Privacy Policy

The Sacred Act is operated by The Sacred Act LLC, 584 Castro Street #3185, San Francisco, CA 94114. In this policy, “we”, “us” and “the app” mean that entity and The Sacred Act application for iPhone and Apple Watch.

You can reach a person at support@thesacredact.com.

Everything we collect exists to make your meditation. We do not sell your data. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not build advertising profiles. Your health data is used only to shape your practice and is never shared for marketing.

You can export everything, erase your practice while keeping your account, or delete your account outright — all from inside the app, with no support ticket and no waiting period.

Account information. Your email address, and, if you sign in with Apple, the Apple-provided identifier — including the private relay address, if you chose to hide your real one.

Your practitioner profile. Anything you choose to add: your name, how you would like to be addressed, pronouns, name pronunciation, and a profile picture.

What you share with the practice. The words you write or speak before a sit, the reflection you offer after it, the meditations composed for you, and your practice history — what you practiced, when, and for how long.

Anonymous first-run data. You can take your first meditation without creating an account. The app creates an anonymous session so that sit can be saved. If you later create an account, that session is linked to it and your first meditation carries over. If you never create an account, the data stays attached to an anonymous identifier holding no personal details.

Health and body data — only with your permission. Through Apple HealthKit, the app reads:

• Heart rate, resting heart rate, and walking heart rate average
• Heart rate variability (SDNN)
• Respiratory rate
• Sleep analysis
• Mindful sessions
• Workouts

That is the whole list. We do not read blood pressure, blood oxygen, clinical records, or anything else Health can hold.

With your permission the app also writes back to Health: your completed sits as mindful sessions, and meditation workouts. If you use the Apple Watch companion, it records live heart samples during a sit. The app uses HealthKit background delivery, which means iOS may wake it to receive new samples while it is not open.

Health data is never written to iCloud. The readings the app keeps are stored in our own database and time-series store, under your account, and are deleted with it.

Two sets of switches govern this. Apple’s own permissions decide what the app may read and write, and live in iOS Settings under Apps, Health, Data Access & Devices, The Sacred Act. The app’s own switches, under Settings, Apple Health inside the app, decide whether it uses the access it has: Read from Apple Health and Write to Apple Health. Turn reading off and the practice stops sensing your body; turn writing off and completed sits are no longer recorded to Health. The same page lists exactly what is read and written, and Disconnect turns both switches off at once.

What your health data is used for. Each use below is what the app actually does today. Nothing on this list is a plan.

• To read the state you arrive in. Before a practice, the app shows what it senses, such as your heart rate against your resting rate or a workout that just ended, as rows you can set aside one by one. Anything you set aside is not used.
• To choose the practice. An elevated heart, a suppressed heart rate variability, short sleep, or a workout that just ended change which technique is offered and how it is framed. This reaches our backend and the AI provider that writes the offering as sentences and labelled numbers, never as raw samples.
• To let the guide speak to your state. The one or two sentences that explain why a practice was offered are written with your current readings in view, so the guide can say, for example, that your heart is running high.
• To draw your body’s line for each sit. During a sit the app captures heart rate, heart rate variability, and breathing about every twelve seconds, from your Apple Watch when you wear one, and sends those samples to our backend, where they are kept in our time-series store. From them the app draws the line you see after a sit and the all-time timeline in the Mirror, and one sentence of recognition is written by the AI provider from the verified facts of that sit.
• To learn how your body answers the guidance. On our backend, the samples around each guided phrase are measured for whether your body settled, opened, stayed steady, or activated. Those measurements are one part of how future practices are chosen and of the guide’s long-term picture of you.
• To pace the silences. How long the guide’s pauses run, and where the deepest part of a sit begins, are tuned to how your body has settled in past sits. The live heart rate is not used for this, and no health value ever reaches the voice provider; only the resulting speed and pause lengths do.
• To show you the Mirror. The Mirror’s readings of your body across time, its patterns across postures, traditions, and times of day, and the guide’s standing picture of you are written by the AI provider from summaries of your sits and your baselines.
• To answer you in conversation. When you ask the guide about your body, it reads your all-time readings, as averages and ranges, and says so in the thread.
• To breathe with you. While a practice is being made, the orb on screen breathes at your own measured breathing rate. This stays on the device.
• To record your practice. Each completed sit is written back to Apple Health as a mindful session and as a mind-and-body workout, which is also what lets your Watch sample your heart continuously during it. Nothing health-related is ever sent to the Watch; it sends readings to the phone, and receives only playback state.

