Privacy Policy

Suzhou Maifangbao Technology Co., Ltd. is the personal-information processor or data controller for Merrou. In this Policy, “Merrou,” “we,” “us,” and “our” refer to that company. Questions, rights requests, complaints, and security reports can be sent to support@merrou.com.

This Policy applies to the Merrou website and related services. A third-party site or service has its own policy when you leave Merrou or choose to use it directly.

We do not currently provide payment features or intentionally request precise location, government ID, financial-account data, address-book contacts, microphone recordings, or device photos outside files you deliberately upload.

• directly from you when you sign in, create a twin, upload content, set permissions, or send messages;
• from Google when you choose Google sign-in and authorize Google to share account data;
• from other users when they invite you, label a relationship, request access, or communicate with you;
• automatically from your browser, our hosting environment, and security systems; and
• from text extracted from files you choose to import.

• create and secure your account and maintain your signed-in session;
• build, store, search, and operate your digital twin and its permission system;
• create embeddings, retrieve relevant authorized context, and generate AI replies;
• display listed profiles and enable invitations, access requests, relationships, and chats;
• honor your public, relationship, private, and transcript-sharing choices;
• detect abuse, troubleshoot failures, protect users, and maintain service reliability;
• comply with legal duties, enforce our Terms, and respond to lawful requests; and
• communicate with you about the Service, security, support, and material policy changes.

Depending on where you live, our legal basis may be performance of our contract with you, your consent, compliance with law, protection of vital interests, or our legitimate interests in operating and securing the Service where those interests are not overridden by your rights. We will request separate consent when applicable law requires it, including for certain sensitive-information or cross-border processing.

When you send a message, Merrou sends an AI provider the message together with limited context selected for that conversation: the represented person’s permitted profile and persona fields, relevant permitted notes or photo descriptions, your basic profile context, the relationship label if any, and relevant recent or retrieved conversation messages. The provider returns an AI-generated reply.

To make relevant information searchable, selected text and conversation batches are sent to an embedding model, which returns numerical vectors. Merrou stores those vectors with the related records and applies account and visibility checks before retrieval. The AI provider does not receive your entire account on every request; it receives the content needed for the requested generation or embedding operation.

We do not use sensitive interaction data to train a general-purpose model unless permitted by law and, where required, after obtaining your separate consent. AI replies remain probabilistic and should not be treated as verified statements by the represented person.

• Public profile: your handle and any profile information presented as public can be viewed by other users. If “Show me in People” is on, your card can appear in search and discovery.
• Public twin content: public persona fields and public knowledge may be used to answer signed-in users who are allowed to chat with your twin.
• Relationship content: content limited to selected relationship groups may be used only for chat visitors assigned to one of those groups.
• Private content: private material is used for your own twin experience and is excluded from other users’ chat context.
• Conversation sharing: the visitor controls whether the represented account owner may read the transcript. Turning sharing on later may expose earlier messages in that conversation to the owner.

We disclose information only as needed for the purposes above, including to:

• Supabase for authentication, database, vector-search, and file-storage infrastructure;
• Vercel for application hosting and AI Gateway routing;
• AI model providers, currently including OpenAI-routed text-generation and embedding models, for the scoped processing described above;
• Google when you choose Google sign-in;
• professional advisers and vendors bound by appropriate confidentiality and data-protection duties;
• authorities or other parties when disclosure is required by law or reasonably necessary to protect rights and safety; and
• a successor in a merger, financing, reorganization, or sale, subject to continued protection and legally required notice.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not disclose private chat content to advertisers for targeted advertising.

Merrou is operated by a company in China and uses service providers that may process information in more than one country or region. The applicable destination can depend on our configured hosting region, the AI route, and where you use the Service. Privacy laws in those locations may differ from those where you live.

We will use legally required safeguards for cross-border transfers. Where the laws of the People’s Republic of China apply, this may include a security assessment, certification, standard contract, personal- information protection impact assessment, and separate consent before export, as applicable. Where EEA, UK, or similar laws apply, this may include adequacy decisions or approved contractual safeguards.

Profile, relationship, memory, image, and chat content can reveal sensitive information such as health, sexuality, religion, specific identity, financial circumstances, precise whereabouts, or information about a minor. Merrou does not require you to place this information in free-text content. Avoid submitting it unless it is necessary, you understand the impact, and you have authority to do so. We will seek separate consent where applicable law requires it for our processing.

• Account and profile data is generally kept while your account remains active.
• Twin content, files, images, invitations, relationships, and chat history remain until you delete the relevant content, clear or remove a chat where available, or delete your account.
• Browser-local interface preferences remain until you clear site data in your browser.
• Security, safety, and network logs are kept for the period required by applicable law—where required, at least six months—and otherwise only as long as reasonably necessary for their purpose.
• After deletion, residual copies may remain temporarily in restricted backups or processor systems until their normal overwrite cycle, or longer if law requires preservation. During any mandatory retention period, processing is limited to storage, security, and legal compliance.

You can delete your account in Settings. This removes the active sign-in account and associated profile, twin content, messages, invitations, database records, and user storage objects, subject to the exceptions above.

Merrou uses essential cookies to maintain Supabase authentication and remember whether onboarding is complete. These are necessary for account access, security, and routing. Merrou also uses local browser storage for interface preferences such as pinned-chat order and chat-rail state. We do not currently use advertising cookies. You can clear cookies or site data in your browser, but doing so may sign you out or reset preferences.

We use measures designed to protect information, including authenticated sessions, access controls, database row-level security, private storage for imported files and note images, permission checks before retrieval, and encrypted transport. No online system is completely secure. Protect your sign-in account, avoid uploading unnecessary secrets, and report suspected compromise to support@merrou.com.

Depending on applicable law, you may ask us to:

• confirm whether we process your information and provide access or a copy;
• correct or complete inaccurate information;
• delete information or your account;
• restrict or object to processing;
• transfer information where technically feasible and legally required;
• withdraw consent without affecting processing already lawfully completed; and
• explain relevant automated processing or complain to a competent regulator.

Many profile, visibility, chat-sharing, chat-deletion, and account-deletion controls are available directly in Merrou. For another request, email support@merrou.com from the address linked to your account. We may need to verify your identity and consider the rights of other people before completing a request.

Merrou is currently intended only for adults aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly offer the Service to minors or knowingly process a child’s personal information. If you believe a minor has created an account or appears in submitted content without proper authorization, contact us so we can investigate and take appropriate action.

We may update this Policy as the Service, providers, or law changes. We will post the new date here and give additional notice for material changes. If a change requires renewed or separate consent, we will request it before the affected processing begins.

Contact support@merrou.com for privacy questions, rights requests, appeals, complaints, or safety reports. We will review requests within the period required by applicable law. You may also complain to the data- protection, consumer-protection, or network-information authority with jurisdiction where you live.

Please read this Policy together with the Terms of Service.