Your data

Privacy is more than a policy page.

Most AI products promise privacy and rely on you to trust them. We don’t think that’s enough. The way data is protected matters more than the way it’s described. Below is what Impela actually does — what we store, how it’s protected, what you can see and change, and what you can do if you ever want to leave.

What we store

To do coaching, Impela has to remember. Some of what it stores:

• Your account: name, email, password (scrambled so it can’t be read, never stored as plain text), phone number if you opt in to texts.
• Your conversations: every coaching session, with timestamps and message content.
• Your profile: personality observations, values, strengths, growth areas — built up across sessions.
• Your goals and commitments: what you said you’d do, when, and what happened.
• Your relationships: people you discuss in coaching, their relationship to you, the context.
• Patterns: things Impela has noticed about how you work, decide, and react.
• Documents and artifacts: anything you upload, anything coaching produces.

There’s no second, hidden profile. What Impela keeps about you is in your account and your data download. The only things left out are our internal records of how the coach worked each turn, and the technical pieces that protect your account (your scrambled password and your locked keys).

What we don’t do

We don’t sell your data. Not to anyone. Not for any reason.

We never send email in your name. If you connect Gmail, Impela writes drafts. You send them.

We don’t share your conversations or profile with employers, insurers, family members, advertisers, data brokers, or anyone outside Impela.

We don’t train general-purpose AI models on your data. Your sessions are not in some training set making future models smarter. They’re yours.

Three questions, answered short

Can you read my conversations? No. They’re locked with a key made from your password. Impela staff have no way to open them unless you share something with support. One exception: a short reminder label, so a reminder can say what’s due. Details

Where is the key? In your login cookie, only while you’re signed in. Prefer it gone every time? Turn on “Sign me out when I close Impela” in Settings. If you forget your password, your recovery PIN gets your data back. Details

Can I take my data? Yes, in one click from Settings. Everything in the file is readable as it is. Your uploaded files are listed by name, not included. Shared spaces and 360 feedback are in it, as you see them in the app. The detail section lists exactly what’s in the file. Details

Three commitments, built into the code

1. Your data is not shared with marketers, advertisers, or anyone beyond the few outside services we need to run Impela — the AI provider, the email and text providers, and the billing provider. Each one is bound by an agreement to protect your data. (See the full list below.)
2. No human at Impela can read your data without clear permission from you — limited to specific things, for a set time. When you need support help, you grant access through Settings — choosing exactly which items the support team can see (specific sessions, memories, patterns, or other records), and for how long. When the time runs out or you turn it off, access ends automatically and any copied data is deleted.
3. These rules are built into the code, not just promised. A promise that says “we won’t” depends on the company keeping its word. A system that says “we can’t” depends on math. We’ve built it the second way.

Memory you can see, edit, and own

Here’s the part most AI products get wrong.

To coach you well, Impela has to remember a lot — what you’ve said, what you value, what patterns it’s noticed, what you’re working on. Without memory, every session starts from zero and nothing compounds.

But memory you can’t see is untrustworthy. Most AI tools have opaque memory: the system has formed views of you that you have no way to inspect or correct. Impela does it differently.

Everything is visible. Every memory the system holds about you is on a page you can open. There’s nothing hidden in a profile we keep but you don’t see.

Everything is sourced. Every memory shows where it came from: which session, which message, what reasoning produced it, and how confident the system is. You can trace any belief back to the conversation that produced it.

Everything is versioned. When a memory updates — because new evidence came in, or because you corrected it — the old version isn’t overwritten. It’s preserved as a prior version, linked to the new one. You can see what Impela used to believe about you and why it changed its mind.

You can edit it. Anything you don’t agree with, you can change. Anything you don’t want stored, you can delete.

The AI can’t overwrite what you’ve edited. This is a built-in rule. If the AI’s view of you ever conflicts with something you’ve set yourself, the AI does not quietly change it. It suggests a change — which you see as waiting for your review — and waits. You accept, edit, or reject it. If you reject it, the AI won’t suggest the same change again for at least thirty days. This is built into where your data is stored, not just into the AI’s instructions — so it can’t be talked into ignoring it.

Old versions stay in your record. When a memory is replaced, the prior version isn’t deleted — it’s preserved alongside the current version, with the full history of when it changed and why. It’s kept in your record and included in your data download.

Your story is yours. Impela can produce a narrative version of your structured memory — a prose summary of how the system understands you. The narrative is built entirely from your structured memories — every fact in it has a corresponding memory in your record that you can see and edit. And when you rewrite a section in your own words, your version is locked from AI override on the next regeneration. The user’s version of their own story wins.

Personality, visible too

If Impela is going to form a view of your personality, you should be able to see what view it’s formed.

The Personality view shows each trait, the confidence level, and the specific evidence — which sessions and observations contributed. If you’ve uploaded a validated assessment, that’s visible too, with how it factored in. You can retake or re-upload anytime.

There’s no black-box profile that gets used in coaching but never shown to you.

