Legal
Privacy Policy
What Rootmates knows about you, why, who else touches it, and how to get it deleted.
Effective
Who we are
Rootmates is operated by Tamir Tzion Heyman, an individual sole proprietor established in Israel ("Rootmates", "we", "us", "our"). We decide why and how personal data is used in Rootmates, which makes us the data controller for it. If the developer name shown on the App Store or on Google Play is written differently, it refers to the same person.
You can reach us about anything in this policy at feedback@root-mates.com. This is the same address we use for support and for safety reports, and it is monitored.
What this policy covers
This policy applies to the Rootmates mobile app on iOS and Android, the Rootmates web app at root-mates.com, the accounts and backend behind them, and these public pages. It does not cover anything you do inside another company's product - if you tap a link out of Rootmates, or share a day stamp into WhatsApp, that service has its own policy.
What we collect, and what each thing is for
Everything below either comes from you or is produced by the app while you use it. We do not buy personal data or display ads inside Rootmates. The mobile app uses the analytics, diagnostics and subscription services described below. We do not use this information to track you across other companies' apps or websites for advertising.
| What we hold | Why we hold it |
|---|---|
| Email address | To create your account, sign you in, and reach you about your account. |
| Authentication identifiers - your Rootmates user ID, and the identifier Apple or Google gives us if you sign in with them | To recognise you on each sign-in and keep your data attached to you and nobody else. |
| Display name | To name you to your squadmates, on the shared streak and in chat. |
| Avatar photo (optional) | To show your face next to your name in a squad. |
| The habits you create and your daily completion logs, including user-entered workout targets, activity minutes and wellness habits such as hydration | To run the core product - your day, your history, your progress. |
| Streaks, levels, freezes, challenge participation and squad membership | To keep score, to show a squad its shared streak, and to put you in the right squad. |
| Notes and comments you write on habits | To show them where you wrote them. Task notes are visible to your squadmates. |
| Squad chat messages, and photos you send in chat | To deliver them to the squad you sent them to. |
| Journal entries | To provide the private journal. These are for you. |
| Uploaded photos, including private progress photos | To store and show you the photo feature you chose to use. |
| Push notification tokens | To deliver the reminders, nudges and chat pings you turned on. |
| Subscription records and purchase history | RevenueCat processes store transaction identifiers, product and subscription status, and an anonymous or Rootmates account identifier to validate purchases, restore access, apply trials or promotional access, and report subscription activity. RevenueCat forwards subscription events to PostHog and Mixpanel for subscription analytics. On iOS the app also passes Apple's AdServices attribution token for our Apple Ads campaigns. Rootmates does not receive your payment-card or bank details. |
| Mobile product events and app/device context | Only if you allow analytics in the app: app lifecycle events, screen names and selected actions, sent to PostHog. Events are linked to your Rootmates user ID after sign-in and help us understand usage and improve the app. |
| Mobile error and crash reports | Error details, stack traces, app/device context and session status, sent to Sentry when the app crashes or hits an error, to find and fix failures. These reports do not carry your email, name or account ID. |
| Habit-setup conversations at root-mates.com/start, including before you have an account: what you type or say to the habit guide (speech is turned into text while you talk; we do not keep any audio), the habit plan it builds, usage counts, and a scrambled code made from your internet address that changes every day | To hold the conversation, build your plan, carry the plan into your account if you create one, and stop the feature being abused (limits per visitor). The raw internet address is never stored. |
| Abuse and moderation reports - what was reported, by whom, about whom, and what we did | To protect users, to enforce the rules, and to be able to show our working if a decision is challenged. |
Public website analytics
We use Vercel Web Analytics on our public website pages to understand visitor counts, page views and referral sources, and to improve those pages. Reports include browser and device type and approximate geographic information. This measurement does not use analytics cookies or track you across other websites. Vercel processes incoming request information to distinguish visitors using a temporary hash that resets after 24 hours.
We remove query strings and fragments from measured page URLs. We do not send account identities, habits or chat content as analytics events. Signed-in app pages, login pages, personal profiles and invitation links are excluded from page-view tracking. This does not add analytics to our native mobile apps. See Vercel's analytics privacy information. We also use Google Search Console's aggregate search-performance reports; it adds no tracking script to this website.
Download links record daily totals by referring channel, app store and whether the store link was selected or an automatic redirect was attempted. These are counters in our own database, with no individual event history, identifiers, IP addresses or browser details saved in the counters. They use no analytics cookies and are not sent to Google Analytics. Counts represent link visits, store-link selections and redirect attempts, not unique people or confirmed installs.
