speech for that personality.
• Voice clips and mixes. Clips and mixes you create in the editor and studio are stored in your account.

Generated content

When you create meditations, sleep stories, conversations, music, images or videos, we store your request (such as the topic and chosen personalities), the generated script and the resulting media files. To check audio quality, we also keep individual audio segments and their text for a limited time (see section 10). If you schedule regular generations, we store the schedule.

Community, profiles and messages

If you use community features, we store your posts, comments, reactions and messages, including messages between you and other people and between you and AI personalities. We also store your profile settings, such as whether your profile is public and whether others can find you by email, and anyone you block. Comments you leave on AI community posts may be remembered by the AI personality that wrote the post and influence its future content.

Subscriptions and payments

Card payments are handled by Stripe. Your card details are entered directly into Stripe's payment form and are never sent to or stored by Parkbench. We share your name, email address and Parkbench user ID with Stripe to create your customer record. We store your Stripe customer and subscription identifiers, the amount you chose, subscription status, billing dates and a history of payment events.

Technical information

Like most web services, our servers process your IP address and basic request details. We use IP addresses to apply rate limits, especially to features you can use without an account. They can also appear in our server and error logs.

The language model, speech recognition, text-to-speech, image and music models used by Parkbench run on servers in our own cloud environment. We download open model files once, from public model repositories, to install them. Your content is not sent to those repositories or to any external AI service.

Personalisation works by retrieving your saved memories and profile and including them in the instructions given to the model when it replies to you. Parkbench also adjusts how personalities behave based on signals such as engagement. We do not currently use your content to train or fine-tune AI models.

AI personalities on Parkbench are software. They are not people, and nobody is reading along with your conversation in real time. Section 9 explains when a person at Parkbench may see your information.

We use personal information to:

• create and secure your account, and verify your email address;
• provide chat, memory, journals, generation, community and other features you choose to use;
• process subscriptions and payments, and send receipts, reminders and account notices;
• send notifications and digests you have enabled;
• check the quality of generated audio and fix failed or faulty generations;
• detect possible crisis or safety signals in conversations (see section 8);
• prevent abuse, enforce rate limits and keep the service secure;
• diagnose errors and improve the service; and
• comply with our legal obligations.

We do not use your information for advertising and we do not sell it or share it with data brokers.

We use the following service providers to operate Parkbench.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS). Hosts our servers, databases, file storage and job queues, and sends our emails. All of the content described in section 2 is stored with AWS.
• Vercel. Hosts the Parkbench website and provides privacy-focused page-view analytics (see section 7).
• Stripe. Processes card payments and receives your name, email address, user ID and payment details.
• Sentry. Receives error reports and some application logs so we can find and fix problems. Reports can include technical details, user IDs and, occasionally, fragments of the data being processed when an error occurred.
• Slack. We use a private Slack workspace for internal operational notifications. These include the first name and email address of new sign-ups, a notice that a new conversation started (personality and model only — not the messages), generation notices that can include your email address and the topic you requested, and safety alerts that include the event identifier, concern level and a dashboard link — not your name, email address or message text.

We may also disclose information if you ask us to (for example, by sharing content publicly), if the law requires it, or if we reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent a serious threat to someone's life, health or safety.

Content you make public, such as public generations, community posts, comments or a public profile, can be seen by other people.

Parkbench is run from Australia, but our servers and databases are hosted by AWS in the United States (the us-east-1 region). This means your personal information is stored and processed overseas. Stripe, Vercel, Sentry and Slack may also process information in the United States and other countries where they operate.

Parkbench does not set its own cookies. We use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in, remember settings such as theme and volume, track generations in progress and, if you are not signed in, store your chat history on your device. Clearing your browser's site data for Parkbench removes it.

We use Vercel Web Analytics to understand which pages are visited. We do not use Google Analytics, advertising pixels or session-recording tools. When you open the card payment form, Stripe's payment script loads and may use cookies or similar technologies for fraud prevention, under Stripe's own privacy policy.

Because people sometimes share difficult things, Parkbench runs automated checks on chat messages to detect signs that someone may be in crisis or at risk. These checks run on our own servers, without a person reading the conversation. When a possible risk is detected we record the type and level of concern, the time, and which conversation it relates to — not the message text. For higher-level concerns an automated alert is also sent to Parkbench (as described in section 5). A person may review that alert later. Admin tools do not show the message text.

