Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Meny (“we”, “us”) is an independent app built and operated from India. For the purposes of India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, we are the Data Fiduciary for the personal data described here, and you are the Data Principal. You can reach us at any time at privacy@meny.in.

This policy covers the Meny mobile app and this website. It does not cover any third party’s own service that you reach from here, including Google’s sign-in.

2. Age

Meny is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 18. One of the companions, Zoya, is written as an adult romantic character, which is a large part of why the whole service is age-restricted rather than gated in one corner.

If a companion is told by the user that they are under 18, it stops any flirtatious behaviour immediately. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will delete it and its data. If you believe a child is using Meny, write to us at privacy@meny.in and we will act on it.

Before you can use the app we ask once for the year you were born. Not the day, not the month — we do not ask for them and never hold them, so there is no birthday on your record to lose. What we keep is the year, the yes-or-no answer, and when you gave it, which is enough to hold the gate on your next sign-in. The check is made on our server rather than in the app, because a decision the app made for itself would be one anyone could change.

Because a year alone cannot tell us whether your birthday has already passed, we read it strictly and wait for the following year before treating anyone as an adult. If you have just turned 18 this may keep you out for a few months. We would rather be wrong in that direction.

If the answer is no, the app stops there and no companion is reachable. We do not offer a reduced version for under-18s.

3. What we collect

3.1 Account and identity

Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication, and Google is the only way in. There is no guest or anonymous account, and no email-and-password option. We receive from Google and store: your account identifier, your email address and whether it is verified, your display name, your profile photo URL, and which provider you signed in with.

We also store two things you type into the app itself, once, before you start:

• What you want to be called. A name of your choosing, used by the companions when they speak to you. It is separate from any Google display name, and you can change it later.
• Your year of birth, together with whether you cleared the 18+ check and the date you answered. Not your full date of birth — see Age above for why the year is all we ask for.

We never receive your Google password. The app does not store your sign-in token anywhere of its own; the Firebase SDK on your phone holds and refreshes it.

3.2 Your conversations

• Text chats are stored in full, as one thread per companion, so the conversation is still there when you come back. That includes the emoji you react with, the message a reply is answering, and the feedback from a practice interview — all of them part of the thread, and erased with it. A reaction is never sent to the companion.
• If you report a message, we keep a copy of that one message, which companion said it, the reason you picked and anything you added. Nothing else from the conversation comes with it — not your own messages, not the rest of the thread. The companion is never told you reported her, and the report does not change how she talks to you.
• Voice calls are not recorded. Audio is streamed, transcribed as it arrives, and discarded. We keep no audio files, and there is no way to record you in the app at all: speaking to a companion means placing a call.
• Listening to a message creates the audio at the moment you tap, from words already in your chat, and we keep no copy of it. Your phone may hold one briefly so that playing it again does not need the internet. Nothing you record is ever turned into audio we store.
• Transcripts of a voice call are kept as a rolling window of roughly the last twenty turns while the call is live, plus a written summary of the conversation afterwards. We do not keep the full verbatim transcript of a call. When you call a companion, the call is also given your last few messages with that companion from the past few hours, so it can carry on where your chat left off. Those messages are already in your thread; nothing new is stored to do this.
• Memory: a short list of things worth remembering, extracted from your conversations: details about you, your interests, people you mention, standalone facts you have shared, and things you said are coming up on a particular day, such as an exam or an interview, so the companion can ask how it went. This is the list you can read and erase in the app.
• Each companion remembers what you told them. What you tell one companion is not shown to the others. The only exceptions are a few basics: the name you want to be called, the languages you speak, your city, and what you do or study. A companion is also told, in general terms, how long you two have been talking, so a regular is not greeted like a stranger; it is never told how often you visit.

Some of what you say will be personal, and some of it may be sensitive: how you are feeling, your health, your relationships. We treat everything in a conversation as sensitive by default, which is why the safeguards below are written the way they are.

3.3 Settings that stay on your phone

Audio routing (speaker or earpiece), whether calls show live captions, the name shown in the app, your theme, whether you have completed the intro and whether you have seen the microphone notice are stored on your device only. They describe the room you are sitting in, not who you are, and they are never sent to us. Uninstalling the app removes them.

