Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 2026-07-25  ·  Last Updated: 2026-07-25

1. Introduction

Fortivus is an AI-powered coaching app built by Rendok Labs LLC, a California limited liability company. It helps adult men work on personal growth, relationships, and self-development through private journaling with an AI coach (“Forge”), real-time chat with an AI sparring partner (“Flint”), and a written guide called Foundations of a Grounded Man.

This policy explains what we collect, why, who else touches it, and what you can do about it. It applies to the Fortivus mobile app and any related services we operate.

We built Fortivus around writing things down that you probably haven't said out loud to anyone. We take that seriously, and this document is written to be read rather than skimmed past. If something here is unclear, email joel@rendoklabs.com and ask.

2. What we collect

Account information

• Email address and password. Used to create and secure your account. Your password is hashed by our authentication provider — we never see or store it in readable form.
• Display name. Whatever you choose to be called in the app.
• Profile photo. Optional. If you upload one, see the note in Section 6 about how profile photos are stored.
• Timezone. Detected from your device so that dates, times, daily messages, and notifications line up with your actual day rather than a server clock.

What you write

• Journal entries. The free-form text you write in Forge, along with any principle you tag, the coaching mode you pick, and an optional emotional state.
• Coach responses. The replies Forge writes back to you.
• Flint chat messages. Your side and Flint's side of every conversation, grouped into sessions with a title and preview.
• Imported context documents. If you paste in a conversation from another AI tool (for example ChatGPT) to give the coach background, we store what you paste.
• Daily messages. The short daily message Forge sends you, and whether you've read it.

What you tell us about your life

• Profile questionnaire answers. Relationship status, living situation, whether you have kids and their age ranges, how often you argue, whether divorce has come up, communication style, relationship length, and what brought you to the app.
• Location. Optionally, your country, city, and postal code, with a separate consent flag. This is coarse location that you type in — Fortivus does not request or use your device's GPS.

What the coach remembers

• Coach context. As you use the app, the AI extracts recurring themes, patterns, and notable events from what you've written so it can respond with continuity instead of starting cold every time. This is stored as structured notes tied to your account.

Product and usage data

• Reading progress. Which principles of the guide you've read and when.
• Feedback. If you submit feedback, we store your message, an optional rating, and your app version. Your feedback message is encrypted at rest, the same as your journal entries and chat messages.
• Nudge engagement. Whether you engaged with a Flint nudge, and its topic — used to avoid repeating ourselves.
• Push notification token. A device token so we can deliver notifications. Only if you grant notification permission.
• Subscription status. Which plan or entitlement you hold, and any access code you redeemed.

Voice dictation

If you use the microphone button, your device records audio and sends it to a speech-to-text provider to be converted into text. Fortivus does not store your audio recordings. The audio is sent for transcription, the text comes back into the entry box, and the recording is not saved to our database. See Section 4 for who processes it.

What we do not collect

To be explicit, Fortivus contains:

• No analytics SDK. No Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment, PostHog, or similar.
• No advertising SDK, no ad identifiers, no tracking pixels, no cross-app tracking.
• No crash-reporting SDK collecting device telemetry.
• No GPS or background location access.
• No contacts, calendar, or health data access.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with data brokers. We do not use it to advertise to you, because we don't run ads.

3. How we use your information

We use what we collect to:

• Provide the coaching service. Generate Forge's responses to your journal entries and Flint's replies in chat.
• Personalize responses over time. Give the AI enough context about your situation that it responds to you specifically rather than generically.
• Deliver daily messages and notifications, at a time and cadence you control.
• Show you your own history — past entries, sessions, streaks, and reading progress.
• Handle billing and access. Confirm your subscription status and unlock paid features.
• Support you and improve the product. Respond to your feedback and fix what's broken.
• Keep the service secure and enforce our Terms of Service.

We do not use your journal entries or chat messages to train AI models — neither ours nor anyone else's. See Section 5.

4. Third parties who process your data

We keep the list of companies that touch your data short and deliberate. Each one below is a processor acting on our behalf.

We don't add third parties casually. If that changes materially, Section 12 explains how you'll hear about it.

5. How AI processing works

This is the part most worth understanding, so it gets its own section.

What gets sent. When you save a journal entry or send a Flint message, that text is sent over an encrypted connection to Anthropic's API, which runs the Claude models that generate Forge's and Flint's responses. Along with your message, we send relevant context so the response is coherent: recent entries, the coach's accumulated notes about your situation, your profile answers, and any context documents you've imported.

What is not sent. The API request contains the content needed to write a good response. It does not include your email address, your name, your account ID, or your payment information.

Training. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, inputs and outputs sent through the API are not used to train their models. We rely on that commitment and we do not opt into any arrangement that would change it. We also do not use your content to train any model of our own.

Retention at Anthropic. Anthropic retains API data according to their own policy, which may include limited retention for safety and abuse-monitoring purposes. We don't control that window. Their privacy policy, linked above, is authoritative.

