Privacy Policy

YouRu — Be Your Own Guru — speaks meditations, affirmations and other guided content back to you in your own voice. To do that we record a short sample of you speaking and build a digital model of your voice from it. That recording and that model are the most sensitive things we hold, so this policy starts with them.

• We record and model your voice only after you agree to it, each time you record.
• Your voice model is used only to generate audio for your own account. We do not sell it, rent it, or use it to speak to anyone else.
• You can delete your voice data at any time in Settings, and deleting it is real: the model, the recording and every audio file made with it are destroyed.
• We do not run advertising or analytics trackers.

A recording of your voice and a model built from it can identify you. Some laws treat them as biometric data, and we handle them that way everywhere.

What we collect

• Your recording — about a minute of you reading a script aloud. We keep only your most recent recording, so you can hear it beside your cloned voice while you tune it.
• Your voice model — built from that recording by our voice-synthesis provider, ElevenLabs, and held in our account with them.
• Audio in your voice — each piece you play is rendered once in your voice and stored, so it does not have to be made again.
• A record of your consent — which consent statement you agreed to, and when.

Consent comes first

Nothing is recorded, stored or sent to our provider until you tick the consent statement on the recording screen. Consent is asked for again with every new recording. You are never required to record your voice to keep an account.

What it is used for

One purpose: generating the audio you choose to listen to, in your voice, inside your own account. Your voice files are delivered only to you, signed in — not to other users, and not to our own administrators through the app.

How long we keep it, and how it is destroyed

We keep your voice data for as long as you keep your voice on YouRu. It is destroyed when you do any of the following:

• Delete your voice in Settings. The voice model is deleted from our provider, and your recording and every audio and preview file made with it are deleted from our storage. Your account, favorites and listening history stay.
• Delete your account in Settings. Your voice data is destroyed first, in the same way, and the account is closed only once that has finished.
• Record again. The new recording and model replace the old ones, and audio made with the old model is deleted.

If any copy cannot be confirmed destroyed — for example because our provider did not answer — we do not tell you it is done. Settings shows the deletion as unfinished and lets you run it again. We keep a log that a deletion happened and whether it completed; that log contains no audio. The record of your consent is kept, marked as withdrawn.

• Account details — your name, email address and a scrambled (hashed) form of your password; an optional profile photo; your time zone, so “today” means your today; and, if you signed up with an invite code, which code it was.
• What you do in the app — what you play, for how long and where you stopped (so you can continue from there), how you said you felt after a session when you chose to answer, the goals you choose, your favorites, your listening preferences (such as background sound levels), and how many characters of audio have been generated for you, which is how we keep usage within daily limits.
• Sign-in and security data — when you sign in we store a session with your IP address and browser type, and we use IP and email addresses to limit repeated sign-in and sign-up attempts.

We set one cookie that keeps you signed in, and your browser remembers your light or dark theme. We do not use advertising cookies, tracking pixels or third-party analytics.

We use a small number of companies to run YouRu. Each receives only what it needs for its job, and none may use your information for its own purposes.

• ElevenLabs — voice synthesis. Receives your recording to build your voice model, holds the model, and receives the text of each piece to render it in your voice.
• Vercel — hosting and file storage. Serves the app, stores your recording, generated audio and profile photo, and handles request logs, which include IP addresses.
• Neon — our database. Stores your account and activity records.
• Mailgun — email. Sends your verification codes and password-reset messages to your email address.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising.

Deleting your account destroys your voice data first, as described above. It then deletes your profile photo, your password, your sign-in sessions, the goals you chose and any verification code or password-reset link still waiting to be used, and removes your name, email address and time zone from the account record.

What stays is a closed record with none of those details on it: your listening history, favorites and usage figures, the record of your consent and the log of the deletion, kept for our accounting. They are attached to that closed record, which no longer says who it belonged to. Your email address is free, so you can sign up again with it as a new account, which starts empty. Our database provider also keeps short-term recovery copies of the database, in which the record as it was before deletion remains until those copies expire.

• See and change your name, email, photo and password in Settings. Changing your email asks for your current password and a code we send to the new address.
• Delete your voice, or your whole account, in Settings.
• Hear the exact recording we hold, beside your cloned voice, under Fine-tune your voice in My YouRu.

When we change this policy we will change the date at the top. The consent statement you agree to when you record is versioned, and we keep a record of which version you agreed to.