Privacy
Last updated: August 15, 2026
Switchback is a recovery support tool. The data you put into it is recovery-sensitive by nature — your triggers, your coping tools, the people you lean on, what you wrote at 2am when an urge showed up. This page is the honest version of what happens to all of that.
Switchback is operated by Switchback Recovery, LLC, a Colorado limited liability company and the data controller for the information described in this policy.
A note about beta
Switchback is in beta. The practices described in this policy apply now, but because the product is still being built, some data handling may evolve as we move toward our first full release. If anything material changes, we'll update this policy and tell you. Switchback may process sensitive recovery-related information; only provide information you're comfortable storing and processing in a product that's still being tested.
What Switchback collects
When you sign up, Switchback stores your email address (for sign-in and email delivery), the display name you choose for Switchback to call you, and your date of birth. Date of birth is used to confirm that you are 18 or older — Switchback is built for adults and isn't designed for younger users. As you use the app, Switchback stores what you write into it: your assessment responses, your check-ins, your journal entries, your meeting notes, the support contacts you save, the inputs and outputs of any intervention sessions, the daily reflections generated for you, any dates you choose to mark as milestones along with the names you give them, and any feedback you send.
On the infrastructure side, the platforms Switchback runs on keep standard request logs (IP address, user-agent string, timestamps) for security and abuse prevention. Switchback does not separately collect this information beyond what those platforms retain.
Nothing in Switchback establishes where you live. The app never requests device location, and there is no street, postal code, state, or country to fill in anywhere in it. Two coarser signals do exist, and it is worth being exact about both. The infrastructure logs described above may contain IP addresses, from which an approximate location can be inferred. And if you turn on a reminder, Switchback stores your device's time-zone name — "America/Denver", for example — so the reminder arrives at the right hour where you actually are, and keeps doing that if you travel. A time zone covers many states at once and follows the traveller rather than describing the resident.
Neither signal is used to treat you differently. Switchback applies the same privacy, consent, and safety practices to everyone, and does not vary them by where someone appears to be.
If you turn on a reminder and allow notifications, Switchback stores a push registration token for that device — an identifier issued so a notification can be routed to the right device. It is linked to your account and to the device, not to anything you write. Switchback removes it when you sign out, and deleting your account deletes it along with everything else.
What Switchback doesn't collect
Switchback does not use Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Segment, Facebook Pixel, or any other third-party behavioral tracker. There are no advertising network integrations. There are no social-media SDKs. There are no cross-site cookies. If Switchback ever adds any kind of third-party analytics, this page will say so before it ships.
The mobile app does include one Google component: Firebase Cloud Messaging, which exists to deliver push notifications and is described below. It is not an analytics or advertising product, and Switchback does not include Google's analytics library alongside it.
Switchback does not sell your data. Switchback does not share your data with third parties for marketing, advertising, or profiling. The only places your data goes are the infrastructure providers listed below, and only to the extent required to run the app.
Cookies
Switchback uses a small number of first-party cookies to keep you signed in. They're read only by Switchback's own servers to look up your session. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, and no cookies shared with third parties.
Where your data lives
Your account and everything you write into Switchback is stored in a US-region database operated by a third-party infrastructure provider. Every table is protected by database-level row-security rules so that one signed-in user can only ever read or change their own rows — no other Switchback user can reach your data.
A small amount of privileged access exists strictly to operate the service: automated server-side functions and a limited set of administrators can act with elevated database permissions to respond to your support or deletion requests, to run features that need to act across accounts, to keep the service secure, and to comply with the law. This access is limited to what the task requires and is not used to browse your private content.
The app itself runs on a third-party hosting platform that serves the pages and keeps standard server logs. Email delivery (sign-in links, welcome notes, anything else Switchback sends) goes through a third-party email provider.
Push notifications are delivered through Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging, and from there through Apple's or Google's own push service to your device. To send one, Switchback hands that provider your device's registration token and the text of the notification. That text is fixed wording written in advance — it names the feature the reminder is for, such as adding a gratitude — and never contains anything you have written. The provider does necessarily learn which reminder types a device receives and when.
Switchback is built to support Sentry, a third-party crash-and-error diagnostics provider, and will only begin sending diagnostic data once it is switched on and this policy is updated to say so. If and when it is active, that diagnostic data is structurally scrubbed of the content you write into the app and is never used for behavioral analytics, advertising, or tracking.
