Mind with Marcus — Privacy Policy

Effective September 22, 2026. This policy explains what Mind with Marcus (the “app”) does with your information. Mind with Marcus is published by Westwood Hills, K.K. (“we”, “us”), a company registered in Japan. Marcus is a personal companion you can talk to, bring along and text. It is not a medical, psychological or mental-health service, and nothing Marcus says is medical advice; if you are in crisis, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line.

The short version: Marcus is an AI companion; his replies are generated by artificial intelligence, not by a person. There is no sign-up and we do not ask for your name, email address or phone number. Your conversations are processed live by us and the service providers below in order to produce Marcus’s replies and are not recorded; what Marcus remembers about you is stored on your phone, not on our servers. Before your first conversation the app shows you what is sent and to whom and asks for your permission; nothing you say or type leaves your phone for those providers until you agree, and you can withdraw that permission at any time (section 1). We keep a pseudonymous installation record, your Marcus-time balance and Apple purchase records so the app can work and so purchases can be honoured and refunded. From the app update that follows version 1.0 (build 26), the app also reports a handful of usage events — never conversations — to Meta so we can measure our own advertising (section 5).

1. What is needed to provide Marcus

Your permission. The first time you tap Talk, Text or Come With Me, the app shows a screen titled “Before you talk to Marcus”. It explains that Marcus is an AI companion; that in Talk and Come With Me your voice is processed, in Text your messages are processed, and that Marcus may use notes from your previous conversations for continuity; and that this information is processed by OpenAI, Deepgram, LiveKit and Inworld to provide Marcus’s conversation, voice and real-time features (what each of them receives is set out in section 5). Nothing is sent to these providers until you tap “Agree & Continue”; “Not Now” sends nothing and returns you to the home screen. Your choice is recorded only on your phone (in the iOS Keychain, with the date and the version of the disclosure you agreed to) and is never sent anywhere. You can withdraw it at any time in About Marcus under “Data sharing”; after that, Marcus cannot talk, text or listen until you agree again, and the screen is shown again the next time you try. If what we share or with whom changes, the app asks you again. Withdrawing this permission does not delete what Marcus remembers on your phone; “Forget everything Marcus knows” does that, separately.

Installation identity. The first time the app runs it generates a random installation identifier and registers it with our server, which issues a user identifier and a secret. These are stored in the iOS Keychain on your phone. They are not derived from your Apple ID, your device identifiers or any personal detail. Because they live in the Keychain, they can survive deleting and reinstalling the app, which is how your Marcus-time balance is kept for you.

Voice (Talk). When you tap Talk, your microphone audio is streamed from the phone to Marcus over an encrypted real-time connection. It is transcribed to text by a speech-to-text provider, the text is sent with the conversation so far to a language-model provider that writes Marcus’s reply, and the reply text is turned into speech by a voice provider. Neither we nor our real-time provider keeps a recording or a transcript of the session once it ends. While Marcus is speaking, windows of up to about three seconds of your audio are sent to our real-time provider’s interruption detector so Marcus can stop when you start talking; that service retains nothing from them. The microphone is on only during Talk and Come With Me, and both the app (“Mic on”) and iOS show when it is; the iOS microphone permission text says the same.

Text. When you use Text, what you type is sent to Marcus the same way, without audio, and the microphone stays off. Text conversations do not use Marcus time.

Conversation context. During a session, the conversation is held in the working memory of the Marcus service so he can follow what you are saying. When the session ends, it is discarded there; the service does not keep a copy of your conversations.

2. What Marcus remembers (persistent memory)

At the end of a conversation, the language-model provider writes a short summary of it and a list of facts worth remembering (people, situations, preferences). These are sent back to your phone and stored in a local database inside the app, together with a transcript of what was said in Talk, Text and Come With Me. Nothing in this database is uploaded for storage anywhere.

At the start of each new session, the app sends a compact brief — recent summaries and the facts Marcus has kept, never the full archive — to the Marcus service so he can pick up where you left off. That brief is processed like the rest of the conversation and discarded when the session ends.

Because this memory lives only on your phone, it is protected by your device passcode and iOS data protection, it is included in your device backups according to your iOS backup settings, and you can delete it at any time: open About Marcus from the home screen and choose “Forget everything Marcus knows”, or delete the app.