How it’s protected

The mechanical layer:

• Locked while traveling. Everything between your device and our servers moves over a secure, encrypted connection.
• Locked while stored. Your conversations and most of what Impela keeps are encrypted with your key. A few fields are not yet. Details
• Passwords scrambled. Your password is scrambled in a way that can’t be undone — we don’t store anything readable, even internally.
• Tight access. Access to our live systems is limited to essential work, and every access is logged.
• Trusted hosting. No system is uncrackable, but ours is built to the standard a careful engineer would use.

These are table stakes. We mention them because if they weren’t here, the rest wouldn’t matter.

What you can do, anytime

• See everything. Your profile, your conversations, your memories, your patterns, your story, your personality view — all visible from inside the app.
• Edit any of it. Anything Impela has wrong, you correct. Edits to your story are locked from AI override.
• Delete any of it. A specific session, a goal, a person you don’t want stored, a pattern observation — delete it.
• Download your data. One click in Settings. The file is readable as it is. Your uploaded files are listed by name, not included. Shared spaces and 360 feedback are in it, as you see them in the app. Details
• Manage your notifications. Turn off email or text reminders, or opt out of follow-up texts entirely — pick exactly which ones you want, anytime in Settings.
• Delete your account. Permanent, complete erasure from our active systems. Not “marked as deleted” — actually gone.

Who we work with

A few outside services help us run Impela. Each one is bound by an agreement to protect your data.

• AI providers (Anthropic and OpenAI for coaching responses). Your conversation is processed to generate replies; under their terms it is not used to train their models and is deleted within about 30 days. It is encrypted in transit and at rest, but to coach you it has to be read — so it isn’t end-to-end encrypted.
• Email and SMS delivery (Resend for email, Twilio for SMS). Used only to send notifications you’ve opted into.
• Billing (Stripe). Handles payment processing. We don’t store credit card numbers; Stripe does.
• Cloud hosting (Vercel for the application, managed Postgres for data). Standard infrastructure.
• Encryption keys (Amazon Web Services KMS). Holds the server-side keys that protect your data, including the server half of the lock on your recovery PIN — it handles keys, never your data itself.

That’s it. No analytics trackers, no advertising pixels, no third-party retargeting.

What happens if Impela goes away

If we’re acquired, the acquirer inherits the same privacy commitments. If your data would be used differently under new ownership, you’ll get notice and the chance to export and delete before the transition.

If we shut down, you’ll get notice in advance, the ability to export your data, and a permanent deletion of everything that remains.

You’re not trapped here.

How it works, in detail

The mechanics behind the short answers above. Every line here can be checked against the code.

• Your key. It is made from your password when you log in. It travels in your login cookie, on your device, locked under a server key, so a copy of the cookie alone can’t open your data. Our servers use it only while handling your requests and never store it. The cookie lasts 7 days from your last visit, 30 if you chose “remember me,” never more than 90. With “Sign me out when I close Impela” on, it lasts only until you close your browser, and “remember me” is ignored.
• Your password. Never stored. We keep a scrambled version that can’t be undone. A password reset uses your recovery PIN plus a key held in Amazon’s key service (KMS) to unlock your data again.
• Encrypted with your key. Conversations, memories, patterns, artifacts, outcomes, commitments, and your notes on people. Not yet: goal and vision titles and descriptions, shared goals, a person’s email address and the names you use for them, your Big Five scores, the written notes people give in a 360 review, and uploaded files. Those sit behind the normal server locks only.
• The reminder label. When a commitment has a reminder, we keep its name, cut to 80 characters, under a server key, so a reminder email or text can say what’s due. Our reminder system can read that label and nothing else.
• Your download. The file holds your account, profile, conversations, people, goals, commitments, memories, patterns, artifacts and devices, all readable. If a field could not be opened with your key, the file says so instead of showing scrambled text. Your uploaded files are listed by name, size and date, but the files themselves are not included. Shared spaces are in the file as you see them in the app: shared goals, what you shared, agreed messages and your own health-check answers, never the other person’s private coaching. 360 feedback is in the file as the app shows it to you: pooled scores and raters’ notes in their words, with the same holds the app uses, and your own self-ratings.
• Gmail. The permission Google grants (gmail.compose) would allow sending. Impela’s code only creates drafts and never reads your mail. You send.
• 360 reviews. What your direct reports say is held back until at least three of them have answered. Peers and your manager are not held back that way, so with one or two of them you may guess who said what.
• Two-sided coaching. Your partner sees only the message you approved. Items you share go to your partner’s coach in your words with a one-line summary we write, and a “what I’m hoping for” line, if you add one, goes to their coach, not to them.
• Teens and parents. A parent sees the commitments the teen chooses to share, when the teen last used Impela, and safety alerts. Never the words.

Bottom line

Most AI products treat privacy as something they have to say. We treat it as something we have to build. Memory is visible, editable, versioned. Humans can’t read your data without your permission, given for a set time. The AI can’t quietly form a view of you that you’d disagree with if you saw it. Your data is yours, and leaving with all of it is one click away.

For the legal version of all this — the binding policy, the formal commitments, the regulatory specifics — read our Privacy Policy.