Privacy Policy

Last updated: 27 September 2026

Pluck is a daily texting game. You practise conversations with characters played by an AI, and a coach marks what you sent. This policy explains what we collect, why, who else sees it, and how to get rid of it.

Pluck is operated by Tony Chow (“we”, “us”). Contact: [email protected].

1. The short version

• You sign in with Apple. We never receive or store your name or email address for your account — only Apple's per-app identifier.

• We do store the conversations you practise, because the coach has to read them to mark them, and because you can look back at a past round.

• Your practice messages are sent to DeepSeek, an AI provider based in China, to generate the character's replies and the coaching, or to Anthropic, in the US, when DeepSeek is unavailable. Your name and account never go with them. We do not use them to train anyone's model; what each provider keeps is governed by its own terms (§5).

• We use no advertising, no third-party analytics and no trackers. There is no advertising identifier in the app.

• Deleting your account really deletes it, including every stored conversation and the anonymous counters belonging to the device you delete from, in one action from inside the app (§7).

• Pluck is 18+.

2. Who this covers

This policy covers the Pluck app and the Pluck website. If you only join the waitlist on the website, the only thing we hold is your email address (§3.6). If you play a scene on the website, §3.7 says what happens to the one reply you write there.

3. What we collect

3.1 Account

When you sign in with Apple we store an opaque identifier Apple gives us for you (the “per-app subject”), our own internal id, and the dates you signed up and last opened the app. We do not ask Apple for your name or email, and we do not store them. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, nothing changes for us, because we were not using an email address anyway.

3.2 Your practice conversations

When you play a round we store the transcript — the messages you wrote, the character's replies, and the marks the coach gave each message — together with the round's state: which character and objective, the turn count, the engagement curve, and any safety flags. We store this because the coach must read the round to grade it, because your rating is computed from it, and so you can revisit a past round.

We also store the reads you tap during a round — whether you judged the other person to be leaning in, holding steady or cooling — alongside the answer the grader had, and the optional one-line "why?" if you wrote one. We keep these to check the grader against real players and improve it. They are stored with the round and are deleted when the round or the account is deleted.

Write as if a human might read it. We can read stored conversations when we have to: to investigate a content report, to fix a bug you tell us about, or where the law requires it. We do not read them routinely.

3.3 Scenarios you write

If you create your own scenario, we store the setup and opening line you wrote. It is private to your account.

3.4 App usage

Two things, both keyed to a random identifier generated on your device and neither linked to your account:

A daily open count. One row per install per day that the app was opened. It tells us how many people come back on day 1, day 3 and day 7.

A practice funnel. A small, fixed set of events recording which step of a round you reached and where you stopped: that the home screen was seen, that a round started and how it ended, that a message was sent, that the coach's breakdown was opened, that a retry was started, that a round was abandoned; which step of the first-run setup you reached and what you chose when asked about notifications; and that you shared a scene, with the kind of app it went to (for example Messages), never what it said. 24 event names in total.

We are specific about what an event may carry, because it is enforced in code rather than promised in a policy. Each event may only carry properties from a written allowlist, and every value must be a true/false, a whole number, or one of a short list of fixed words — for example the round's outcome, or which screen you started from. There is no free-text property, and there is no way for a message you wrote to end up in this store. The closest thing to content is the length of a message in characters, which we keep because "the message that ended it was four characters long" is a useful finding and a length cannot be turned back into a sentence.

Anything the app sends that is not on that allowlist is discarded by our server before it is written, including the event name itself.

3.5 Content reports

If you report something a character said, we store the report, what was shown, and enough context to review it.

3.6 Waitlist (website)

If you enter your email address on the Pluck website we store that address, a tag saying which part of the page you used, and the date. Your IP address is used in memory to rate-limit signups and is not written to our database. We will send you one email when Pluck opens. To be removed before then, email [email protected] and we will delete the row.

3.7 Playing a scene on the website

You can play the day's practice scene on the website (on the home page, or at pluck.coach/today), or open a link someone sent you (pluck.coach/d/…). Either way, before anything you write is sent, we ask you to confirm you are 18 or over. Your answer is never sent to us: your browser remembers it, so you are not asked again. If you then write a reply, it is sent to our AI provider (§5) to be marked, and the mark is shown to you. We do not store what you wrote. Our server keeps a score from 0 to 4 and the time, attached to the link, and a count of how many times the link was opened; nothing that identifies you. Your IP address is used in memory to rate-limit the page and is not written to our database. The page is served through Cloudflare, which hosts our website, and may use Cloudflare Turnstile to check that you are a person. If what you write suggests you may be in crisis, nothing is sent to the AI provider and the page shows crisis resources instead.

After your reply you get a link of your own. It carries your mark, never your words, so a friend you send it to sees your mark after making their own move. If someone sent you a link, you see their marks, never their words, and they never see what you wrote. Links stop working after a month and are then deleted. If you ask for the launch email on that page, §3.6 applies.

4. What we do not collect

We do not collect your name, your email address (for the app), your contacts, your phone number, your location, your photos, your device advertising identifier, or your real conversations with real people. Pluck contains no advertising SDK, no third-party analytics, and no cross-app tracking. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for advertising.

