Privacy Policy

When we act for your therapist

Your therapist (or their practice) is your health care provider. They decide how your care is provided and are responsible for your clinical record. When your therapist uses Vessel, we handle your health information on their behalf:

• In the United States, we act as your therapist’s business associate under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). We may use and disclose your protected health information only as our agreement with your therapist and HIPAA allow.
• Under the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar laws, we act as a processor (or service provider) for your therapist, who is the controller of your clinical information.

This covers your reflections and moods, your secure messages with your therapist, your conversations with the AI companion and any summaries of them, and the session recordings, transcripts, notes and reports your therapist creates.

Your therapist has their own legal and professional duties. These include giving you their own notice of privacy practices, and keeping clinical records for as long as state, federal or local law requires. For some requests about your clinical record (for example, asking to amend it), we may refer you to your therapist, and we help them respond.

When we’re responsible directly

We’re directly responsible (as a “controller” or “business”) for information we use to run Vessel itself. This includes accounts and sign-in, security and fraud prevention, verifying therapists’ licenses, handling reports and support requests, and information we collect on our website.

Account information

• Everyone: your name, email address and password. Passwords are handled by our sign-in provider (Google Cloud Identity Platform) and aren’t stored by us in readable form. We also keep your app language, notification settings, voice preference, an optional profile photo, your two-step verification settings, and a record of what you agreed to and when.
• Clients: which therapist invited you, and how often you’d like reminders to reflect (daily, weekly or every two weeks).
• Invitations: to invite you, your therapist gives us your email address and, optionally, the language for the invitation email. We create a 6-digit code that works for 7 days.

Therapists’ professional information

Therapists give us their credentials, license number, license state and license type. Our team checks the license against public state licensing board records before approving the account, and we keep a record of the review. Clients can see their therapist’s name, credentials, photo, and license state and type, but not the license number. If a therapist pairs a Plaud recorder, we store the recorder’s serial number and model.

Reflections and moods

Your written reflections, the prompts your therapist sets for you, the mood you choose (such as happy, neutral, sad, anxious or angry), and when you wrote them. Your therapist can see your reflections.

Secure messages

Messages between you and your therapist, including replies and reactions, when they were sent, and whether they’ve been read. Messages become part of your clinical record, so they can’t be deleted from the app.

AI companion conversations and memory

For clients who agree to use the AI companion (see Section 4):

• Conversations: what you type or say (saved as text), Vessel’s replies, when they happened, and whether you used voice. A conversation ends when you leave it or after 30 minutes without activity.
• Memory (optional): if you turn it on, short notes from your conversations, such as your goals, what helps you, how you like to be supported, recurring sources of stress, and important people by first name or role. Memory is designed to leave out medications, diagnoses, crisis details, contact details, addresses and surnames. Only you can see it. Your therapist can’t.
• Summaries for your therapist (optional): if you turn this on, a short AI summary of each conversation (themes, mood trend, things you’d like to raise, and any risk flags) is created for your therapist.

Voice

You can talk with the AI companion, and therapists can talk with their assistant.

• Streaming voice (iPhone, where available): your voice is streamed securely to our voice service on Google Cloud and to Google Gemini, so Vessel can listen and reply in real time. The audio is held only in memory for the call. We don’t record or keep it, and we keep Google’s option to cache audio for resuming sessions turned off. What you and Vessel say is saved as text in the conversation, like typed messages.
• Turn-based voice (Android, with VoiceOver, and as a fallback) and the therapist assistant: your speech is turned into text on your device, so the audio never leaves your phone. Voice mode is offered only where your device can do this on the device. Only the text is sent to Vessel.
• Spoken replies: Vessel’s replies are turned into speech by Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and sent to your device to play. We don’t store that audio.
• We count how many seconds of voice you use each day, to apply a daily allowance.

Session recordings, transcripts, notes and reports

These are created by your therapist and are part of your clinical record:

• Session recordings (optional feature): a therapist can import audio of a session from a Plaud recorder, after confirming in the app that you consented to the recording. We store the audio and a transcript (text with speaker labels) produced by Plaud’s transcription service. Recordings and transcripts are visible only to your therapist in the app.
• Clinical notes and reports: your therapist may ask Vessel’s AI to draft a clinical note from a session transcript. The draft is labeled as AI-generated, and your therapist reviews, edits and approves it. If your therapist shares a report with you, you see its summary, key topics, emotional themes and recommended focus, but not the clinical note itself or any AI risk flags.
• Therapist tools: tasks your therapist creates, and their conversations with Vessel’s AI assistant about their own clients (including the records the assistant cited).

