Privacy Policy

When you use Pay It Forward (payitfwd.app), we collect:

• Account information — your name and email address, provided when you sign up or sign in with a supported OAuth provider (Google, GitHub, LinkedIn).
• Profile picture — if you sign in with a social provider, we may display your profile photo sourced from that provider.
• Kindness you acknowledge — the content of the moments you note (descriptions, categories, timestamps, and any people you link them to).
• Basic usage data — logs and diagnostic information needed to operate the Service reliably.

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, maintain, and improve the Service.
• Generate AI-powered suggestions for acts you can pay forward.
• Visualize your impact and the chains you contribute to.
• Communicate with you about your account and product updates.
• Detect, investigate, and prevent abuse or fraud.

We do not sell your data. We share information only with service providers that help us operate the Service (for example, hosting and authentication providers), and only to the extent necessary. We may disclose information if required by law or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Pay It Forward or its users.

Pay It Forward owns all aggregated, anonymized, and derived data generated by the platform, including chain analytics, network graphs, and impact metrics. We use this data to improve the Service, publish research and benchmarks, and surface the kind of macro signals that make generosity visible at scale.

Your individual personal data — your account details and the content you post — remains subject to your rights as described elsewhere in this policy. You can export or delete it at any time from your profile.

Pay It Forward lets you connect optional third-party services to make it easier to acknowledge the people who helped you. These integrations are always opt-in, and we ask for the smallest permission scope that still makes the feature useful.

• Google Contacts — when you connect Google Contacts from Settings → Integrations, we request the contacts.readonly scope. We fetch matching contacts live from Google whenever you type in the acknowledge form and discard the results as soon as the form closes. We never copy your contact list into our database and we never write back to your Google account. You can disconnect at any time — we drop the stored OAuth tokens and stop calling Google immediately.
• LinkedIn, Slack, and Google Calendar — not yet available. If you join the waitlist from the integrations page, we only record the fact that you expressed interest (your user id and the integration name); we do not contact any third party on your behalf until the feature ships and you explicitly authorise it.
• Voice assistant (ElevenLabs + LiveAvatar) — when you open the voice modal, the text you type or transcribe is sent to ElevenLabs to synthesize the assistant's voice and, when a photorealistic avatar is enabled, to LiveAvatar to render the face with real-time lip-sync. Video is streamed live over WebRTC — nothing is recorded or transmitted from your camera; no video of you ever leaves the browser. Speech recognition happens in your browser via the Web Speech API; only the transcribed text is sent to our AI. The avatar session is torn down the moment you close the modal.

The OAuth tokens we store for connected integrations are encrypted at rest by our database provider and are only used to make the specific API calls listed above. Revoking access from the provider's own controls (for example, Google account permissions) will also immediately sever the connection from our side.

Our voice agent (the mic icon in the bottom-right of the app) runs speech recognition locally in your browser using the Web Speech API. We never record, store, or transmit your audio. Only the resulting text transcript is sent to our AI engine to parse your intent.

Text-to-speech replies are generated on demand via ElevenLabs and streamed directly to your device — the audio is not retained on our servers beyond the duration of the response. When ElevenLabs is unavailable or a voice can’t be reached, the browser’s built-in SpeechSynthesis takes over, which also runs entirely client-side.

We use cookies and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, and understand how the Service is used. You can control cookies through your browser settings, but disabling them may affect functionality.

We retain your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. If you delete your account, we will remove your personal information within a reasonable period, except where we are required to retain it for legal, accounting, or security reasons.

You can access and update your profile information at any time from your account settings. You can export your data anytime from profile settings — the “Download my data” button returns a JSON bundle of your profile, acts, tokens, reactions, comments, notifications, invites, email preferences, and subscription. You can also delete your account, which will remove your personal data and logged acts from the Service. For any additional requests, contact us at hello@payitfwd.app.

Pay It Forward is not directed to children under 13. You must be at least 13 years old to create an account. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above and, for material changes, provide more prominent notice.

Questions or concerns about this policy? Email us at hello@payitfwd.app.