3. Come With Me

Come With Me is different from Talk: Marcus listens silently to what is happening around you until you tap Leave. While it is on, all speech that reaches your microphone — yours and that of anyone near you — is transcribed continuously. Every few minutes, and when you tap Leave, the transcript since the last note is condensed by the language-model provider into a short note of what happened, which becomes part of the conversation so Marcus can talk with you about it afterwards. The note is marked as something the phone caught that may have been misheard, and Marcus does not repeat overheard words as exact quotes. The note can be included in the session summary stored on your phone as described in section 2, but nothing heard during Come With Me becomes a lasting fact about you unless you say it to Marcus yourself in a conversation.

You are responsible for using Come With Me lawfully and considerately: laws on recording and processing other people’s speech differ by country and state. Tell the people you are with, and do not use it where consent is required and has not been given, or where recording is prohibited.

4. Marcus time, usage and purchases

Usage records. Our server keeps, for each session, its mode (Talk, Come With Me or Text), when it started and ended, how many seconds were used and from which balance (free or paid), and the cost of the service providers for that session. It does not hold what was said. It also keeps your Marcus-time ledger: the free time granted, time purchased, time consumed and any refunds.

Purchases. Marcus time is sold as consumable in-app purchases through Apple’s App Store. We never see your payment details; Apple handles payment. When you buy a pack, the app sends Apple’s signed transaction to our server, which verifies it with Apple’s certificates and credits your balance once. We keep Apple’s transaction identifiers, the product, quantity, storefront, currency and price, the purchase date and refund status. Your pseudonymous user identifier is passed to Apple with the transaction (as Apple’s “app account token”) so a purchase can be matched to the right balance, and Apple sends us server notifications about refunds and revocations, which we store and act on by removing the corresponding time.

Abuse prevention. When an installation registers, our server records the request’s IP address and the date in order to limit how many free allowances can be created from one address per day. The IP address is not linked to your installation record or your conversations, and these records are deleted automatically once they are more than seven days old.

Diagnostics. While connected, the app sends the Marcus service audio-quality statistics (packet loss, jitter, delay) and a timeline of the phone’s audio-engine state, so connection problems can be diagnosed. The service writes operational logs — timings, connection events, session mode, resource usage and errors. These logs contain no recordings; in rare cases a single short line of what you said can appear in them (when a reply had to be skipped), and they are kept by our hosting provider for about 30 days. Apart from the Meta measurement kit described in section 5, the app contains no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting software, and Marcus does not show advertisements.

5. Service providers

We rely on the following providers to run Mind with Marcus. Each receives only what its role requires and processes it under its own terms and privacy policy, which we encourage you to read. All of them may process your data outside Japan, including in the United States. The first four are the third-party services named on the in-app permission screen (section 1); none of them receives anything you say or type until you have agreed there.