Your voice — only when you choose to speak. When you speak rather than type, the microphone audio is used two ways. It is transcribed into text, and it is analyzed for vocal tone. Both are described in their own sections below.

Context — only what you allow.

• Location, while you are using the app, to derive the place you are in and the weather around you.
• Motion and fitness activity, with the barometer, to tell walking from driving from being carried from rest. What the app read and what you corrected is kept on your phone for thirty days so it can learn your days. A short summary of each reading (the kind of motion, rounded speed and air pressure, never a place or a route) is stored with the practice it shaped.
• Calendar. With calendar access granted, the app reads your upcoming events to understand the shape of your day. If you separately connect Google Calendar, we store a token that lets us read it. Connecting a calendar is a permission you grant, not a sign-in: the Google account whose calendar you connect can be a different account from the one you use to sign in, and you can connect more than one.
• Photos. The app can save share cards you create to your photo library. It only ever adds — it never reads your library, and it does not use the camera.

Technical data. Crash and error reports, and the basic request logs needed to run and secure the service.

What we never collect. Payment details. Apple handles every purchase in the app, and Stripe handles every order from our shop; we never see your card and we never receive it.

When you buy from thesacredact.com/shop, Stripe takes your payment and collects your name, email, shipping address and, for orders that cross a border, your phone number. We pass those details to Printful, which makes your order and ships it to you, and Printful passes your address to the carrier that delivers it. We use them to fill and support your order and for nothing else. Your bag is kept only in your own browser until you check out.

Everything above serves one purpose — your practice. We use it to:

• compose the meditation you are about to hear, and speak it in a voice;
• select the contemplative technique most likely to serve you now;
• reflect your practice back to you in the Mirror and your history;
• keep your practice available across your devices;
• operate, secure, and debug the service.

We do not use your information for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not share it with data brokers.

Your meditations are composed by AI. The words you share and the context you have allowed — body signals, place, the shape of your day — are sent to the AI providers listed below to generate your meditation text and to synthesize the voice that speaks it. These providers process your input to return your meditation and are contractually limited to that purpose.

What “body signals” means, precisely: a short summary of your recent readings at the moment a practice is made, such as your current heart rate against your resting rate, your heart rate variability against your typical value, your breathing rate, hours slept last night, and how long ago a workout ended. Raw samples, the full stream of measurements Health holds, are never sent to any AI provider.

Your content is not used to train general-purpose AI models. At Hume, which analyzes your voice, we have turned on both zero data retention and the opt-out from model training, so your recordings are not stored there and are never used to improve their models.

When you speak to the app, two things happen to that audio, and we want both to be plain.

Transcription. Your speech is transcribed by Apple’s speech recognition. When your device is online, Apple performs this on its servers; when offline, it happens on the device. The resulting transcript becomes part of your practice.

Emotion recognition. Your voice audio is also sent to Hume AI, which analyzes vocal tone and returns confidence scores across 48 emotional dimensions. This is an emotion recognition system: it infers emotional state from how you sound, not from what you say. Those scores help the guide meet the state you are actually in. They are inferences, not facts about you, and they are never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared beyond the providers listed below.

You are never obliged to speak. Typing does the same work, and if you type, no audio is captured, transcribed, or analyzed at all.

We use these providers — “subprocessors” — to run the service:

Data is stored in the United States. Our database runs in Supabase’s us-west-2 region, our backend runs in Render’s Oregon region, and our time-series store runs in AWS us-east-1.