Mobile analytics and diagnostics
Product analytics (PostHog) are off until you allow them.The app asks during setup, and you can change your answer at any time in Account → Privacy. If you allow analytics, the app sends app lifecycle events (installed, opened, backgrounded), screen names and selected actions to our PostHog project in its EU cloud. Events are linked to your Rootmates user ID after sign-in. Event properties are counts, categories and habit-type identifiers, not habit names, chat messages, journal text, photo paths, email addresses or display names. We do not enable session replay or automatic touch capture. If you decline, nothing is sent to PostHog from the app.
Crash and error reports (Sentry) are always on, because they are how we find and fix failures that cannot be diagnosed any other way. When the app crashes or hits an error it sends Sentry the error details, stack traces, app and device context and session status. We do not set your email, name or account ID on these reports, Sentry's default personal-data attachment is disabled, and performance tracing is off. Error reports can contain technical context associated with the failure; we do not intentionally send your private content.
Subscription analytics. RevenueCat sends subscription events - for example a trial starting, renewing or being cancelled, with the product, price, store and your RevenueCat app user ID - to PostHog and to Mixpanel, which we use to understand subscriptions. These events do not include your habits, chat, journal or photos, and they never include payment-card or bank details.
Apple Ads attribution.On iOS the app passes RevenueCat Apple's AdServices attribution token, so we can tell whether a subscription came from one of our own Apple Ads campaigns. We do not request the advertising identifier (IDFA) or show an App Tracking Transparency prompt, and we do not use this to track you across other companies' apps or websites.
Older testing versions of the app may have behaved differently while these services were being configured. Contact us about any records you want removed. Apple and Google may separately provide diagnostics through their own developer dashboards under their policies and your device settings.
What your squadmates see, and what stays private
Your squadmates can see your display name and avatar, the habits and check-offs you share with the squad, your streak and level, the notes and comments you write on habits, your squad chat messages, any photo you post into a squad chat, and your challenge activity.
Your journal entries and your private progress photos are not shown to squadmates. They are stored for you, under access rules that only let your own account read them. Nothing on the internet is absolutely secure, but this is not a setting you have to find - it is how those two features are built.
Our legal bases (GDPR)
If you are in the EU or the EEA, the GDPR applies to us because we offer this service to people there. These are the bases we rely on.
| Data | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Email, authentication identifiers, display name, avatar | Art. 6(1)(b) - performance of our contract with you |
| Habits, completion logs, streaks, levels, freezes, challenges, squad membership | Art. 6(1)(b) - contract |
| Notes, comments, chat messages, journal entries, uploaded photos | Art. 6(1)(b) - contract |
| Push tokens, for the transactional notifications you enabled | Art. 6(1)(b) - contract. Any promotional or marketing push would need your Art. 6(1)(a) consent, and we would ask for it separately. |
| Purchase verification and subscription access | Art. 6(1)(b) - contract; Art. 6(1)(c) for records we must retain by law. |
| Product and subscription analytics, Apple Ads campaign measurement on iOS, and error diagnostics | Optional analytics and diagnostics use Art. 6(1)(a) consent where offered. Necessary service reliability and security processing uses Art. 6(1)(f), subject to applicable consent requirements. Consent can be withdrawn without losing paid access; it does not undo processing that was lawful before withdrawal. |
| Habit-setup conversations at root-mates.com/start | Art. 6(1)(b) - steps you ask us to take before entering into a contract (building the plan you asked for); Art. 6(1)(f) - our legitimate interest in preventing abuse of the feature, for the per-visitor limits |
| Abuse reports and moderation records | Art. 6(1)(f) - our legitimate interest, and that of the people using Rootmates, in a service that is safe to be in; and Art. 6(1)(c) where the law requires us to act or to keep a record |
Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights, and you can object - see Your rights below.
Sensitive information you choose to enter
Rootmates does not connect to Apple Health, Google Health Connect or any medical service, and we do not diagnose, score or infer anything about your health.
You do not need to provide medical or other sensitive information to use Rootmates. If you voluntarily enter information that reveals your health, religious beliefs, sexual life or other special-category information - in a habit name, a journal entry, a note, a photo or a conversation with the habit guide - you explicitly consent to our processing that information solely to provide the feature in which you entered it. You may withdraw this consent at any time by deleting the relevant content or your account. Withdrawing does not affect anything we lawfully did before you withdrew.
