LonelyNo is a companionship service for adults. This notice explains what we store, why, how long we keep it, and how you remove it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
Who we are
LonelyNo is the data controller for the information described here. Contact details for data protection queries are at the end of this notice.
What we store
- Your account details. Your email address, and — if you subscribe — your billing identifiers. Card details are handled entirely by our payment processor; we never see or store your card number.
- What your companion remembers. A summary of the things you have talked about: the people in your life, your interests, plans you mentioned, and how you like to be spoken to. This is written in ordinary language and you can ask to see it at any time.
- Conversation records. A short summary of each conversation, its length, and quality measures we use to check our own service is any good.
- Your settings. Your chosen companion and your contact preferences.
What we do not do
- We do not sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
- We do not show you advertising, and we do not use what you say to target advertising.
- We do not send reports about your conversations to anybody — including anyone who has ever paid for your account. A gift-giver receives a payment receipt and an expiry date, and nothing else.
- We do not use your conversations to train third-party AI models.
Your messages and any earlier audio records
LonelyNo launches with text conversations. The audio retention rules below apply only to any earlier audio records we hold.
Messages you type stay where you left them. Your thread with your companion is your correspondence — it persists, it scrolls back, and it is there when you return, the same way any messaging app works. Deleting it would be losing something of yours, not protecting you. You can remove any message from it whenever you like, and removed means removed.
Recordings of spoken calls do not. The word-for-word record of a call is kept only long enough to produce the summary your companion remembers, and is then deleted. Nobody asked us for a transcript of a phone call with a friend, and holding one would be a risk to you with no benefit. The summary of the call appears in your thread; the words do not.
Earlier voice notes. Where a short spoken message was sent, the words are stored alongside it, so nothing is audio-only. You can delete the note and the words together.
There is one exception. If a conversation contains something that suggests you may be at serious risk, we keep that record for up to 90 days so a trained person can review it, after which it is deleted automatically. We do this to keep people safe, and because it would be wrong to have nothing to look at if something went badly.
Lawful basis
We process your account and conversation data to provide the service you have asked for (performance of a contract). We rely on your consent for marketing emails, which you may withdraw at any time using the unsubscribe link in any message, without affecting the service. Where we process information about safety concerns, we do so in our legitimate interests and yours, in keeping people safe.
How long we keep things
- Your memory and account: for as long as you have an account.
- Your message thread: for as long as you have an account, or until you delete it. Removing a message removes the message. It does not, on its own, make them forget what the message was about — those are two different requests, and the second one has its own control on your memory page, where you can ask them to forget a specific thing.
- Recordings of spoken calls: deleted once the summary is made.
- Records relating to a safety concern: up to 90 days.
- If you never subscribe and stop using LonelyNo: deleted after 12 months of inactivity.
- If you cancel: we keep your memory for 12 months from the day you cancel, so that coming back costs you nothing — they still know you. After that it is deleted. If you would rather it went sooner, deleting everything is one step away in your account, and it happens immediately.
- If you pause: nothing is deleted. A pause stops the billing and stops them getting in touch; it does not touch anything they remember about you.
- Billing records: kept as long as UK tax and accounting law requires.
Cookies, and what is kept on your device
We use as few as we can, and none of them are for advertising. There are no advertising cookies, no tracking pixels and no third-party analytics here, so there is no banner for you to click your way past. What we do keep is what the service cannot work without.
- ln_uid. This is how your own conversation finds its way back to you. It holds a random reference to your account and nothing else — no name, no email, nothing anyone reading it could make sense of. Without it every visit would begin from nothing, and if you have not made an account, it is the only thread back to what your companion remembers. It lasts about 13 months, or until you clear it.
- Sign-in cookies, with names beginning sb-. Set only if you sign in with an email link, and only then. They keep you signed in, and they go when you sign out.
- ln_adult. Remembers that you have already told us your date of birth, so we do not ask you again every time. It holds nothing but the fact that you answered — not your birthday, not your age. It lasts a year.
- The installed app's offline files. If you add LonelyNo to your home screen, it keeps a copy of the ordinary pages, the pictures and the icons so it still opens when you have no signal. Your conversations are deliberately never kept this way, so that a shared tablet never has your thread sitting on it.
The law lets us store these without asking first, because each one is needed to provide what you asked for rather than to watch what you do. If we ever want to store anything beyond that — anything for advertising or measurement — we will ask you first, and you will be free to say no and carry on as normal.
You can clear any of it from your browser's settings whenever you like. One honest warning: if you clear ln_uid before you have made an account, we will have no way to connect you to your earlier conversations. Not because we have deleted them, but because that reference was the only way back to them.
Your rights
You can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it, or provide it in a portable form. You can also object to processing and withdraw consent.
In practice, three of these are built into the product rather than left to a form. "What they remember" shows you everything held about you in plain words, with a button beside each item to remove it. The same page carries "Subjects they'll never raise" — name one and it will not be brought up again, ever, however naturally it would fit. And delete everything is one step away in your account. We show you exactly what is about to go and ask you to confirm — once for safety, never to talk you out of it — and then it happens straight away. Deletion is permanent, including anything we had previously recorded as a superseded version.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK's independent regulator, at ico.org.uk. You can go to them at any point, and you do not have to come to us first — though we would rather have the chance to put it right.
Children
LonelyNo is for adults aged 18 or over. It is not intended for children and we do not knowingly provide the service to anyone under 18. If we become aware that someone using LonelyNo is under 18, we will close the account and refund any payment.
Third parties who help us run the service
We use suppliers to provide speech recognition, speech generation, language models, hosting, payments and email. They act on our instructions and may not use your information for their own purposes. Some process data outside the UK, protected by appropriate safeguards. A current list is available on request.
Changes
If we change this notice we will update the date at the top and, for anything significant, tell you directly.
Contact
For any privacy question, or to exercise any right above, write to us — the address is on our contact page, along with what to expect when you do and how long we will take. Put "data protection" in the subject line and it will reach the right place.