Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains how VetXplanation, LLC (“VetX,” “we,” “us”) collects, uses, shares, and protects personal information when you use the VETXPLANATION website and apps, the Guide AI assistant, and our clinic tools (the “Service”). It is part of our Terms of Service. Veterinary clinics that use the Service are independent businesses; their own privacy practices govern what they do with information you share with them.

1. Notice at Collection

We collect the categories of personal information listed below to create and run your account, provide Guide and our other features, process payments, send the notifications you turn on, share information with clinics only when you choose to, keep the Service secure, and meet our legal obligations. We keep each category for the periods described in How long we keep it. We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you.

We do not collect your precise geolocation. Photos taken on a phone can carry location data inside the file; we don't read or use it, but it stays in the file you upload — you can turn off location tagging in your camera settings.

2. What we collect

Information you give us

• Account details: your name, email address, and password (stored by our authentication provider in hashed form).
• Profile details you choose to add: phone, address, an emergency contact, and a secondary caregiver. If you add someone else's name or number, please make sure they're comfortable with that.
• Pet information: species, breed, birthdate, weight, health conditions, allergies, medications, microchip, license and rabies-tag numbers, pet insurance details, and your veterinarian's name and phone.
• Content: vet records, lab results, prescriptions and photos you upload; notes and care logs; your Guide chats; and visit transcripts.
• Voice: when you use the microphone, your speech is converted to text either by your own browser or device, or by our transcription provider. We keep the text, not the audio. If you record a vet visit, you're responsible for getting everyone's consent first — many states, including California, require it.
• Messages and bookings with clinics, and the email address and relationship of anyone you invite to see your pets' information.
• Payment: when you subscribe, Stripe collects your card details directly — we never see or store your card number. We receive your subscription status, billing history, and the billing details Stripe shares with us. We keep a record of the automatic-renewal terms you agreed to, when you agreed, and your browser type.
• Clinic staff provide their name, work email, role, and optionally a title, bio and photo (shown publicly only when the clinic turns that on). People booking with a clinic provide their name, email, optional phone and reason for the visit. People contacting us or applying as a clinic provide the contact and business details in the form.

Information collected automatically

• Records of which features you use and how much AI processing they took, so we can show and enforce your AI allowance.
• If you turn on notifications: a push token for your device and your browser type.
• When you accept our Terms: the version and time. Error diagnostics (what went wrong and on which page) sent to our hosting platform when something breaks.
• Our hosting and infrastructure providers keep standard service logs, which include IP addresses, for security and reliability.
• Browser storage, not tracking cookies. We store your sign-in session, display preferences (like theme and selected pet), and unsent drafts in your browser's local storage so the app works. We don't use advertising cookies, analytics trackers, or tracking pixels.

Information from others

• Clinics you share with may add records, logs, appointments, and messages to your pet's chart.
• Stripe tells us whether payments succeed.
• Someone who invites you to see their pet's information gives us your email.

3. How we use it

• To provide the Service: store your records, run Guide, build reminders and visit prep.
• To send the notifications and emails you've asked for, and service messages about your account and subscription.
• To bill you and manage your subscription, including renewal reminders the law requires.
• To share information with a clinic or person, only when you direct us to.
• To keep people safe: messages that suggest a risk of self-harm or harm to others are automatically flagged so our team can review them and respond appropriately.
• To prevent fraud and abuse, keep the Service secure, and debug problems.
• To provide support and respond to requests.
• To comply with law and enforce our Terms.
• To improve the Service using de-identified or aggregated information that can't reasonably be linked back to you.

We never use the contents of your pet's medical records for advertising, and we don't make decisions about you with legal or similarly significant effects based solely on automated processing.

4. AI features

When you use Guide, ask for a record or photo explanation, or record a visit, we send the relevant content — your question, recent chat, the record or photo, and the pet details needed to answer well — to our AI providers to generate a response. Today those are Google (Gemini models, and Google Search to look up sources for an answer) and the Lovable AI Gateway, which routes requests to model providers including Google and OpenAI (for speech-to-text). They process this content on our behalf to provide the Service, not to build advertising profiles, and we use their business API services, which don't use your content to train their general models. AI output can be wrong; see Section 3 of our Terms.

Please don't put information about your own health, or anyone else's, into the Service — it's designed for your pets. If you do mention something about your own health, we use it only to respond to you and to keep you safe as described above.

5. How we share it

External AI assistants, only with your approval. When you approve an OAuth connection, the connected assistant can read your profile name, Guide name, explanation preference, owned pets, recent health logs, record summaries and medication directions through our read-only MCP tools. Contact and billing information, private chats and uploaded files are excluded. The assistant provider handles information it receives under its own privacy policy, which may differ from our business AI services. Revoke access in Settings → AI assistant connections; this does not erase information already received by the provider.