Who else touches your data
We do not sell your personal data and we do not hand it to advertisers or data brokers. We do use a small set of named service and platform providers to run Rootmates, and your data passes through them:
- Supabase - authentication, database hosting and file storage. Our database and your uploaded files live here, in the EU (Frankfurt) region.
- Expo / EAS - application infrastructure, including the push notification relay and over-the-air update delivery.
- Apple Push Notification service (APNs) and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) - delivery of the notifications you turned on, to your device.
- RevenueCat - subscription validation, purchase restoration, entitlement management and subscription analytics. It processes purchase records and app user identifiers on our behalf, including Apple Ads attribution on iOS.
- PostHog - mobile product analytics in our EU cloud project.
- Sentry - mobile crash and error reporting.
- Mixpanel - subscription analytics, from subscription events RevenueCat forwards to it.
- Apple App Store and Google Play - billing, renewals, cancellation and applicable refunds for purchases made through their stores. They process payment credentials under their own policies; Rootmates and RevenueCat receive transaction information, not your card or bank details.
- Anthropic - the AI model behind the habit guide at root-mates.com/start. It receives the text of your conversation with the guide in order to reply and build your plan.
- AssemblyAI - speech-to-text for the habit guide, only when you choose to talk instead of type. It receives your voice while the microphone is on and returns the words as text.
- ElevenLabs- turns the habit guide's replies into speech when you talk to it instead of typing. It receives the text of the guide's replies, not your voice.
- Cloudflare Turnstile - a bot check on the habit guide at root-mates.com/start. It checks your browser in the background, without a puzzle for most visitors, so automated scripts cannot run up the cost of the service.
- Vercel - hosting for the Rootmates web app and API, and aggregate analytics for our public website pages as described above.
- Apple and Google - optional identity providers, if you choose Sign in with Apple or Google Sign-In. They tell us the account information you authorise them to share, and they also process information under their own terms and privacy notices.
Where a service provider processes personal data on our behalf, we require appropriate contractual, confidentiality and security protections and require the provider to process the information consistently with our instructions and applicable data-protection law.
We may also disclose personal data where we are legally required to, or where it is genuinely necessary to investigate abuse, protect someone from harm, or establish or defend a legal claim.
International transfers
Rootmates is established in Israel. The European Commission recognises Israel as providing an adequate level of protection for personal data, so personal data reaching us in Israel is covered by that adequacy framework.
Some of our service providers, or their own subprocessors, may process information in the United States or in other countries. Where EU or EEA personal data is transferred to a country that does not benefit from an adequacy decision, we rely on an appropriate transfer mechanism - such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and supplementary safeguards where required, or another legally recognised transfer mechanism. You may contact us for information about the safeguards that apply to a particular transfer.
How long we keep things
| Category | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account and profile information | Kept while your account is active. Deleted when you delete your account. |
| Habits, completion history, streaks, journal entries, notes, comments, chat messages and uploaded photos | Kept until you delete the content or your account, other than the narrow exceptions in this table. |
| Habit-setup conversations at root-mates.com/start | If you do not create an account, the whole conversation is deleted 30 days after it started. If you do, the plan becomes part of your account and the conversation text is deleted after 30 days. The per-visitor limit records are deleted after 2 days. |
| Push notification tokens | Kept while they are needed to deliver notifications you enabled. Removed when the token is invalidated by the platform, when you turn notifications off, or when the account is deleted. |
| Crash reports and performance data in the App Store Connect and Play Console dashboards | Retention of reports in Apple's and Google's own consoles is controlled by those platforms. This is separate from the Sentry records below. |
| Abuse reports and moderation records | Up to 12 months after the report is closed, where that is necessary to protect users, to document an enforcement decision, or to meet a legal obligation. A record can outlive the reported account, because a record that vanishes with the offender is not a safety record. |
| RevenueCat subscription records; PostHog events; Mixpanel subscription events; Sentry error records | These are stored separately from the app database. Retention depends on the provider and our project settings, and records are not automatically erased by the in-app account-deletion operation. Contact us to request deletion of identifiable records held by these providers. We may retain records needed for active subscriptions, legal obligations, fraud prevention or legal claims; we will explain an applicable exception when responding to your request. |
| Encrypted database backups | Our database is on Supabase, which takes an automatic daily backup and keeps up to 7 days of them. Point-in-time recovery is not enabled. So 7 days is the outer edge of how long a deleted row can survive in a backup. |
What deletion actually means. Account deletion removes your account and associated database records. The service then attempts to remove your uploaded files from storage. If that cleanup fails, the account deletion can still succeed while some files remain pending follow-up; deletion does not guarantee that every stored file disappears at the same instant. Contact feedback@root-mates.com if you need help with a deletion. Database records may remain in encrypted backups until their normal rotation expires, up to 7 days. Those backups are isolated from ordinary product use; if we restore one, we reapply deletions. Uploaded files are held separately from these database backups. Separate subscription, promotional-access, analytics and diagnostic records are described above.