This section reflects Apple’s rules and our own commitments:

• Health data is read only with your explicit permission, granted in Apple’s own Health permission sheet, which the app presents only when you tap Connect Apple Health or the Apple Health switch on the Mirror’s Body card, never at launch.
• Health data is used only to shape and reflect your practice: to choose and pace a meditation for the state your body is in, and to show you in the Mirror what shifted during a sit.
• Health data is never used for advertising, marketing, or data mining, and is never used to train any machine-learning model, ours or anyone else’s.
• Health data is never sold.
• Health data is never disclosed to any third party except the subprocessors above that are strictly necessary to provide the service, as you expressly permit through the app, or as required by law.
• Health data is never written to iCloud.
• You can see exactly which data is read and written, and turn the app’s reading or writing off, under Settings, Apple Health inside the app. You can revoke Apple’s permissions at any time in iOS Settings under Apps, Health, Data Access & Devices, The Sacred Act. The app continues to work without it.
• Deleting your practice data or your account removes the health readings we hold.

The Sacred Act’s use of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Concretely:

• Calendar access is read-only, and is granted only by you, in Google’s own consent screen.
• We read the list of your calendars, so you can choose which ones count, and, for events on the calendars you chose, the name, the place, and the start and end times. We do not use event descriptions or guests, and from version 3.13.1 the app does not request them from Google at all.
• Calendar events are used only to shape your practice: to name the moment you are in (an event ahead, underway, or just ended), to size the practice to the time you have, and to estimate the journey to an event’s place.
• When a practice is made, the name, place and timing of the events nearest to now (at most one ahead, one underway and one just ended) are sent to our server and to the AI providers listed above that compose your meditation, and are stored with that practice in your account. To estimate a journey, an event’s place is sent to Apple’s maps services. Nothing else from your calendar leaves your device.
• Our server also stores the token that lets it mint short-lived access tokens on your behalf. It does not copy or sync your calendar.
• Calendar data is never used for advertising, never sold, and never shared with anyone except the providers named above, solely to make your practice.
• Calendar data is never used to train any machine-learning model, ours or anyone else’s.
• In the app you can set any calendar moment aside before a practice is made, and it is then left out of what shapes that practice. It is still recorded with it.
• You can disconnect a calendar account in the app at any time, and revoke our access entirely from your Google Account permissions page. Deleting your practice data or your account removes the event details stored with your practices. The app continues to work without it.

If you choose to share a meditation, the app creates a link on share.thesacredact.com that anyone holding it can open. You can also hand a share card to Instagram Stories; that opens Instagram with the image and shares nothing else with Meta. Only share what you are comfortable being seen. Deleting the underlying meditation removes its share link.

We keep your practice data for as long as your account exists, because your history is the product — your past sits shape what is offered next.

When you delete your account, your data is deleted immediately, including any token you granted us for Google Calendar. Copies held in routine encrypted backups age out within 30 days.

Anonymous first-run sessions that are never linked to an account are deleted after 90 days of inactivity.

Inside the app, under Settings → Manage Data, you can:

• Export your data. A complete JSON file of your profile and every meditation, handed straight to the share sheet.
• Erase your practice data while keeping your account.
• Delete your account entirely. This removes your profile, your practice, your health samples, and any connected-calendar token. There is no support ticket and no waiting period.
• Revoke any permission — Health, location, motion, calendar, microphone, notifications — at any time.

Depending on where you live, you may also have rights to access, correct, port, or object to the processing of your personal data, and to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority. Write to support@thesacredact.com and we will respond within 30 days. Where the law allows us longer for a complex request, we will tell you why and when to expect an answer.

Where the app is available. The Sacred Act is currently offered only on the United States App Store. We do not offer or market it to people in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. If that changes, we will appoint the representatives those laws require and update this page before the app becomes available there.

If you are in California: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we do not process sensitive personal information for purposes beyond providing the service.

The Sacred Act is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has given us data, write to support@thesacredact.com and we will delete it.

Your data lives in your own account, protected by row level security — your records are readable and writable by you alone, enforced by the database itself rather than by application code. Data is encrypted in transit. No system is perfectly secure, but we design so that a fault in one place cannot expose another practitioner’s practice.

We will update this page when the app changes, and update the date at the top. For material changes we will tell you in the app before they take effect.

support@thesacredact.com

The Sacred Act LLC
584 Castro Street #3185
San Francisco, CA 94114