We disclose personal information only to:

• Service providers that process it on our behalf under contracts limiting their use of it: Supabase (database, sign-in, file storage), Lovable and its cloud infrastructure (hosting, AI gateway, error diagnostics), Google (AI models, search grounding, fonts, and the maps shown on clinic pages), OpenAI via the Lovable AI Gateway (speech-to-text), Resend (email delivery), Stripe (payments), and the browser push services run by Apple, Google and Mozilla (delivering notifications).
• Clinics, at your direction. If you link your account to a clinic — when you sign up through a clinic's link and tick the sharing box, or by choosing one on the Share screen — that clinic can see your contact details and your pets' profiles, records, logs, medications, photos and transcripts, and can message you. Your private notes are shared only if you turn on “Share notes with clinic.” You can stop sharing any time on the Share screen; information the clinic already received becomes part of its own records.
• People you invite to view your pets' information, with the permissions you choose.
• Legal and safety reasons: to comply with law or legal process, to protect the rights, safety and property of you, us or others, and to respond to an emergency.
• Business transfers: as part of a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, subject to this policy.

We don't sell personal information, share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, or show targeted ads. We haven't done so in the past 12 months.

6. How long we keep it

• Your account and content stay until you delete them. Deleting a pet deletes its records, logs, photos and chats. Deleting your account (Settings → Your data) cancels any subscription and deletes your account, pets, content and uploaded files immediately; copies in our providers' backups age out on their normal backup cycle.
• Kept after account deletion, because the law requires it or for the reasons given: your Terms-acceptance records and automatic-renewal consent records (at least three years, and at least one year after your subscription ends, to prove consent); billing and tax records held by Stripe; messages, appointments and records you exchanged with a clinic, which are part of that clinic's records; AI usage totals, with your identity removed; and our administrative audit log.
• Contact forms, clinic applications and booking requests are kept until they're no longer needed to respond and follow up, or until you ask us to delete them.
• Service logs kept by our hosting providers are retained according to their standard schedules.

7. Your choices

• Edit your profile and pets in Settings, or remove a pet.
• Turn notifications on or off in Settings.
• Choose or clear your clinic on the Share screen, and remove people you've invited.
• Download a copy of your data (Settings → Your data → Export).
• Delete your account (Settings → Your data → Delete my account).

8. Your privacy rights

Depending on where you live — including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah and Virginia — you may have the right to:

• know what personal information we have about you and get a copy in a portable format;
• correct inaccurate information;
• delete your personal information;
• opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information, targeted advertising, and profiling (we don't do any of these);
• limit the use of sensitive personal information (we only use it as needed to provide the Service); and
• not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

How to make a request: use the export, edit and delete tools in Settings, or email support@barkxplanation.com from your account email address. We'll verify your request by confirming it came from (or can be confirmed at) the email on the account, and we'll respond within 45 days (we may extend once by 45 days and will tell you if we do). You can use an authorized agent; we'll ask for proof that you authorized them and may ask you to confirm your identity with us directly.

Appeals: if we decline your request, you can appeal by replying to our decision or emailing support@barkxplanation.com with “Privacy appeal” in the subject. We'll respond within the time your state's law requires (generally 45 or 60 days). If you're not satisfied, you can contact your state attorney general.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track: we treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a request to opt out of sale and sharing — which we already don't do. Because we don't track you across other websites or services, our Service doesn't change its behavior in response to browser “Do Not Track” signals.

9. Additional California disclosures

In the past 12 months we collected the categories of personal information listed in the Notice at Collection, from you, from your device, and from the clinics, people and payment processor described above, for the business purposes in Section 3, and disclosed them for those business purposes to the recipients described in Section 5. We did not sell or share personal information, and we have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16.

Shine the Light (Cal. Civ. Code §1798.83): we don't disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct-marketing purposes.

Financial incentives: we don't currently offer any financial incentive in exchange for personal information. Care points have no cash value and can't currently be redeemed.

10. Security

We protect information with encryption in transit and at rest, per-account access rules in our database, and limited staff access. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects your personal information we'll notify you and regulators as the law requires. Veterinary records are generally not covered by HIPAA — our commitments here and applicable consumer-privacy laws govern instead.

11. Children

The Service is for adults 18 and older. We don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, contact support@barkxplanation.com and we'll delete it.

12. Changes, where we operate, and contact

We operate in the United States and process information here. If we make material changes to this policy, we'll tell you in the app or by email before they take effect and update the date above.

Questions or requests: support@barkxplanation.com. Legal notices: legal@barkxplanation.com. VetXplanation, LLC.