Privacy Policy

What we collect

Account information (name, email, and a profile picture if you add one), and the health and fitness data you choose to log: meals and meal photos, body weight, measurements, progress photos, workouts, weekly check-ins including the free-text answers, your goals, and your conversations with the AI coach. During setup we also ask, privately, about your injuries, foods you avoid, what motivates you, and whether you have a history of disordered eating. None of that last group is ever shown to a human coach.

How we handle eating disorders

If you tell us during setup that you have a history of disordered eating, or if you describe one in a message to the AI coach, we set a flag on your account that makes the app gentler: it stops using weight-loss and deficit language, stops celebrating weight lost, hides loss-framed figures from your progress screens, and encourages you to work with a doctor or a dietitian. The flag is set once and there is currently no switch in the app to turn it back off. It is included in what we send to Google so the AI can follow those rules. If it has been set and you do not want it, email us and we will remove it.

It also puts a floor under your calorie target, and the floor is narrower than it sounds. On your own targets screen the app will not let you save a number below the one Method works out for you. If your target sits above Method's number you can still lower it as far as that number, and if your profile is too incomplete for Method to work one out, that particular rule has nothing to measure you against.

Underneath it there is a second floor, and this one is for everybody, flag or no flag. The targets screen will not accept a calorie figure below 1,500 for men or 1,200 for women: type one and the box simply puts your old number back. You can still build a plan under that number by entering protein, carbs and fat yourself, because there are real reasons somebody might and we would rather you did it in front of us than went elsewhere. The app says so at the time and offers to talk it through.

A human coach is never shown this flag and never sees what you wrote, but they can infer it, and we would rather tell you than let you assume otherwise. If your coach tries to lower your calorie target the app refuses and tells them to talk to you first. While your targets are unset it refuses any change they make to them, increases included, or the first time they try to set them at all, and it also refuses a request to hand your targets back to Method's own calculation. Your training schedule feeds that calculation, so the same refusal reaches it. If your coach tries to cut how many days a week you train, and that cut would lower the number Method works out for you, the app refuses that too. They can still change your equipment, which days of the week you train, and the exercises in your programme, as long as the number does not fall. A client without the flag produces none of those refusals, so a coach who meets one can work out that something is protecting your targets, and they can meet one without ever touching your targets, by changing your training.

How we use it

To run the app: log your nutrition, generate coaching responses, track your progress, and deliver check-ins. Meal photos, anything you dictate to the AI coach by voice, and your messages to the AI coach are sent to Google's Gemini models, along with a summary of your plan and progress, to produce your results. That summary includes your name, age and sex, your goal, goal weight and pace, your weight, targets and what the app calculates you burn in a day, your measurements, your daily totals for the last week and when you last logged a meal, the branded products you have saved with their calories and macros, the titles of any goals you have set, your check-in answers, your injuries, what you avoid eating, what motivates you, the flag described above, and the summary and facts the AI has remembered about you. We do not send your progress photos to Google.

Messages between you and a human coach are not processed by AI at all. Voice notes on that thread are sent as audio and played back as audio, never transcribed. One thing on the coaching side does reach Google: if your coach generates a pre-call brief about you, that brief sends your first name, goal, calorie target, recent check-ins and weigh-ins, a nutrition summary, and the notes your coach has written about you.

We have not set up any special data-retention or model-training arrangement with Google, so what we send is handled under Google's own published terms for the Gemini API. Those terms differ by tier, and we would rather you knew the worse case than the vague one: on the lower tier they allow people at Google to read what we send and to use it to improve its products, and that would include your messages to the AI coach. We have not yet confirmed which tier our account is on. We are checking, and we will say so here plainly once we know. We do not sell your personal data, we never use health or fitness data for advertising, marketing or data mining, and the app contains no analytics, tracking or crash-reporting tools of any kind. It loads no fonts or scripts from anyone else, so nobody is following you around inside it. Your device does not fetch anything from another company at all: the exercise demonstration films come from our own server, which fetches them from MuscleWiki on your behalf.