LiveKit (LiveKit, Inc.) — carries the real-time audio, text and session data between your phone and Marcus, and hosts the Marcus service and its operational logs. Session recording and transcript retention are switched off; LiveKit keeps session metadata (identifiers, times, connection quality) and the operational logs described above. Its interruption detector receives windows of up to about three seconds of your audio while Marcus is speaking and retains nothing from them. livekit.com/legal/privacy-policy
Deepgram (Deepgram, Inc.) — converts your speech, and speech heard during Come With Me, into text. We have opted every request out of Deepgram’s Model Improvement Program, so Deepgram keeps the audio and transcript only as long as it takes to process the request and does not use them to improve its models. deepgram.com/privacy
OpenAI (OpenAI, L.L.C.) — the artificial-intelligence language model that reads the conversation and the memory brief and writes everything Marcus says: his replies, session summaries, remembered facts and Come With Me notes. What you say (as text), what you type and the memory brief are sent to it. OpenAI does not use data sent through its API to train its models; it may keep API inputs and outputs for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, then deletes them. openai.com/policies/privacy-policy
Inworld (Inworld AI, Inc.) — turns the text of Marcus’s replies into his voice. It receives Marcus’s words, not yours, and no identifier. Under its terms Inworld may retain and use that text to operate and improve its service; it does not train its generally available models on it. inworld.ai/privacy
Cloudflare (Cloudflare, Inc.) — runs our server and database holding installation, usage, Marcus-time and purchase records. cloudflare.com/privacypolicy
Apple (Apple Inc.) — App Store distribution and in-app purchases under Apple’s own terms. apple.com/legal/privacy
Meta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) — from the app update that follows version 1.0 (build 26), the app includes Meta’s software development kit (Facebook iOS SDK 18.0, through react-native-fbsdk-next 13.4.3; our Meta app ID is 1582224833681015). We use it for analytics and to measure our own advertising and marketing for Mind with Marcus — for example, whether an advertisement led to an installation and to use of the app. It receives app-event information: that the app was opened; four events we send when a feature actually starts (Talk started, Text started, Come With Me started, and the Add Marcus time sheet opened, the last with only a fixed label saying where it was opened from); and purchase events that the kit logs itself from Apple’s StoreKit, which include the product identifier, the amount and the currency. Alongside these, the kit processes device and app details (such as device model, iOS version, app version, language and time zone) and device-level identifiers such as Apple’s identifier for vendor, together with the network address of the request. Meta may link this information to a Meta account associated with the device and processes it under its own terms. We have disabled the kit’s collection of the advertising identifier (IDFA) and its advertiser-tracking setting, and the app does not ask for iOS tracking permission. We do not send Meta the content of conversations, transcripts, audio, what Marcus remembers, names, messages, anything heard during Come With Me, prompts, or our installation and user identifiers. Marcus does not use Meta to show advertisements inside the app. facebook.com/privacy/policy

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with anyone else except where the law requires us to or to protect the rights and safety of users or the public.

6. Retention and deletion

On your phone: Marcus’s memory (summaries, facts and transcripts) stays until you choose “Forget everything Marcus knows” in About Marcus or delete the app. The installation credential in the Keychain may remain after the app is deleted; it contains no personal information and only becomes meaningful again if you reinstall the app.

At the Marcus service: audio, transcripts and conversation context are used only for the duration of the session and are not stored by the service afterwards; session recording at our real-time provider is switched off. Operational logs are kept by our hosting provider for about 30 days. Our speech, language and voice providers keep data as described in section 5.

On our server: installation records, usage records, Marcus-time ledger entries, purchase records and Apple’s refund notifications are kept for as long as the installation and its balance exist and as needed for accounting and for honouring or contesting refunds; we do not currently apply an automatic deletion schedule to these records. Registration IP records are deleted automatically after seven days.

Deletion requests. To delete what Marcus remembers, choose “Forget everything Marcus knows” in About Marcus, or delete the app from your phone. To ask us to delete your server-side records, email info@westwoodhills.jp and include the installation ID shown in About Marcus (it identifies the installation, not you; we hold no name or email to look you up by). We will confirm when it is done. Deleting the server record also removes any remaining Marcus time, which cannot be restored. Purchase records that we must keep for tax, accounting or refund-dispute purposes may be retained for the legally required period even after other data is deleted.

7. Security

Data between the app, our server and the Marcus service travels over encrypted connections (HTTPS and encrypted WebRTC media). Your installation credential is kept in the iOS Keychain, and our server stores only a cryptographic hash of the secret, not the secret itself. Apple purchase data is accepted only when its signature chains to Apple’s root certificate. Access to our server, database and provider accounts is limited to the people who operate the service. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Children

Mind with Marcus is intended for adults. It is not directed to children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has used the app and provided information through it, contact us and we will delete the associated server records.

9. Your rights and international transfers

You can withdraw your permission for the AI processing described in section 1 at any time in About Marcus (“Data sharing” → “Withdraw consent”). Depending on where you live, you may also have rights to access, correct, delete or restrict the processing of your information, or to object to it. Because we identify you only by an installation identifier, we will ask you to demonstrate control of that installation before acting on a request. We are established in Japan and handle personal information under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information; the providers in section 5 process data in other countries, including the United States, under their own safeguards. Nothing in this policy limits rights you have under applicable law.

10. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the app changes. The current version is always at this address, with its effective date at the top. If a change materially reduces your rights or expands what we collect, we will make that clear in the app or on this page before it takes effect.

11. Contact

Westwood Hills, K.K.
2-6-13 Shinohara-higashi, Kohoku-ku
Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
info@westwoodhills.jp · Mind with Marcus support · www.westwoodhills.jp