Privacy Policy

Cheers is an email assistant you text. It is operated by Principle Technologies, Inc. (“Cheers,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), a Delaware corporation. This policy explains what information we collect, why, who we share it with, and what control you have over it.

Questions? Email support@cheers.so. For security matters, email security@cheers.so.

The short version

Cheers looks after your Gmail inbox. It texts you over iMessage when something needs your attention, reminds you when you're behind, and drafts replies that send only after you say yes. To do that, it needs to read your email. We take that seriously:

• We don't store your emails. Cheers reads a message when it needs to and keeps only identifiers, the addresses involved, and short notes written in its own words.
• Some emails are never read at all. Before any email is opened, a check that sees only the sender, subject, and timing applies your do-not-read rules — medical and financial mail is off-limits by default.
• We never sell your data and never use it for advertising.
• Our AI provider keeps nothing. Our agreement with Anthropic includes zero data retention, and your content is never used to train AI models.
• Everything stored is encrypted twice — once on disk, and again at the application layer with keys held outside the database.
• Working notes expire. Day-to-day notes and your texts with Cheers are deleted automatically within 30 days.
• You stay in control. Disconnect Gmail or delete your account and all its data at any time.

How Cheers works

When you join, you connect your Gmail account and give Cheers your phone number. From then on, Google notifies Cheers when new mail arrives, a privacy check decides what it may read, and an AI model reads the rest to work out what actually needs you. When something does, Cheers texts you. When you want to reply, it drafts the email in your style and sends it only after you approve. The web app at cheers.so is where you sign in, connect Gmail, and manage settings.

What we collect and store

Google account information

When you sign in with Google, we receive your email address and a unique identifier for your Google account, which we use to create and identify your Cheers account.

Gmail content

With your explicit consent, we access your Gmail mailbox through the Gmail API — message subjects, bodies, sender and recipient addresses, timestamps, labels, and thread structure — to identify what needs your attention, summarize it, and draft replies you approve.

We do not store the contents of your emails. When Cheers needs a message, it retrieves it from Gmail at that moment, processes it, and discards it. No body, subject line, or preview is ever written to our database. What we keep is the Gmail message and thread identifiers, labels, timestamps, the addresses of the people in a thread and who sent what, and notes Cheers writes in its own words. Because we hold identifiers rather than copies, if you delete a message in Gmail, Cheers can no longer retrieve it.

Knowing when mail arrives

While your Gmail is connected, Google notifies us when new messages reach your inbox, via Google Cloud Pub/Sub. Each notification contains your email address and a marker of your mailbox's position — never the message itself — and Google discards undelivered notifications within seven days. When one arrives, we record only who is in the thread and when they wrote; no subject or body is retrieved and no AI model is involved.

This stops the moment you disconnect: pressing “Stop Cheers” or deleting your account cancels the notifications with Google before revoking our access.

Notes Cheers writes

So that it is useful over time, Cheers keeps two kinds of notes. Day-to-day working notes track what a conversation is about and what is still outstanding; they are deleted automatically within 30 days, and usually sooner, once a matter is finished. A few short documents about you — how you write, who matters to you, your standing instructions — last for the life of your account. All are written by an AI model in its own words rather than copied from your mail, capped in length, and stored encrypted.

Your phone number and texts

To reach you over iMessage, we store your phone number and your conversation with Cheers — your instructions and its replies. Because Cheers texts you about your email, these conversations contain summaries of and references to your messages. Together with the notes above, they are the only places where text drawn from your email is stored: always our description of your mail rather than a copy of it, always encrypted, deleted automatically after 30 days, and deleted entirely with your account.

Technical information

We collect standard operational data — IP address, browser and device type, timestamps, and records of errors and API activity — to operate the service, diagnose problems, and detect abuse. Our logs never include message content. We do not collect payment information; if we ever charge for Cheers, payments will be handled by a processor disclosed here at that time.

Emails Cheers never reads

Some of your mail should stay between you and the sender, and for that, “we read it but kept it private” is not good enough. Before Cheers opens any email, it runs a check that sees only the envelope — the sender's address, the subject line, and when it was sent. The contents are not retrieved for this check.

By default, mail that is clearly about your medical care or personal finances — a message from your doctor's office, a bank statement — is excluded. You can adjust these defaults and add rules of your own in plain language: specific senders, legal matters, anything you would rather Cheers not see.

An excluded email is never opened: never retrieved from Gmail, never stored, never sent to an AI model. You read it in Gmail as you always have. When the envelope alone cannot settle whether a rule applies, the part of Cheers that would read the message also knows your rules and applies them before going further.