3.4 Operational records

• Session records: which companion, when a session started and ended, how many turns it ran, and whether it was voice or text.
• Which photos a companion has sent you, so the same one is never sent twice. We keep a reference to the picture and when it was sent, nothing about how you reacted to it. It is erased by “Forget everything” along with the rest.
• Timing measurements: how many milliseconds each stage of a call took. These contain no conversation content. Speed is the product here, and we cannot fix what we cannot measure.
• Safety events: when the crisis-detection layer fires, we record the session identifier and the severity level, and deliberately not the words that triggered it. A database of people’s worst moments is a liability, not telemetry.
• Server logs: ordinary application and error logs. Transcript logging exists as a developer switch and is off in production.
• Usage counters: short-lived per-account counters that stop one account from overloading the service.

4. What we do not collect

• No advertising identifiers, ad SDKs or third-party analytics SDKs. There are none in the app.
• No contacts, photos, calendar, SMS or location. The app does not ask for these permissions.
• No background listening. The microphone is open only during a call you started. A call can carry on while you use another app or lock your screen, the way a phone call does — while it does, Android shows an ongoing notification and both Android and iOS show their microphone indicator. It ends when you hang up, after five minutes of silence, or when your minutes run out.
• No payment details. Meny is free at present and takes no payments.
• No tracking of you across other apps or websites, and no data broker relationships.

5. Why we use it

We rely on your consent, given when you start using Meny and refusable at any time by deleting your data or your account. We do not use your conversations to train or fine-tune AI models, ours or anyone else’s.

6. Who else handles it

Meny is assembled from specialist services. Each one below receives only what it needs to do its job, under contract, and none of them is permitted to use your data for their own purposes.

We will keep this list current. If we add or change a processor in a way that matters to you, we will say so under Changes.

7. Where it is processed

Most of Meny runs in Google Cloud’s Mumbai region (asia-south1), because being close to you is what makes a voice call feel like a call. Our database is hosted there too.

On a call, all four companions’ replies are generated in Mumbai. Some processing still happens outside India: the Google endpoints that write chat replies, memory summaries and the companions’ voices are multi-region rather than India-only. Where personal data leaves India, it moves under the contractual protections Google offers and only to countries not restricted by the Government of India.

8. How long we keep it

We do not currently expire inactive data automatically. It stays until you ask for it to go. Deletion is real deletion from our live systems; backups and logs age out on their own cycle and are not used to repopulate anything.

9. Your rights and controls

Three of these are buttons in the app, and they are deliberately different from each other:

• See what Meny remembers. Settings → Memory shows the complete list, in the same words the companion sees, and which companion each thing belongs to. You can forget any single item there without touching the rest.
• Forget everything. Erases your memory list, your chat threads and your session summaries, and keeps your account so you can still sign in. This cannot be undone. Messages you reported to us are the one exception and are kept, so that a complaint stays actionable; deleting your account removes those too.
• Delete my account. Removes everything keyed to you, including the account itself and the sign-in identity. This cannot be undone.
• Sign out is none of the above. It ends the session on this phone and leaves your data intact, so handing someone your phone for five minutes does not cost you everything the app knows about you.

If you have already uninstalled the app or cannot sign in, you do not have to reinstall to get out: deleting your account explains how to ask us by email, and what is removed either way.

Under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, you also have the right to:

• obtain a summary of the personal data we process about you and who we have shared it with;
• have inaccurate or incomplete data corrected, completed or updated;
• have your personal data erased;
• nominate another person to exercise these rights on your behalf if you die or become incapable of exercising them;
• a grievance redressal process, described below;
• withdraw your consent at any time. For a service that is only conversation, that means deleting your data or your account.

To exercise anything the app does not cover, write to privacy@meny.in from the email address on your account. We will respond within 30 days.

10. Security

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, and call audio travels over encrypted WebRTC into a private room created for that one call. Data at rest is encrypted by our cloud provider. Every request that touches your data is authenticated server-side, and the identity used is always the one proven by your sign-in token. The app cannot ask for someone else’s data by naming them.

Our database is not reachable from any client; only our servers can read it. Access by us is limited to what is needed to run and repair the service.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we will notify you and the Data Protection Board of India as the law requires. If you find a vulnerability, please tell us at security@meny.in before disclosing it publicly.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and for any change that materially affects your privacy we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Meny after that means you accept the updated policy; if you do not, you can delete your account.

12. Contact and grievances

For anything about your data, write to privacy@meny.in.

Our Grievance Officer, appointed under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 and the Information Technology Act, 2000 and its rules, is:

Grievance Officer, Meny
grievance@meny.in

We acknowledge complaints within 24 hours and resolve them within 15 days. If you are not satisfied with the outcome, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.