Safety signals

When the safety screen finds crisis language (see Section 3), we record the type of concern (self-harm, suicidal thoughts, harm to others or abuse), how serious it seemed, where it came from, and when. We also keep the alert sent to your therapist. Safety records don’t include what you said.

Reports and blocks

If you report a message, a conversation, or a reply from the AI, we keep the reason, any details you add, and a copy of what you reported (up to 2,000 characters, or for a whole conversation, its 5 most recent messages). For AI replies, we also keep which AI model and instructions produced them. We also keep a record of blocked message threads and how each report was resolved.

Device and technical information

• Push notifications: your device’s push token, if you allow notifications.
• Device details: your device type, operating system and version, and model, which we record in our audit logs.
• Security and audit records: who accessed which health record, when, and with what result (not the content); sign-in and account security events; and counters we use to limit abuse, such as failed invitation codes and password-reset emails.
• Service logs: errors and events we need to run and fix Vessel. They’re designed to exclude message content, transcripts and audio. Our cloud provider may process your IP address to deliver the service and protect it from abuse.
• On your device: the app stores your sign-in session and when you were last active (for the automatic lock), your security settings (such as Face ID unlock), and caches some of your information so screens load quickly. Face ID or Touch ID checks happen on your device; Vessel never receives your biometric data. Reflection reminders are scheduled on your device.
• Permissions: the microphone and speech recognition are used only for voice features; the camera and photo library only if you choose a profile photo; and Bluetooth only to connect a therapist’s Plaud recorder. Vessel doesn’t collect your location. Android 11 and earlier require location permission to search for Bluetooth devices, but Vessel doesn’t read or store your location.

Our website

• Contact form: your name, email address, subject and message.
• Call requests from therapists: your name, email address, and optionally your license number, practice name and a message.
• Mailing list: your email address, if you sign up.
• reCAPTCHA: our contact and call request forms use Google reCAPTCHA to tell people from bots. reCAPTCHA collects hardware and software information (such as device and browser data) and may set cookies. It’s subject to the Google Privacy Policy (opens in a new tab) and Terms of Service (opens in a new tab).
• Hosting: our hosting provider (Google) processes technical information such as your IP address and browser type to deliver pages and keep the site secure.

Our website doesn’t use analytics or advertising cookies. Apart from reCAPTCHA on the forms, it doesn’t load third-party tracking tools. See our Cookie Policy for more.

When you contact us

If you email us (for example, at support@vesseltherapist.com or privacy@vesseltherapist.com), we keep your message and our reply so we can help you and keep a record of your request.

To provide Vessel

• To create and secure your account, and to connect you with your therapist.
• To provide reflections, secure messaging, reports, reminders, voice features, and your therapist’s tools.
• To apply fair-use limits, such as a daily allowance for AI replies and voice.
• To answer your questions and requests.

AI features

All AI features run on our servers using Google Gemini on Google Cloud, in the United States, under our HIPAA Business Associate Agreement with Google. No AI service is called directly from your device.

• AI companion (clients): to reply, the AI sees the recent messages of your current conversation (up to the last 20) and a short background: your first name, your therapist’s first name, your recent moods, the focus from reports your therapist has shared with you, and, only if memory is on, your memories and past conversations. It can look up your own reflections and the reports your therapist shared with you. It never sees your therapist’s drafts or clinical notes.
• Conversation summaries (only if you opt in): after a conversation ends, the AI creates a summary for your therapist. Before the conversation is sent to the AI, we remove email addresses, phone numbers, links, street addresses, and your and your therapist’s names.
• Memory (only if you opt in): after a conversation ends, the AI picks out a few short notes to remember.
• Therapist assistant: helps therapists find and summarize information about their own clients, with citations to the records it used. It can only reach clients in that therapist’s caseload. It can’t see clients’ AI companion conversations or memory, and it sees conversation summaries only for clients who opted in to sharing them. It can suggest tasks, but the therapist must confirm them.
• Clinical note drafts: when a therapist asks, the AI drafts a note from one session transcript. The therapist is responsible for reviewing and approving it.
• Search: to find relevant records quickly, we create searchable copies (text snippets and numerical “embeddings”) of records. They follow the same visibility rules as the original record and are deleted when it’s deleted.

