Privacy Policy
Effective date: May 6, 2026
Riverb ("we", "us", "our") is a voice journal app that transforms your spoken entries into reflections and an ongoing narrative story. This policy explains what data we collect, how we use it, and how you can control it.
End-to-end encryption
Your voice recordings and transcripts are encrypted with a key that lives only on your devices. The audio is encrypted with XChaCha20-Poly1305; the encryption key is sealed against an X25519 public key generated when you create your account, using the libsodium crypto_box_seal primitive. Without your device — or your 12-word recovery phrase — no one (not even Riverb) can decrypt your recordings.
We briefly process your recording in memory to generate the transcript and reflection. After that, the audio and transcript are sealed and the plaintext is discarded from our servers.
What we collect
- Account information — your email address and display name, used for authentication and to personalize your experience.
- Year of birth — collected once during onboarding as your attestation that you are 18 or older. We do not collect the day or month of your birth.
- Voice recordings — audio you record in the app. Recordings are encrypted with a key on your device and stored on our servers in that encrypted form.
- Transcripts — text transcriptions of your recordings, encrypted alongside the audio with the same device-held key.
- Generated content — Mirror Moment reflections, story scenes, daily pages, and images generated from your entries. Stored using Google Cloud's standard server-side encryption.
- Device information — push notification tokens so we can send you notifications you've opted into.
How we use your data
- Transcription, reflection, and story — your voice recordings are sent to Google's Gemini AI models to convert speech to text and generate Mirror Moments (poetic reflections), narrative story scenes, and original images.
- Story narration — when you tap play on a story scene, the text of the scene is sent to OpenAI's text-to-speech service to generate audio narration.
- Push notifications — gentle reminders to journal, and notifications when new story content is generated.
- Beta-period quality improvement — during our public beta, we retain a separate backup copy of recordings and transcripts to improve transcription, reflection, and story quality. This copy is held in a Google Cloud Storage bucket protected with a customer-managed encryption key (Cloud KMS), is accessible only to Riverb founders for review and analysis, and is deleted immediately when you delete your account.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers.
Third-party services
- Firebase Authentication (Google) — account sign-in and identity management.
- Google Cloud — encrypted storage of your audio recordings, transcripts, generated content, and beta-period backup copies.
- Google Gemini — AI processing for transcription, reflections, story generation, and image creation.
- OpenAI — text-to-speech narration when you play a story scene aloud.
- Google Analytics — anonymous website usage analytics (marketing site only, not in-app).
- Sentry — error tracking to help us fix bugs.
Data storage and security
Your data is stored on Google Cloud Platform servers in the United States (us-central1 region). Voice recordings and transcripts are encrypted with a key that lives on your device — even Riverb cannot decrypt them. Other content (Mirror Moments, story scenes, character data) is stored using Google Cloud's standard server-side encryption. Database connections use SSL encryption.
You can delete individual entries from the app at any time. When you delete your account, your voice recordings, transcripts, and any beta-period backup copies are permanently removed immediately. Other user data is removed within 30 days.
Sharing
When you choose to share a Mirror Moment or story scene, a public link is created that anyone can view. Shared pages never reveal your name, email, or any identifying information. You can revoke any share at any time, which immediately makes the link inaccessible.
Data retention and deletion
Your data is retained for as long as you have an active account. You can delete your account at any time from the app's settings screen, or at riverb.app/delete-account. When you delete your account, all your data is permanently removed, including:
- Voice recordings (the encrypted copies on our servers)
- Beta-period backup copies of recordings and transcripts
- Transcripts and Mirror Moments
- Story scenes and generated images
- Character data
- Shared content links
Age restriction
Riverb is for adults 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we discover that an account belongs to someone under 18, we will delete the account and all associated data.
Changes to this policy
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of significant changes through the app or by email.
Contact
If you have questions about this privacy policy or your data, contact us at privacy@riverb.co.