How we use your information

We use the information above to:

• Authenticate you and maintain your account
• Read incoming mail, determine what warrants your attention, and text you about it
• Draft replies and, at your direction, send them from your account
• Apply and modify Gmail labels to organize your mailbox
• Keep notes about your threads and preferences, so Cheers is useful over time
• Communicate with you about the service, including security notices
• Detect and prevent abuse, fraud, and security incidents, and comply with legal obligations

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not build advertising profiles.

Google user data

This section governs our use of data obtained through Google APIs and takes precedence over any general statement elsewhere in this policy.

Scopes we request, and why.

We request gmail.modify because Cheers both reads and acts on your mail. A read-only scope would not let us apply labels or send the replies you ask for. gmail.modify does not allow Cheers to permanently delete your messages.

Limited Use. Cheers's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Specifically, and without limiting the above:

• We use Google user data only to provide and improve the user-facing features of Cheers that you have chosen to use.
• We do not transfer Google user data to third parties except as necessary to provide those features, for security purposes, or to comply with applicable law.
• We do not use Google user data for serving advertising of any kind.
• We do not sell Google user data.
• We do not allow humans to read your Google user data, except with your explicit consent for specific messages, where necessary for security purposes such as investigating abuse, to comply with applicable law, or where the data has been aggregated and anonymized.
• We do not use Google user data, or any data obtained through Google Workspace APIs, to develop, improve, or train generalized (non-personalized) artificial intelligence or machine learning models.

Revoking access. You can disconnect Cheers from your Google account at any time, either from within Cheers or at myaccount.google.com/permissions. Revoking access stops all future processing immediately. To also delete data we have already stored, see “Your choices and rights” below.

How we use AI

Cheers uses large language models to read, classify, summarize, and draft responses to your email, which means the content of your messages is sent to our AI provider for processing. We use Anthropic's Claude models, accessed through Anthropic's API. Under our agreement with Anthropic:

• Zero data retention. The content we send for processing is not stored on Anthropic's systems once the request completes. Your email passes through; it does not stay.
• Your email content is never used to train or improve any AI model.
• Processing is automated; no human at Anthropic reviews your content in the ordinary course.
• We send only the content the specific task needs — with a cap on how much of any one message is included — never bulk exports of your mailbox.

AI output can be wrong. Cheers asks for your approval before sending email on your behalf, and you remain responsible for anything sent from your account.

Who we share information with

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We disclose it only to the service providers below, each of which processes it on our behalf under a written agreement, and only as needed to operate Cheers.

We may also disclose information when required by law, to enforce our terms, to protect the rights, property, or safety of Cheers, our users, or the public, or in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets — in which case we will notify you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

How long we keep your information

We may retain information longer where required by law or to resolve disputes, in which case we retain only what is necessary for that purpose.

Your choices and rights

Disconnecting Google. Revoke Cheers's access at any time from within the app or from your Google Account permissions page.

Deleting your data. Delete your account from within Cheers, or email support@cheers.so. We revoke your Google OAuth tokens immediately and, within 30 days, delete your account data, your conversation history, and every note Cheers has written. Encrypted backups are purged on the schedule above.

Access and correction. Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, by emailing support@cheers.so.

If you are in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland. You have rights under the GDPR to access, rectify, erase, restrict, and port your personal data, and to object to processing. Our legal basis is your consent for accessing Gmail data, and our legitimate interests in operating and securing the service. You may withdraw consent at any time, and you may lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

If you are a California resident. You have rights under the CCPA to know what personal information we collect, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, so there is nothing to opt out of. We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

To exercise any of these rights, email support@cheers.so. We will respond within the timeframe required by applicable law.

Security

• Encryption in transit. All connections to Cheers use TLS 1.2 or higher, as do our own connections to Google, Anthropic, our database, and our messaging provider.
• Encryption at rest. All stored data is encrypted on disk.
• A second layer of encryption for everything personal. Your Google credentials and every note, document, and conversation Cheers stores are individually encrypted again at the application layer with AES-256-GCM. The key lives in a separate secrets manager, not the database, and each record's encryption is tied to the account it belongs to — so database access alone yields neither your mailbox nor anything Cheers has written about you.
• Account separation enforced by the database. Our database only returns rows belonging to the user whose request is being served. Automated tests enforce this, and also fail our build if anyone adds a place in the database capable of holding email content.
• Production access limited to authorized personnel with multi-factor authentication; web application firewall and rate limiting; automated dependency and code scanning; logging and monitoring of security-relevant events.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, contact security@cheers.so.

International transfers

We are based in the United States and process information there. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and, for UK transfers, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

Children

Cheers is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact support@cheers.so and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If we make a material change to how we handle your information, we will notify you by email or in the app before it takes effect, and we will update the date at the top. Continued use after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.

Contact us

Principle Technologies, Inc.

General and privacy: support@cheers.so
Security: security@cheers.so