Privacy policy
What Pretake keeps, what it sends, and what it never has.
In short
- No accounts. You do not register an account. The server identifies your install by a random token. Imported text and names you enter can still contain personal information.
- Files are processed on your phone. Pretake deletes its imported file copies after processing. Your originals stay where you saved them. The reconstructed conversation is stored in the app; selected messages also appear in the encrypted server records described below.
- Selected text is sent to AI. Conversation text is processed by Pretake and its AI services to build context and write replies. Our routing prohibits provider data collection and training, but does not guarantee zero retention by every service.
- The server keeps little, and keeps it encrypted: a style profile containing excerpts, selected imported messages, your rehearsal messages, and your subscription status. "Delete everything" in Settings erases all of it, on the server first.
- 18+. Your date of birth is checked and never stored.
1. Who is responsible
Pretake is operated by Victor Gulchenko, Emanuelstraße 27, 80796 München, Germany ("we", "us"). We are the controller for the processing described here. For anything about your data, write to privacy@getpretake.com.
This policy is governed by German law and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
2. No accounts, no identity
There is no sign-up. The first time the app runs it asks our server for an install token; that request carries nothing about you, and the token it gets back is random. It is the only thing the server uses to tell one install from another.
We do not ask for your own name, email address or phone number to register, and do not collect an advertising identifier or location. Names and personal information can appear in text you import or enter. The app contains no advertising SDK and does not use your IP address to work out where you are. Android text recognition includes Google ML Kit’s technical diagnostics, described in section 10.
If you pick the person you want to rehearse with from your contacts, iOS or Android shows its system contact picker. Pretake never asks for permission to read your contacts and never sees your address book; it receives the one name you tapped and nothing else — no number, no email address, no identifier.
3. What stays on your phone
| Data | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| A chat export (for example a WhatsApp export) | Read on your phone. Pretake deletes its imported copy after processing; the source file you chose remains in its original location. |
| Screenshots | The text is recognised on your phone using Apple’s Vision framework on iOS or bundled Google ML Kit text-recognition models on Android, then Pretake’s imported image copies are deleted. Your original photos remain in your library. Images are never uploaded. The app does not read your photo library beyond the images you hand it. |
| A screen recording | Sampled and text-recognised on your phone. Pretake deletes its working copies; your original recording stays in your library. Video is never uploaded. |
| The reconstructed conversation | Stored on your phone, in the app's own database. Selected context is sent with reply requests (section 4); excerpts and the imported messages shown at the start of practice also exist in encrypted server records. Deleted when you delete that person. |
| Notes on the older part of a long conversation | Stored on your phone next to the conversation (section 5). Deleted with it. |
| Your age check | Only the fact that it passed, and when. Your date of birth is never stored. |
| Your install token and subscription state | Stored on your phone so the app can talk to the server. |
4. What is sent to the server, and what it keeps
Some data is stored to support your conversations; additional context is processed during AI requests.
Stored on the server, against your token
- A style profile of the person you imported: aggregate statistics about how they write, plus 20 to 30 representative excerpts and the closing messages of the conversation. Small and bounded.
- The display name and relationship you typed for that person.
- Your rehearsal messages and selected imported messages — the conversations you have in the app, including every rewind and branch, plus the imported messages shown at the start of practice (currently up to eight).
- Your subscription status (section 9).
- AI reply reports you choose to submit: the selected reply, reason and an anonymous install reference. Report text is encrypted, visible only to authorised reviewers, and automatically removed after 30 days or sooner when you delete that conversation or install.
- Safety events: that a safety rule fired, which rule and on which surface — never the text that triggered it.
All of this is encrypted at rest. Each install gets its own 256-bit key; message content, display names, relationships and style profiles are encrypted with AES-256-GCM under that key, and the token itself is stored only as a hash. Conversation content is encrypted; operational fields such as subscription expiry, report reason and safety rule identifiers remain readable. Decrypting content requires the separate server master key. There is no password to reset because there is no sign-in account.
Additional context sent for processing
The imported conversation. The full reconstructed transcript is held in the app. Selected context goes to our server and the model provider for generation. The request context is not separately saved as a complete server transcript. However, the style profile contains excerpts and closing messages, and the synced practice thread includes selected imported messages. These remain encrypted on the server until deleted.
Before it leaves, URLs, email addresses and phone numbers are replaced on your phone, and the same rule runs again on the server before the text reaches the model provider. The same identifiers are stripped from the style profile before it is uploaded, and the server refuses a profile that still contains one.
Requests have size limits. Recent messages, relevant older exchanges and available conversation notes are selected within those limits; the AI may not see every message.
5. Long conversations
For a long conversation, the app can send older messages to the AI to build notes with references to source exchanges. Later reply requests use those notes, recent messages and relevant older exchanges within the request limits. Notes can be regenerated if the conversation changes or processing needs to be retried.
These notes are stored on your phone, sent with relevant AI requests and deleted with the person. They are not stored as a separate notes record on the server. This is separate from the profile excerpts and synced messages described in section 4.
6. The AI model provider
Replies are written by a large language model. Our server sends requests through OpenRouter to Google’s Gemini. OpenRouter requests prohibit provider data collection and training. This setting alone is not a guarantee of zero retention; the services’ retention rules may apply. See OpenRouter’s data policy and Google’s API terms.
This means the redacted conversation — and, for a long conversation, the notes described in section 5 — reaches OpenRouter and the model provider for processing. This is the one place your import goes beyond your phone and our server, and it is what makes the simulation able to sound like the person at all.