Deleting your account
You can delete your Rootmates account yourself, without contacting anyone, and it takes effect immediately for the account and associated database records. File cleanup and separate subscription, promotional-access, analytics and diagnostic records are handled as described above.
- In the app: Settings / Profile → Delete account. Versions that include signed-in Account & help on the paywall also offer Delete account there, without requiring an active subscription.
- On the web: root-mates.com/delete-account, which can delete your account for you after you sign in, and also tells you how to ask us to do it by email if you no longer have the app installed.
Deleting your account removes your account and the personal data attached to it from our live systems: your profile, your habits and completion history, your private journal, your notes and comments and your chat messages. Removal of uploaded photos is attempted separately and can require follow-up if storage cleanup fails. If you are the owner of a squad, ownership is handed to another member so the squad does not die with your account; if you were the only member, the squad is deleted with you. The exceptions are the ones already named above - moderation records where we need them, and encrypted backups until they expire, files awaiting cleanup after a storage failure, and the separate subscription, promotional-access, analytics and diagnostic records described above.
Deleting your account does not cancel a store subscription. Manage or cancel it in the Apple App Store or Google Play account used for the purchase. For deletion requests covering our service providers, contact feedback@root-mates.com.
Your rights
Subject to applicable law, you may ask us to give you access to the personal data we hold about you; correct information that is wrong; delete it; restrict how we process it; or give you a portable copy of the information you provided. You may object to processing we base on legitimate interests. Where we rely on your consent, you may withdraw it at any time, without affecting the lawfulness of what we did before you withdrew.
Most of these you can exercise yourself inside the app: edit your profile and your content, and delete your account outright. For anything else, email feedback@root-mates.com and we will answer within one month, as the GDPR requires. We may need to confirm you are the account holder before we act, which is a protection for you.
If you are in the EU or EEA and you think we have got this wrong, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the data-protection supervisory authority in the country where you live, where you work, or where you believe the infringement happened. If you are in Israel, you may contact the Privacy Protection Authority. We would rather you told us first, but that right does not depend on it.
No automated decision-making
Rootmates does not use personal data to make decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects through solely automated processing. Enforcement decisions about content and accounts are made by a person.
Children
Rootmates is intended for people aged 13 and older. We do not knowingly allow anyone under 13 to hold a Rootmates account, and we do not design features to attract them. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will suspend it and delete the account and its personal information, unless the processing is lawfully authorised by a verified parent or guardian.
If you believe a child under 13 is using Rootmates, tell us at feedback@root-mates.com and we will act on it.
Security
Data moving between the app and our servers travels over TLS. Data at rest is encrypted by our hosting providers, including database backups. Access to your rows is enforced in the database itself with row-level security, not only in the app - so a bug in a screen cannot hand your journal to somebody else. Access to production systems is limited to the operator. No service can promise perfect security, and we do not.
California and other US state privacy rights
Rootmates is a small independent app and does not currently meet the thresholds that make an operator a "business" under the California Consumer Privacy Act. We provide the following anyway, to everyone, not only Californians.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. Our analytics and subscription services are used for the purposes described above, not cross-context behavioural advertising.
You may ask us to tell you what personal information we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it - see Your rights and Deleting your account above. We will not treat you differently for exercising any of this.
Do Not Track.Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal. There is no common standard for what a service must do when it receives one, and our services do not currently respond to browser Do Not Track signals. We do not track you across third-party websites or apps in the first place.
Changes to this policy
This version is effective 5 October 2026. If we change it in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and make the revised policy available through the app's policy links. Where advance notice or renewed consent is required, we will provide it before the change applies. Continuing to use Rootmates after that means the new version applies to you, subject to your rights under applicable law.
Contact
Tamir Tzion Heyman, sole proprietor, Israel - operating as Rootmates.
feedback@root-mates.com
See also the Terms of Use and the Community Guidelines.