The Sage

The Sage is the Stoic guide you can talk to in Aurelius. Before your first question, the app asks you to agree to these terms. They say who the Sage is for, what it is and what it isn't, what it sees about you, and how to change your mind. Everything else about your data is in the privacy policy.

1. Who the Sage is for

The Sage is only for people aged 18 and over. By agreeing to these terms you confirm that you are. Aurelius knows at most your year of birth, if you entered it in your Memento mori profile; when that year says you are certainly younger, the Sage stays closed even so.

The rest of Aurelius, including dictating a thought, is for everyone aged 13 and over and never involves the Sage.

2. What the Sage is, and what it isn't

The Sage answers with Claude Haiku 5.5, a language model made by Anthropic, guided by the Stoics and a few kindred thinkers. It can help you think something through, suggest a habit or a breathing exercise, or save a thought for you.

It is an AI, not a person. It is not a doctor, a therapist, a lawyer or a financial adviser, and its answers can be wrong, incomplete or out of date. What you do with its advice is your decision. If you are in crisis or in danger, don't rely on the Sage: call your local emergency number (112 in the EU) or, in the Czech Republic, the Linka první psychické pomoci on 116 123.

The Sage has a weekly allowance of answers, which Aurelius Maximus raises. It is counted per device, as described in section 5 of the privacy policy. Please don't use the Sage for anything Anthropic's usage policy forbids.

3. What the Sage receives, and why

So that the Sage can answer more precisely and give advice that fits you, rather than generic advice, each conversation includes a short summary of your situation. It is sent only when you write to the Sage, never in the background:

• the messages of the current conversation, yours and the Sage's;
• your device's language, today's date and the local time;
• from your Memento mori profile, if you filled it in, only your sex (so it can address you correctly in languages with grammatical gender) and your age in years;
• when you get up and go to bed, as set in My day;
• your wheel of life: how satisfied you are with each of its eight areas, on a 0–10 scale;
• your planned habits and how many days you have kept them;
• how many tasks you completed and planned in the last seven days, today and tomorrow, counted by compartment (for example work or home), never their titles.

Your habits, and anything you tell the Sage yourself, may say something about your health, your beliefs or your private life. The GDPR protects such information as a special category, which is why the Sage needs your explicit consent (see section 5). The Sage is instructed never to repeat your numbers back to you.

4. What the Sage never receives

Some data is too personal to leave your phone, so the app never sends it to the Sage or anywhere else:

• the text of your thoughts, notes and comments, and attached photos;
• your contacts and your calendar events;
• your country and your lifespan estimate;
• your lifestyle answers from Memento mori: whether you have a partner, how you sleep, your stress and social life, weight, steps, how much you drink or smoke, diet, exercise, health conditions and education;
• which of your answers shorten or lengthen your lifespan estimate;
• the apps you have installed and how you use them;
• your gratitude notes, monthly retrospective and anything from your watch.

Whatever you write to the Sage yourself is up to you. It does not need your name or any details that identify you in order to help.

5. Your consent, and how to withdraw it

When you tick I agree to the Sage's terms and continue, you give your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR) for the Sage to process the summary in section 3, and anything you choose to tell it, including about your health, your beliefs or other sensitive matters, solely to answer you. Without it the Sage stays closed, because it cannot answer without reading what you write. The rest of Aurelius works the same either way.

You can withdraw your consent at any time in Settings → General → The Sage's terms. The Sage then closes, and asks again the next time you open it. Withdrawing does not touch conversations you already had: they were forgotten when you closed them.

6. Every conversation is its own

A conversation exists only while the Sage is open. When you close it, it is forgotten: on your phone, on my server, everywhere. There is no chat history, and the Sage does not remember earlier conversations.

The one exception is your choice: when you ask the Sage to save something as a thought, the conversation that led to it is saved with that thought as comments, on your phone only, like anything else you save.

7. How a message travels

Your phone sends the message over an encrypted connection to my server, which runs on Cloudflare. The server only passes the message on to Anthropic and streams the answer back to you. It does not store or log the content of your conversations. It keeps only short technical logs about requests, such as their time, their result and the random device identifier described in section 5 of the privacy policy, which are deleted automatically within 7 days. Like any hosting provider, Cloudflare processes your IP address to deliver the connection.

Anthropic receives the conversation and the summary from my server, not from your phone, so it does not learn your IP address, your device identifier or anything else that identifies you, unless you write it in a message. Anthropic processes the data on my behalf and under contract with me:

• Anthropic does not use your conversations to train its models;
• it deletes them automatically within 30 days;
• only if its automated safety systems flag a conversation as violating its usage policy may it keep that conversation for up to 2 years to review it.

The legal basis is providing the service you ask for (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) and, for information about your health and other special categories, your explicit consent (Art. 9(2)(a) GDPR) described in section 5. When you speak to the Sage, your voice is turned into text as described under Speech recognition.

8. Changes to these terms

If these terms change, I will update this page and the date at the top. When a change concerns what the Sage receives, who processes it or who may use it, the app asks for your agreement again before your next question.