Our server and database are in Frankfurt, Germany, in the EU. Generating a reply involves processing outside the EU/EEA. Where it does, we rely on the safeguards in Chapter V of the GDPR, such as the European Commission's adequacy decisions or standard contractual clauses.
A message that trips the app's crisis rules is screened on your phone first and is never sent inside a request that asks the simulation to react to it; the app answers in its own voice instead.
7. No training
Pretake does not use your imported or practice conversations to train models. AI requests are configured to prohibit provider data collection and training; this is distinct from service retention rules. We do not use it for analytics, for personalisation across users, or for advertising. It is used to provide the app, and for nothing else.
8. The person whose messages you import
The person you rehearse with did not agree to any of this and cannot be asked from inside the app. That fact shaped the design, and it comes with obligations for you (see the terms).
- We hold as little of their words as we can: the server stores the style profile and selected imported messages described in section 4, alongside your practice conversations.
- Redaction targets URLs, email addresses and phone numbers in imported context. It does not make all text anonymous; names and other personal details may remain.
- The simulation is for private rehearsal only. Pretake does not send rehearsal messages to the other person or publish them. You can deliberately copy message text; do not present a simulated reply as something the real person said.
- Every conversation carries a permanent marker — AI simulation of Kate — not Kate — that cannot be dismissed, and the simulation answers honestly when asked whether it is real.
- The simulation steps out of character if asked to write in that person's name, to produce a fake screenshot, to help deceive them, or to work out how to manipulate them. Sexual content is refused, because the person being simulated never consented.
- It never messages you first. The app has no notification capability at all.
If you believe someone has imported a conversation with you, you can write to us at privacy@getpretake.com. Be aware of the limit: because nothing on the server is tied to an identity, we cannot search for conversations involving you. The reliable way to have one removed is for the person who imported it to delete it, which erases it from their phone and from our server.
9. Subscriptions
Pretake Unlimited is billed by Apple through the App Store on iOS, or by Google through Google Play on Android. Pretake never sees your card or bank details; the billing provider’s privacy policy governs its payment processing.
On iOS, to confirm that a subscription is active, the app sends our server a receipt signed by Apple. The server keeps the transaction identifier and the expiry date against your token. Apple also sends our server App Store Server Notifications — signed messages about renewals, expiries and refunds — so that access ends when a subscription does. They identify the transaction and the kind of event, not you.
On Android, the app sends a Google Play purchase token to our server. The server verifies it directly with Google, stores the token encrypted and its hash for lookup, and keeps the product, subscription expiry and test/production state. Authenticated Google Play notifications let us refresh renewals, cancellations and refunds. Purchase tokens are used only to provide and verify access.
A subscription is tied to one active install. Restoring it on a new phone moves it there and the previous install returns to the free tier.
10. Crash reports
The current Android release and backend do not send crash reports to Sentry.
The app and the server can send crash reports (through Sentry) if crash reporting is turned on in the version you are using. When it is, it is configured to send no IP address, no identity, no record of what you typed or which screens you visited, no session replays, and no request contents — only the technical trace of the crash. Crash data is not linked to you.
Android text recognition: Google ML Kit processes images and recognition results on your device. Its SDK may send Google technical information such as the app and SDK version, device/OS characteristics, a per-installation identifier, latency, input dimensions, feature events and error codes for diagnostics and usage analytics. These metrics do not include the images, video, conversation text or recognition output. See ML Kit’s privacy information and Android data disclosures.
11. How long we keep it
Until you delete it. Data on the server lives for as long as your install holds it; there is currently no automatic expiry. Deleting a person, or everything, removes it as described in section 12. Saved draft references remain only in the app and are removed with their conversation.
12. Deleting
Deleting one person removes their style profile, every branch of the conversation, the imported conversation and the import record — including any saved draft reference. The app asks the server to delete first. If that fails, the local conversation and your access remain so you can retry.
"Delete everything" in Settings asks the server to erase everything held under your token first, while the token still exists, and only then clears your phone and forgets the token. The order matters: the token is also the key to everything encrypted under it, so what is left behind is erased, not merely unreachable. If the server cannot be reached, the app tells you so rather than reporting a deletion that did not happen.
Outside the app: visit Delete your Pretake data. A private, single-use code from Settings identifies the server record without an email account. Codes are stored only as hashes and expire after seven days. If you have no code or app access, email privacy@getpretake.com for help; an email address alone may not identify an anonymous install. The webpage deletes server data; it cannot remotely remove files on your phone.
Deleted data is removed from the active database immediately. Encrypted automatic database backups may retain earlier records for up to seven days before they expire. Safety counters may remain without user or conversation identifiers and contain no message text. Apple and Google retain their own purchase records under their policies. Deleting data or uninstalling the app does not cancel a subscription.
13. Age
Pretake is for adults. The app asks for your date of birth to check that you are 18 or over, and does not store it — only that the check passed, and when. We do not knowingly process data about anyone under 18.
14. Your rights
Under the GDPR you have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to receive it in a portable form. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority — in our case Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht (BayLDA), the Bavarian supervisory authority for the private sector, or the authority where you live.
Because nothing on the server is tied to an identity, we cannot match an email from you to any data. The app itself is the tool for exercising these rights: each person's page shows what was imported and what was kept, and Settings deletes everything. If you need help, write to privacy@getpretake.com.
15. Legal basis
We process your data to provide the app you asked for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR). Safety screening, crash reporting and the prevention of misuse rest on our legitimate interest in running the service safely (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Processing the messages of the person you imported, in order to provide the rehearsal, rests on the legitimate interests of you and of us, subject to the safeguards in section 8 (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR).
16. Changes
If this policy changes, the new version is published here with a new date at the top. Changes that matter will also be pointed out in the app.