Bringing in a real conversation

Pluck can read a conversation you have actually had, so it can hand you a practice round shaped like your own situation. You paste it, or pick screenshots of it.

It is read on your phone and never sent to us. Names and numbers are stripped on the device, you see and edit the stripped version before anything uses it, and then your phone works out the shape of the conversation by itself. No model runs on it. Nothing about it reaches our servers, not even briefly: what the app sends is which practice round to set up, which is the same thing it sends when you pick a round by hand.

We never store the conversation. Not on our servers, not in an account, not as an option you could switch on. There is no copy of it anywhere except on your own phone, where it lives only as long as you are on that screen.

We do keep the counts, on your phone, if you ask us to. After a reading you can name it — "Maya" — and Pluck keeps what it counted: how many of the five things it looks for turned up, which shape the conversation had, and which reply the biggest drop landed on. That is so you can read the same person again in a month and see whether it moved. It is numbers, not words: nothing in it can be turned back into a single thing either of you wrote. It lives on your phone, it is never sent to us, and you can delete any of it at any time from the Convos tab. If you do not name a reading, nothing is kept at all.

We never tell you what the other person thinks or feels. They did not agree to be measured, and nobody can read that off a screenshot anyway. What Pluck says is what was observably in the conversation, and what your own messages did. The practice round you get is written by us, with our own characters, and none of the words you brought are in it.

Two things the app refuses outright. If the text suggests anyone involved is under 18, the import is declined and there is no way to override it. The same applies to a conversation that reads as trying to win back an ex. Both refusals are decided on your device before anything else happens.

5. Who else processes your data

DeepSeek processes this as our service provider to answer our request. DeepSeek is based in the People's Republic of China, so the content of a round leaves your country when it is graded. Its Open Platform terms do not promise that what it receives is kept out of model training, so treat a practice round as text a third party may keep. It never receives your name, email, sign-in identifier or the anonymous counters belonging to your device. When DeepSeek cannot answer (an outage, or our account with them running out), the same request goes to Anthropic instead, as our backup service provider; under our terms with Anthropic, that content is not used to train their models.

We have no other processors: no analytics vendor, no email marketing platform, no advertising network, no data broker.

6. Automated processing, and what the grades are

Pluck is an AI product, and we want to be exact about it:

• The characters are AI, not real people, and the app says so on screen.

• Every message you send is scored by an automated system, and the round produces a rating that changes over time.

• Those grades are a product opinion generated by a model — they are not a measurement of you, not a psychological assessment, and not advice. A real person may react differently to the same message.

• The grading has no legal or financial consequence for you.

• We compare the reads you tap against what the grader thought, and use the difference to calibrate the grader — to find where it is wrong, not to build a profile of you. This is our own tuning, not AI model training: we do not use your conversations to train anyone's model (§5 says what our AI provider may keep).

7. How long we keep it

• Conversations, rounds, scenarios and your account: until you delete them. We run no automatic expiry, so what you keep, we keep.

• Deleting your account removes your user record, sessions, every stored round and transcript, the reads you tapped in those rounds, your scenarios, and any friend connections. This is a real delete in our database, not a flag. If you are not signed in, the same deletion is available for everything your device created.

• The anonymous counters in §3.4 are deleted too, per device. The daily open counts and the funnel events are keyed to a random device identifier rather than to your account, so we cannot find them from the account alone — the app sends that device identifier along with the delete, and we remove both sets of counters for that device. This works the same whether or not you are signed in. Two honest limits: the delete covers the device you run it from, so if you practised on a second device, deleting from that device too is what clears its counters; and a copy of the app old enough not to send the identifier will delete your account and rounds but leave that device's counters behind, which updating the app and deleting your data again will clear. The counters contain no name, no email, no message text and no identity.

• Content reports: kept while we review them and for a reasonable period afterwards, because they are a safety record.

• Waitlist email: until Pluck opens and we send the one email, or until you ask us to remove it.

• Backups may hold copies for a short period after deletion before they age out.

8. Your choices

In the app: Settings → Delete account and practice data. That is the fastest and most complete route, and it needs no email to us.

California residents (CCPA/CPRA). You have the right to know what we collect, to get a copy, to correct it, and to have it deleted. You may also opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of personal information — we do neither, and there is nothing to opt out of. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes requiring an opt-out. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights. To make a request, email [email protected]; we may need to verify that you control the account.

Anywhere else: email [email protected] and we will do the same thing.

9. Age

Pluck is for adults. You confirm you are 18 or over when you first open the app, and there is no way past that screen. If we learn that someone under 18 has an account, we will delete it and its data. If you believe a minor is using Pluck, email [email protected].

10. Security

Sign-in tokens are opaque and stored server-side so that signing out or deleting your account can genuinely revoke them. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to the production database is limited to the operator. No service is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise — but we hold as little as the product allows, which is the part that matters most.

11. Where your data is

Our servers and our hosting provider are in the United States. The AI provider that generates replies and grading, DeepSeek, is in the People's Republic of China, so the content of each practice round is processed there too, or in the United States when our backup provider, Anthropic, answers instead. If you use Pluck from elsewhere, your information is processed in these places.

12. Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date above, and for anything material we will say so in the app before it takes effect.

13. Contact

[email protected] — privacy questions, deletion requests, or anything in this document that is not clear.