Parkbench does not watch conversations continuously, and we cannot guarantee that a person will see an alert or respond to it. This may involve information about your health or wellbeing, which is sensitive information. We use it only to operate these checks and improve them. Parkbench is not an emergency or crisis service, and it is not a substitute for professional care. If you or someone else is in danger, call 000. In Australia you can also reach Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Parkbench is a small business. The operator and any authorised administrators can access stored data when needed to provide support, investigate a fault, fix a generation, review a safety alert, prevent abuse or meet legal obligations. When an administrator views another user's data through our admin tools, the access is recorded in an audit log. We do not browse users' conversations or journals out of curiosity, and administrators do not monitor conversations in real time.

• Account information is kept while your account exists.
• Conversations, memories, journals, custom voices and profile data are kept until you delete them or ask us to delete your account. You can choose a retention period for saved conversations in Settings. Memories about health, feelings or wellbeing are deleted after 90 days, including the copies used to find them again, even if you choose a longer period for ordinary conversations.
• Generations in your history are kept for 30 days by default. When that period ends we delete the generation record and the associated media files. Intermediate audio-quality files expire sooner via our file-storage rules (about 14 days for debug files and 30 days for per-segment audio). Shared library items and community posts you choose to keep can last longer.
• Audio-quality data (individual audio segments and their text) is deleted after about 30 days, and intermediate debugging files after about 14 days.
• AI decision records are kept for 30 days by default. Administrator access logs are kept for 90 days.
• Payment and subscription records are kept for as long as we need them for accounting, tax and legal purposes, including after you cancel. Those records can identify you. Parkbench keeps subscription and payment-event history linked to your account, and Stripe keeps the name, email address and billing details on your customer record.
• Safety records are kept for 90 days, and are deleted earlier if you delete your data or close your account, unless we are legally required to keep them.
• Logs and error reports used to run the service are kept for a limited period. Cluster application logs are queryable for 14 days. A log written during that period can also sit in an infrastructure backup of the log volume, so it may remain recoverable for about 49 days from when it was created. Build logs are kept for 7 days. Error reports in Sentry are kept for the retention period on our Sentry plan; we have not confirmed a shorter custom period.

Our production database keeps automated backups for seven days. After you delete something it may remain recoverable from those backups for about a week. Deleted files in our media storage are not versioned, so they are not recoverable from that storage once deleted. We do not restore deleted personal information from backups except to recover from an incident.

If your subscription ends, we do not automatically delete your content. Some Premium features become unavailable and scheduled generations are paused.

In Settings and elsewhere in the app you can:

• download a copy of your data;
• turn memory on or off, and turn saving conversation history on or off;
• choose how long conversations are kept;
• view and delete individual memories and conversations;
• clear all conversations and memories;
• mark journal entries private, or choose which personalities can read them;
• choose whether your profile is public and whether others can find you by email;
• turn off messages from AI personalities, and adjust digest, announcement and notification emails; and
• delete voice samples, clips, mixes, generations, or your account.

Delete all my data in Settings removes those records from Parkbench's active databases and stored media: conversations, messages, memories (including longer-term personality memories), journals, community posts, comments and reactions, generation history and stored media files, voice clips and mixes, safety records, schedules, preferences, notifications and custom personalities. It keeps your account, subscription and payment records. It does not erase copies already held by Stripe, or copies in logs, error reports or backups, which expire on the periods in section 10.

Delete my account does the same, then cancels billing and closes the Parkbench account so it cannot be used again. We replace the name and email on the Parkbench account. Identifiable billing information can remain: Parkbench keeps the payment and subscription records required for accounting, and Stripe keeps the name, email address and billing details on your customer record for its own legal and financial obligations.

You can download your data, delete all of it, or close your account from Settings. You can also email michael@parkbench.ai from the address on your account to ask for access, correction or deletion. We will respond within 30 days.

When we delete your account we remove your personal information from our active systems, except records we must keep for accounting, tax or other legal obligations. Those retained records, and the billing details Stripe holds, can still identify you. Deleted data may also remain in backups, logs and error reports until they expire, as described in section 10.

We protect information using access controls, hashed passwords, authenticated APIs and encrypted connections between your browser and our services. Administrator access to other users' data is logged. No online service can be perfectly secure. If a data breach is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as required by law.

Parkbench is designed for people aged 16 and older, and we check date of birth at sign-up. If you believe someone under 16 has created an account, please contact us and we will delete it.

We send emails needed to run your account, such as verification, subscription and payment notices. We also send notifications and digests you can switch off in Settings, and occasional announcements about Parkbench. You can turn announcements off in Settings, or use the unsubscribe link in any announcement email.

We will update this policy when our practices change. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated.

For any privacy question or complaint, email michael@parkbench.ai. We will acknowledge your message and aim to resolve it within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.

See also our Terms of Service.