Sharing

Your data is shared with the providers required to run the app: Vercel, where the app itself runs; Supabase for the database and file storage; Google for the AI features; Apple and RevenueCat for purchases and notifications; Open Food Facts when you search for a food or scan a barcode, which receives only the search text or the barcode digits; the USDA food database when you photograph a meal, which receives only a food name the AI generated from that photo; MuscleWiki, who provide the exercise demonstration films, which our own server fetches from them and passes through to you when you press play, so MuscleWiki receives nothing about you at all - not your IP address, not your device, and not your name; and Google or Apple if you choose to sign in with them. Nothing is fetched from MuscleWiki unless you press play. None of the food databases is told who is asking. Our notifications never contain the text of a message, a calorie figure or a weight.

Connecting a human coach is your choice, nothing is shared until you accept an invite, and you can have at most three coaches at a time. Once connected, that coach can see your weekly check-ins including anything you write in them, your progress photos, your meal photos, your body weight, your measurements, your nutrition logs, your training plan and workouts, the workouts you build for yourself day by day, and your name, email, profile picture, goal, targets and profile basics such as your age, sex and height. They can also change your calorie and macro targets and your training plan, and they can write your workout programme itself: the training days, the exercises on each one and how many sets, or a replacement for one you built yourself. You can change any of that back. They cannot see your chats with the AI coach, what the AI remembers from them, or what you told us privately during setup. You can disconnect at any time, which immediately stops their access to anything new. They keep any notes they wrote about you, which you cannot read or delete, and your message history stays read-only for both of you. Deleting your account removes both. A programme they wrote stays on your account and stays yours to change, because it is what you are training on.

Your choices and deletion

You can delete your account at any time from inside the app, or by emailing us. Deletion removes your profile, your logs, your photos, your chats, the summary the AI kept of you, and your coaching history from our live systems straight away.

Five things it does not reach, stated plainly. Our own safety backups hold a copy of chats, the AI's summary and coaching messages for up to 14 days and then delete it automatically. Our hosting provider keeps its own database backups, which expire on its schedule rather than ours. Corrections you made to a food's calories or macros are kept indefinitely so the estimate is better next time. Anything already sent to Google for AI processing is held under Google's terms and cannot be recalled. And your subscription record as Apple and RevenueCat hold it is theirs rather than ours, and is managed in your Apple subscription settings.

One of them is ours and we would rather name it than let the sentence above carry it: we keep a record of the subscription events themselves, in our own database. Each row holds an event identifier, what kind of event it was, and the account identifier it belonged to. That identifier is the one your account had, so the row outlives the account it came from. Everything not named here we keep for as long as your account is active, and no longer, except where the law requires otherwise.

Storage and security

Your data is stored with Supabase, our database and file storage provider, with per-user access controls. Your photos and voice notes are kept in private storage that nobody can browse. Your meal photos, progress photos and profile picture sit in a folder belonging to your account, and your own account is the only one that can open those directly. Photos and voice notes inside a coach conversation sit in a folder keyed to that conversation rather than to either person, and neither of you opens them directly. Whenever anyone is meant to see one of these files the app mints a link that expires: five minutes for a meal or progress photo a coach is reading, ten minutes for a photo or voice note in a coach conversation, and one hour for a profile picture once you are connected.

Marketing emails

There are two places you can make an account and they behave differently, so here are both. If you signed up at the end of setup, the box you ticked covers these terms and this policy and permission to send you emails about tips, new features and offers. It is one box, it starts ticked, and the two are inseparable right now: you cannot create an account without agreeing to both, and leaving it unticked stops the signup rather than skipping the emails. What we store from that box is one true-or-false value: whether you agreed to the emails. We do not record which version of these terms you agreed to, or when. If you signed up with Apple or Google, even that one value is written to your account a moment after it is created rather than as part of it, so if that write fails we may hold nothing for you at all.

If you made your account from the sign-in sheet, which is the one that appears when you message the coach as a guest, there is no box at all. That screen tells you that continuing means agreeing to these terms and this policy, it does not ask about email, and we have no email preference recorded for you either way. That is true whether you used your email address, Apple or Google.

Either way, the way off the marketing list is to ask: email us and we will take you off it, or keep you off it, and it changes nothing about your account or your coaching. We are working on making this one question with one answer, asked the same way on both screens.

Changes

Each version of this policy carries a version number beside the date, and the app shows the same number on its copy. When we change what the app does with your data, both move together.

Not medical advice

Method AI provides fitness and nutrition coaching for general wellness. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Consult a physician before starting any training, nutrition, or fasting program.

Contact

Questions or requests: methodaiapp@gmail.com