Voice audio. Fortivus has opted out of Deepgram's Model Improvement Program (their default arrangement that retains audio fragments for model training). Because of that opt-out, voice audio sent to Deepgram for transcription is retained only for the duration necessary to process the request and is not used to train Deepgram's models.

The honest limitation. For the coach to respond to what you wrote, a computer has to read what you wrote. Fortivus is not end-to-end encrypted, and we don't claim it is. Your content is encrypted in our database and in transit, but it is decrypted server-side to generate a response. If you would not be comfortable with a service provider technically being able to access something, don't write it here.

AI output is not advice. Forge and Flint are language models. They can be confidently wrong. They are not therapists, doctors, lawyers, or financial advisors, and nothing they say is professional advice. See our Terms of Service.

6. Security

• Encryption in transit. All traffic between the app, our backend, and every third party listed above uses TLS.
• Encryption at rest. Your most sensitive content — journal entries, Flint chat messages, profile questionnaire answers, coach context, imported context documents, and feedback submissions — is stored encrypted at the column level in our database using PostgreSQL's pgcrypto, with keys held in a managed secrets vault. This is in addition to the disk-level encryption our hosting provider applies.
• Access controls. Database row-level security is used so that your rows are only readable by your authenticated session. Backend functions that need broader access run server-side with credentials that are never shipped in the app.
• Authentication. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider. Session tokens are held in your device's secure storage (Keychain on iOS).

7. Your rights and choices

Regardless of where you live, you can:

• Access your data. Everything you've written is visible in the app.
• Delete individual content. You can delete any journal entry, Flint session, or imported context document from within the app. You can also clear the coach's accumulated memory about you.
• Correct your information. Profile details and questionnaire answers can be edited at any time.
• Turn off notifications. Either in the app's settings or in your device's system settings.
• Control location sharing. Location is optional, typed in by you, and carries its own consent flag.
• Request a copy of your data. Email joel@rendoklabs.com and we'll provide an export.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account and all associated data at any time from within the app: Profile → Delete Account. After a two-step confirmation, deletion runs immediately: your journal entries and coach responses, chat history, coach memory, profile and questionnaire answers, reading progress, profile photo, and account record are all permanently removed, and your login ceases to exist. This cannot be undone.

Deleting your account does not automatically cancel an active subscription — subscriptions are managed by Apple, not by us. Cancel through your Apple ID settings (Settings → [your name] → Subscriptions); the deletion flow in the app links you there.

If anything goes wrong during deletion, or you can no longer access the app, email joel@rendoklabs.com from your account's email address and we'll complete the deletion for you.

8. California privacy rights (CCPA/CPRA)

If you're a California resident, you have the right to:

• Know what personal information we collect, why, and who we share it with. Sections 2 through 4 are that disclosure.
• Delete the personal information we hold about you, subject to narrow legal exceptions.
• Correct inaccurate personal information.
• Opt out of sale or sharing. Fortivus does not sell your personal information, and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. There is nothing to opt out of, because we don't do it.
• Limit use of sensitive personal information. The content you write may be sensitive by nature. We use it only to provide the service described here — never to infer characteristics for advertising.
• Non-discrimination. We will not degrade your service or charge you differently for exercising any of these rights.

To exercise any of these, email joel@rendoklabs.com, or write to us at:

We may need to verify that you control the account before we act.

9. Children's privacy

Fortivus is intended for adults aged 18 and over. The subject matter — relationships, marriage, conflict, divorce, fatherhood — is written for adult men, and the app is rated accordingly.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. We do not target the app to minors. If we learn that we have collected information from someone under 18, we will delete it promptly. If you believe a minor has given us information, email joel@rendoklabs.com and we'll take care of it.

10. Data retention

• While your account is active, we keep your data so the app works and the coach retains continuity. That's the point of the product.
• Content you delete — an entry, a session, an imported document — is removed from our database when you delete it.
• When you delete your account through the in-app Delete Account flow, we permanently and immediately remove your data from our systems. There is no grace period or delayed purge. Backups are cycled out on our hosting provider's normal schedule, so residual copies may persist in backups for a short period after deletion before aging out.
• Third-party billing records are the exception. Apple and RevenueCat retain subscription and transaction information per their own retention policies — we don't control those systems and payment records may be legally required to persist. Contact them directly to request deletion: Apple at privacy.apple.com, RevenueCat at support@revenuecat.com, referencing the email address you used with Fortivus.

11. International users

Fortivus is operated from the United States, and your data is stored and processed on servers in the United States. If you use the app from outside the US, you're consenting to that transfer. US privacy law may differ from the law where you live.

This policy is written primarily around US law. If you're in the EU, UK, or another region with a comprehensive privacy regime, email us and we'll handle your request under the applicable standard.

12. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy materially — new categories of data, a new third party doing something meaningfully different, a change in how AI processing works — we'll let you know by email and with an in-app notice before it takes effect. Minor clarifications and typo fixes will show up as an updated “Last Updated” date.

Continuing to use Fortivus after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy. If you don't, you can delete your account.

13. Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy:

We read every message that comes to that address.