Draft — requires legal review

This document describes Karot's intended data practices and has not been reviewed by a lawyer. It must be reviewed and, where required, adapted to the jurisdictions Karot is offered in before Karot is distributed publicly or submitted for Google OAuth verification.

Privacy Policy

Draft — not yet effective.

Who we are

Karot is a personal relationship assistant consisting of an Android app, a Chrome extension, Mac and iOS companions, and a small API at api.karotapp.com. Contact questions: [CONTACT EMAIL — to be confirmed before publishing].

The short version

  • Your contacts live in your Google account. Karot does not keep a copy of your contact list on any server we run.
  • The only data that reaches our API is anonymized and encrypted: the contact's name, email addresses, phone numbers and company name are stripped on your device first. Scrubbing of free-text notes is best-effort, so a note can still contain other people's names — see "Data sent to the Karot API" below.
  • We never read the content of your messages. Passive tracking records only that a conversation happened, with whom, and when.
  • We do not use analytics or advertising SDKs, and we do not sell or share personal data.

Data Karot reads on your device

  • Google Contacts (People API), with your explicit OAuth consent: names, phone numbers, email addresses, organisation, labels/groups, significant dates, and the notes field. Karot uses this to show you who is due for contact.
  • Karot metadata you enter: traits, short- and long-term goals, notes, and the last-contacted timestamp. This is written back into the notes field of the same Google contact, inside a ### Karot Data ### section, so it syncs through your own Google account.
  • Notification metadata (Android only, optional): when you enable the notification listener, Karot records which messaging app produced a notification and which contact it maps to, in order to update "last contacted". Message content is never read, stored, or transmitted.
  • Interaction history: stored in a local database on the device and never uploaded.

Data sent to the Karot API

When you ask for AI suggestions, the client anonymizes the contact on your device before anything is sent:

  • Names, email addresses, phone numbers and addresses are removed or replaced with placeholders such as [person].
  • The company name is replaced with a broad industry category (for example "technology").
  • The contact identifier is replaced with a one-way hash salted per installation.
  • Traits, goals and up to five recent note excerpts are included as free text, so avoid putting information in notes that you would not want processed by an AI provider.

The anonymized payload is then encrypted on the device (AES-256-GCM, with the AES key encrypted to the server's RSA-OAEP public key) and sent over TLS. The API decrypts it in memory, sends the anonymized text to Google's Gemini API — which may use Google Search grounding to find current information — and returns suggestions.

What the API stores

DataPurposeRetention
Suggestion responses (in-memory cache)Avoid repeat AI calls for the same contactUp to 24 hours; keyed to a one-way hash of your credential plus a per-installation contact hash, so another user's request cannot read your entry
Rate-limit and quota countersAbuse and cost controlUp to 25 hours, keyed by a one-way hash of your credential
Request logsReliability and abuse investigationRequest id, path, method, authentication type, status code and duration only — never payload content or contact data; retained in Cloudflare's log retention window
Error reports (Chrome extension)Fixing crashesError type, message, sanitized stack trace, extension version, platform and page path — no contact data

There is no Karot-operated database of contacts, notes, or relationship history. Decrypted payloads are never written to disk or logs.

Third parties

  • Google — People API (your contacts, under your OAuth grant) and the Gemini API (anonymized suggestion prompts).
  • Cloudflare — hosting for the API and this website.

No advertising networks, no analytics providers, no data brokers.

Google API Services Limited Use disclosure

Karot's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Specifically: Google user data is used only to provide the features described above, is never sold, is never used for advertising, and is not used to train generalised AI models. Anonymized text derived from your notes is sent to Google's Gemini API solely to generate suggestions shown to you.

Legal basis and your rights

Where the GDPR or similar laws apply, processing is based on your consent (which you give in the Google OAuth screen and by enabling optional features) and on the performance of the service you asked for. You can access, correct, export or delete your data at any time — because it is stored in your own Google account, you do this directly in Google Contacts.

Deleting your data

  • Remove the ### Karot Data ### block from a contact's notes to delete the metadata for that person.
  • Uninstall the app or extension to remove all local data, including interaction history.
  • Revoke Karot's access at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
  • Server-side caches and counters expire on their own within 25 hours; no action is needed.

Children

Karot is not directed at children under 13 (or the equivalent minimum age in your country) and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If this policy changes materially, the updated version will be posted here with a new effective date before the change takes effect.