When you use one of the AI-assisted features listed in the next section, the relevant text is processed by a third-party AI inference provider.
If you choose to share a daily reflection, Switchback publishes a general version of that day's reflection at a public web address that anyone with the link can open. That general version is written without using anything from your account. The reflection you read in the app is a different piece of writing, shaped by what you have entered, and it is never published and never leaves the app. Nothing is shared unless you start it.
How AI processing works
Switchback uses AI in nine places: the intervention flow (when you tap Immediate Support Options), the daily reflection, North Star summaries, journal prompts, Coach moments and Coach follow-up questions, the middle-path/clarify flow, talking through something you've written, and a background safety classifier that screens what you write for crisis risk. All of these are powered by Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic.
When you use one of these features, the relevant text you're working with is sent to Anthropic to produce the response Switchback shows you. Switchback does not attach your name, email address, or account ID to that request. Because these features work on what you write, if you type identifying details into the text itself, those details are part of what gets sent — so avoid putting things like your full name or address into anything you write in the app if you'd rather they never leave Switchback. Under Anthropic's commercial API terms, data submitted through their API is not used to train their models. Anthropic's own privacy policy at anthropic.com/legal/privacy governs anything that touches their systems.
For the features that personalize what they say to you, the request also carries relevant parts of your Recovery Profile — the answers you gave in the assessment. Depending on the feature and what you wrote, that can include things like your triggers, coping tools, early warning signs, emotional drivers, high-risk people and places, and how you've asked Switchback to talk to you. Only the parts relevant to that moment are included, never the whole profile, and the same no-name, no-email, no-account-ID rule above applies. If you named another person in your profile — a support contact, or someone you've marked as high-risk — their name can be part of what is sent.
The safety classifier is not monitoring. It can miss a crisis, and it can flag something that isn't one. No person is reviewing what you write as you write it. Don't rely on Switchback to notice that you're in danger — in a crisis, call 988 or 911.
AI output can be wrong. Treat it as supportive material, not advice. Switchback's Terms of Service say more about this.
Retention and deletion
Account data is kept as long as your account exists. You can delete your account and everything in it at any time from your Account page. Deletion takes effect immediately for your own app content the moment you confirm.
A couple of kinds of records are handled differently, and we want to be exact about them. If Switchback ever connects your account with another person's — a feature that is not currently available to you — records of that connection would be marked ended rather than deleted outright, so the other person's history isn't erased without their knowledge. Reports filed against your account by someone else are kept for admin review rather than removed.
Everything else — your profile, journal entries, check-ins, assessment answers, meeting notes, support contacts, notifications, product feedback you submitted, intervention history, and any conversations you had talking something through — is removed from the live service immediately and irreversibly. Encrypted operational backups may keep a copy for up to 7 days, after which it ages out automatically and cannot be restored to your account.
If you run into any trouble, email hello@switchbackrecovery.com from the address tied to your account and the account will be removed within 30 days. A short public summary of the deletion process is also available at Account deletion.
The infrastructure platforms Switchback runs on keep their own operational logs (request paths, status codes, timestamps) under retention windows outside Switchback's direct control. Those logs don't contain the content of what you wrote into the app.
Adults only
Switchback is intended for adults, 18 and older. Switchback does not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has signed up, please email hello@switchbackrecovery.com and the account will be removed.
Changes to this policy
When this policy changes in any way that meaningfully affects how Switchback handles your data, the "Last updated" date at the top of this page will change, and Switchback will surface a notice in the app before the change takes effect. Wording fixes and small clarifications won't trigger a notice, but the date will still reflect the edit.
Corrected on August 15, 2026
An earlier version of this page said the app database had no field for "location, state, street address, postal code, region, or country." That was true when it was written. It stopped being true when reminders began storing your device's time zone so they could arrive at the right local hour, and the sentence was not updated at the time. It has been rewritten above to describe both coarse signals plainly. Nothing about how Switchback handles your data changed — only this page's description of it, which had become incomplete. It is recorded here rather than fixed quietly because a privacy policy that corrects itself in the open is worth more than one that is silently right.
Contact
Contact Switchback Recovery, LLC for any privacy question, data request, or anything else this page didn't answer: hello@switchbackrecovery.com.