No training on your data. We don’t use your information to train or fine-tune AI models. Under Google Cloud’s terms, Google may not use it to train its models without our permission, and we don’t give that permission.

People don’t routinely read your content. Our staff see the content of conversations or records only when it’s needed: to review something you or another user reported, to respond to a request you make, to investigate a security incident, or when the law requires it. Access to health information is logged.

AI can make mistakes. The AI companion isn’t a therapist and doesn’t diagnose or treat. AI drafts and summaries are reviewed by your therapist, who makes all decisions about your care. You can report any AI reply that seems harmful or wrong.

Safety screening and therapist alerts

To help keep clients safe, Vessel screens AI companion conversations for crisis language:

• A keyword screen, in all 17 languages Vessel supports, checks every message you send to the AI companion, everything you say in voice conversations, and each finished conversation. It runs on our servers without AI.
• An AI safety check reviews each message you type or say to the companion, at the same time as the reply is written.
• If either finds signs of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, harm to others or abuse, your therapist gets an in-app alert and a push notification so they can support you. The alert names the type of concern, not what you said. It’s sent whether or not you share summaries. The companion also shows you crisis resources.
• If you report something as self-harm, your therapist is alerted in the same way.

The screen is a safety net, not a crisis service. It can miss things, and it can flag things that aren’t a crisis. We don’t contact emergency services for you.

Emails and notifications

• Service emails: invitations, email address confirmation, password resets, security notices (for example, when two-step verification is turned on), and replies to your requests. These emails don’t contain health information, and their subject lines are neutral.
• Push notifications: every push says only “You have a new notification in Vessel.” It carries a hidden reference that the app uses to show the details after you sign in. Pushes never include message text or health information.
• Marketing: the app doesn’t send marketing emails. If you join our mailing list on the website, we use your email address to send you news about Vessel.

Security, integrity and legal obligations

• To verify therapists, protect accounts, prevent fraud and abuse, and review reported content.
• To keep audit logs and investigate and respond to security incidents.
• To fix problems and improve the safety and quality of Vessel, using reports and technical logs.
• To comply with the law, respond to lawful requests, and enforce our terms.

With your therapist

If you’re a client, your therapist can see:

• your profile (such as your name, email address, photo and reminder preference);
• your reflections and moods;
• your secure messages with them;
• AI summaries of your companion conversations, only if you opted in;
• safety alerts (the type of concern and when, not your words);
• the session recordings, transcripts, notes, reports and tasks they create.

Your therapist can’t see your AI companion conversations, your companion memory, or any voice audio.

If you’re a therapist, your clients can see your name, credentials, photo, and license state and type.

With service providers

We use a small number of service providers to run Vessel. They may use information only to provide their service to us. Providers that handle health information do so under a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement.

For legal reasons and safety

We may disclose information when the law requires it (for example, a valid court order or subpoena), to respond to government requests we’re legally required to answer, to report to regulators such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services when required, or to protect the rights, safety and property of our users, the public or Vessel. Where we act for your therapist, we disclose health information only as HIPAA and our agreement with them allow.

Business transfers

If Vessel is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that deal. It would stay subject to this policy (or a notice we give you) and to our agreements with therapists.

With your permission

We share information in other ways only if you ask us to or agree.

European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland

When we act for your therapist, your therapist is the controller and decides the legal basis for using your clinical information; we process it on their instructions. When we act on our own behalf, we rely on these legal bases:

• Contract: to provide your account and the features you use.
• Consent: for the AI companion, memory and summaries, and our mailing list. You can withdraw consent at any time; this doesn’t affect what we did before.
• Legitimate interests: to keep Vessel secure, prevent abuse, verify therapists, review reports and improve safety, where these interests aren’t overridden by your rights.
• Legal obligation: to meet record-keeping, security and other legal duties.

Health information is a special category of data. We process it on the basis of your explicit consent (for example, when you agree to the AI companion, including safety alerts to your therapist), and, for your therapist’s care, where it’s necessary for the provision of health care by a professional bound by confidentiality. In an emergency, we may rely on the need to protect someone’s vital interests.

Your rights: you can ask to access, correct or delete your personal data, to restrict or object to how we use it (including processing based on legitimate interests), and to receive it in a portable format. Vessel doesn’t make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you based solely on automated processing: safety alerts go to your therapist, who decides what to do.

To use your rights, email privacy@vesseltherapist.com. You can also complain to your local data protection authority, such as your EU member state’s supervisory authority, the UK Information Commissioner’s Office, or the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner.

