Privacy Policy

The short version

• Phobos is an AI assistant you talk to on WhatsApp. To answer you, it needs to keep your messages and files.
• Your conversation lives on our servers in the European Union, in a private space that belongs only to you.
• To write answers, your messages are sent to AI models. We send them with settings that tell the providers to keep nothing and not to train on them.
• Voice notes are turned into text on our own servers.
• Send /delete in the chat at any time and everything is erased. If you don't write for 90 days, it is erased anyway.
• We don't sell your data, show you ads, or use your conversations to train AI.

What we collect

When you write to Phobos

• Your WhatsApp identity: the number or WhatsApp ID you write from, and the name WhatsApp shows for you.
• What you send: text, voice notes, photos, videos, stickers and files, and which earlier message a reply refers to.
• Your conversation with the assistant, the notes you ask it to remember about you, and files it creates for you.
• Usage records: when you wrote, how many messages were answered, and what each answer cost us. These contain no message text.

When Phobos uses the internet for you

If you ask Phobos to look something up, our technical logs record which websites it visited, when, and how much data was used, but not what the pages said. The websites themselves see the address of our server, or of your own proxy if you connected one.

When you connect an account or a proxy

Some features ask you to sign in or enter details on a private one-time page at connect.themartian.app. What you enter there is stored encrypted in your own personal keyring. It is never shown to the AI and never sent through WhatsApp. Phobos only learns which services are connected.

If you are on the waiting list

If you write before you have access, we keep only your WhatsApp number or ID and when you first wrote, so we can reply once and invite you later. We do not keep what you wrote.

This website

This site uses no cookies, no analytics and no tracking. Like any website, our hosting provider processes your IP address to deliver the page and protect it from attacks.

How we use it

• To answer you and do what you ask: write, read your files, look at your photos, send you files, look things up.
• To keep Phobos safe and fair: daily limits, preventing abuse and spam, and fixing problems.
• To meet legal obligations.

We do not use your messages for advertising, we do not sell or rent them, and we do not use them to train AI models.

Legal bases (EU GDPR): providing the service you ask for (contract, Art. 6(1)(b)); our legitimate interest in keeping Phobos secure and preventing abuse (Art. 6(1)(f)); legal obligations (Art. 6(1)(c)); and your consent where we ask for it, which you can withdraw at any time. If you choose to share health or other sensitive information with Phobos, it is used only to answer you.

Who helps us run Phobos

We share your information only with the providers below, only as needed to run Phobos, and under their data-processing terms:

• WhatsApp (Meta): your messages travel through WhatsApp, under WhatsApp's own privacy policy.
• Hetzner Online GmbH: our servers, in Finland (EU). Your conversation, files and private workspace are stored here.
• OpenRouter, which passes requests to Anthropic (Claude, the model that writes the answers) and Google (Gemini, used only to look at pictures). Requests are sent with zero-data-retention and no-training settings, so the providers are asked not to keep or learn from them. These providers may process data in the United States.
• Cloudflare: hosts this website and the private keyring pages at connect.themartian.app.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect people's safety.

Transfers outside the EU: when data goes to providers in the United States, it is protected by the safeguards the GDPR requires, such as the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

• Your messages, files, conversation and notes: until you send /delete, or 90 days after your last message, whichever comes first. Deletion covers your private workspace, the copy of the chat on our WhatsApp connection, your keyring and our records about you.
• Message text in our queue is removed as soon as Phobos has answered it.
• Usage counters (dates, numbers and costs, no message text) are kept for our accounts.
• Technical logs (which person a request was for, websites visited, times and errors; never message text) are kept for at most 30 days.
• Waiting list: your number is kept for up to 90 days, or until you send /delete.
• Copies made for backups during maintenance are kept only briefly and then removed.

Deleting your data on our side does not delete the messages on your phone; you can clear those in WhatsApp yourself.

Who can read your conversation

Nobody reads conversations as a routine. Only the operator of Phobos can access them, and only to check for abuse or to fix a problem you reported or that affects you. Passwords never belong in the chat: if you paste one by mistake, Phobos removes it before storing your message and tells you how to connect safely.

Your rights

You can ask us at any time to see, correct, export or delete your data, to limit how we use it, or to object to its use. The quickest way to delete everything is to send /delete in the chat. For anything else, write to privacy@themartian.app from, or mentioning, the number you use with Phobos. We may ask you to confirm the number is yours, and we answer within one month.

If you think we handle your data wrongly, you can complain to the Italian data protection authority, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, or to the authority where you live.

Children

Phobos is for adults (18+) only. If we learn that someone under 18 is using it, we delete their data.

Security

Each person's conversation runs in a separate private machine, connections are encrypted, and account details are kept encrypted in your own keyring. No system is perfectly secure, so please don't send Phobos anything you could not afford to have exposed.

Like any AI assistant, Phobos can make mistakes, and content it reads (a web page, a file, an email) may try to trick it. It asks you before risky steps, but please check what it does for you.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If a change is important, we will tell you in the chat before it applies.

Contact

TheMartian.app · privacy@themartian.app