United States state privacy laws

Health information we handle as a HIPAA business associate is governed by HIPAA and is generally exempt from state consumer privacy laws. This section covers other personal information, such as information from our website and account and security information that isn’t protected health information.

Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy

This section is our consumer health data privacy policy under Washington’s My Health My Data Act, Nevada’s consumer health data law (SB 370), Connecticut’s consumer health data provisions, and similar laws. Health information that HIPAA protects is exempt from these laws; this section covers consumer health data that isn’t.

• Categories we collect: the fact that you’re a client of a therapist; your moods and reflections; secure messages; AI companion conversations, summaries and memories; session recordings, transcripts, notes, reports and tasks; and safety signals and alerts, which are inferences about possible risk of harm.
• Sources: you, your therapist, our automated processing (AI features and safety screening), and our transcription provider.
• Purposes: to provide the features you request, including the AI features you consent to; to alert your therapist to possible safety concerns; and for security and legal compliance.
• Categories we share, and with whom: the categories above, with your therapist as described in Section 5, and with the service providers listed in Section 5 (who process it only for us). We may also disclose it when the law requires. We don’t share consumer health data with affiliates.
• We don’t sell consumer health data, and we don’t use geofencing around health care locations.
• Consent: we collect and share consumer health data only as needed to provide the service you requested, or with your consent (for example, the AI companion, memory and summaries).
• Your rights: you can confirm whether we collect, share or sell your consumer health data; access it, including a list of the third parties and affiliates we shared it with and how to contact them; withdraw consent; and ask us to delete it. Deletion follows Section 6, and records that other laws require your health care provider to keep are kept.
• How to use your rights: use Settings › Privacy and data in the app, or email privacy@vesseltherapist.com. We respond within 45 days, and may extend this by another 45 days when reasonably necessary, with notice. If we decline, you can appeal by emailing privacy@vesseltherapist.com with “Appeal” in the subject line. We’ll respond in writing within 45 days (60 days in Connecticut). If we deny your appeal, you can contact your state’s Attorney General, including the Washington State Attorney General’s office.

Canada

We handle personal information in line with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial laws, including Quebec’s Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (as amended by Law 25). Where your therapist is the custodian of your health information under provincial law, we act as their agent or service provider.

Your information is stored and processed in the United States and may be accessible to courts and authorities there under U.S. law. You can ask to access or correct your information, and withdraw consent, subject to legal and contractual limits. In Quebec, you can also ask for your information in a structured, commonly used technological format. The person in charge of protecting personal information is our Privacy Officer, whom you can reach at privacy@vesseltherapist.com. You can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada or, in Quebec, the Commission d’accès à l’information.

Brazil

Under Brazil’s General Data Protection Law (LGPD), we process personal data to perform our contract with you, with your consent, to meet legal obligations, for our legitimate interests, and, for sensitive health data, with your specific consent or for the protection of health in procedures by health professionals. You have the rights in Article 18 of the LGPD, including confirmation, access, correction, anonymization, blocking or deletion of unnecessary data, portability, information about sharing and about the consequences of refusing consent, and withdrawal of consent. We transfer data to the United States using mechanisms the LGPD permits. To use your rights, contact our Privacy Officer at privacy@vesseltherapist.com. You can also complain to the National Data Protection Authority (ANPD).

Australia

We handle personal information in line with the Australian Privacy Principles in the Privacy Act 1988. Health information is sensitive information, which we collect with your consent or as the law allows. We disclose personal information to service providers in the United States (see Section 5) and take reasonable steps, including contracts, so they handle it consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles. You can ask to access or correct your information. If you have a complaint, contact us at privacy@vesseltherapist.com; if you’re not satisfied, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Japan

Under the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI), health information is special care-required personal information, which we collect with your consent. We and our service providers store and process personal information in the United States. The United States has no single national privacy law equivalent to the APPI; instead, sector-specific federal laws (such as HIPAA) and state laws apply. Our service providers are bound by contracts that require appropriate protection of personal information. You can ask us to disclose, correct, add to, delete, or stop using or providing your personal information, and to disclose records of provision to third parties, by emailing privacy@vesseltherapist.com. You can also contact the Personal Information Protection Commission.

Other countries

If you live somewhere else, you may have rights under your local law, such as rights to access, correct or delete your information, or to object to how we use it. We’ll honor these rights as your local law requires. Email privacy@vesseltherapist.com. You may also be able to complain to your local data protection authority.