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Privacy policy

The Best Boss Effect app · updated November 6, 2026 · effective November 6, 2026

This policy goes with our Terms of Service. It explains what we keep, who can see it, and what is sent to the services we use.

What we keep

• Your account: your email address, display name, and, if you add them, your photo and bio.
• Your contact details: if you add them, your phone number and job title, and what you choose to share with each coach or mentor you connect with (see Contact details below). If you are in an organization's program, the department and location it gave us.
• Your assessment: your answers, scores and the demographics you chose to give.
• What you write in the app: journal entries (reflection answers, practice entries, notes), your development plan, your development cycles and their reviews, and your 90-day reviews.
• How the app is used: to see how people use the app, we record, for each day, whether you opened your report or a dimension page (the day and which of the two, never what you read or wrote), and, without any identifier, how many people visit the assessment page each day. This is kept in our own database, with no third-party analytics or tracking service, and the days you opened your report are deleted with your account and included in the data you can download.
• Your Ask the book searches: each question you ask and the answer you were shown, with other people's names replaced. After 90 days we delete the text and keep only which chapters it drew on (see below).
• Coaching: each coach you connect with, what you agreed to share with them and when, and the notes they leave on your pages. If you are a coach: your coach card and, if you list yourself in Find a coach, your listing (who you work with, specialties, location and the credentials you enter).
• Reports about a listing: if you report a coach's listing, what you wrote, with your name and email, so we can follow up.
• Terms you accepted: which version of the Terms of Service you accepted, where (signing in, checkout, a coach plan, or the in-app notice) and when.
• Billing: your subscription status and any search packs you buy. Card details are held by Stripe, never by us.

Who can see it

Your journal, plan and cycles are private to you. If you connect with a coach, they can read what you agreed to share with them when you connected, until you narrow it or end the connection on your Profile. If you also chose to share with your coach's firm, the firm's owner can read the same pages. Notes your coach leaves on your pages stay with you after the connection ends. A coach can also keep private working notes about your coaching that only they read; we delete them when the connection ends.

An organization that runs a workshop or holds a dashboard sees group figures only, never for fewer than five people, and never your own result or journal.

Assessment answers are never shown to anyone in the app, and your gender, age range and education are never shown either. To keep your record accurate, the owners of The Best Boss Effect can see and correct your name, job title, level, function, industry, country, department and location; every change is recorded, and anything you enter yourself afterwards replaces theirs. To help you with your account, the owners of The Best Boss Effect can open your result (your archetype and scores, as you see them) and its PDF; every time they do, it is recorded. They never see your journal, plan or cycles this way.

Contact details

Contact details you enter may be used by The Best Boss Effect to contact you about your account, your program, or your subscription. They are never sold or shared with anyone outside the platform.

In a connection with a coach or mentor, each of you chooses what the other sees: email, phone, job title, how to reach you and your photo, each off until you turn it on. What you share there, your photo included, can be saved to the other person's contacts as a contact card, and stops showing in the app when the connection ends (a contact card already saved stays in their contacts). Otherwise your photo is shown to no one, unless you are a coach, whose coach card shows it. The owners of The Best Boss Effect can download the contact details on file (never your photo) to reach people about their accounts, programs or subscriptions; every download is recorded.

Research and comparisons

Your assessment answers and results are used, without your name, email or organization, in the benchmark behind How you compare and in our research on leadership. Only group figures come out of it, never anything that identifies you.

Best Boss stories

If you share a Best Boss story (in the app or on the website's form), we keep what you wrote with the permission you chose: private, for research only; publish anonymously; or publish with your first name. By submitting, you let The Best Boss Effect use your story, lightly edited, in its research, publications, talks and podcast, under that permission. The authors read every story before anything is published, and a story is never published beyond its permission. A published story shows your first name or Anonymous, and the dimension the authors tagged, never your email. Stories shared in the app are linked to your account so you can see them in Profile, Your stories, and withdraw any of them; withdrawing takes a published story down and erases its text and name. A story shared on the website is not linked to anyone; to withdraw one, write to privacy@thebestbosseffect.com with the first few words of it. When you delete your account, stories you shared stay under the permission you chose, with no link back to you, unless you withdraw them first. Stories are included in Download my data, and a note that you shared one (never the story) goes in your journal.

AI and your content

We do not sell what you write, use it in marketing, or train AI models on it. The AI providers below process it only to return a result to us; none of them uses what we send to train its models.

Your 90-day reflection review

The 90-day review is written with AI, and only if you turn it on. When it is on, the app sends what you wrote in your journal during that period (reflection answers, practice entries, notes, cycle reviews and what the person you asked said), your report's leans and your current development cycle to Anthropic, an AI provider in the United States, which writes the review and returns it to us. Before anything is sent, other people's names are replaced. We keep each review in your account. You can turn this off at any time on your Profile; after that, nothing more is sent.

Find a coach

Coaches write their own listings, and their credentials are self-reported. A listing shows the coach's name, photo, bio, specialties, location and credentials, and is shown only to people whose level, industry and country match who the coach works with; to choose which coaches to show you, the app reads the level, industry and country from your latest result. Your own details are never shown in the directory. If you report a listing, we email your report to our support team and keep it with the coach's record.

Ask the book

Ask the book answers your questions from The Best Boss Effect. When you search:

• Before anything leaves our servers, other people's names in your question are replaced.
• Your question (and, for a follow-up, the question before it) is sent to Voyage AI, a provider in the United States, to find the passages of the book that match it.
• Your question is then sent to Anthropic, an AI provider in the United States, together with those passages, the earlier questions and answers in the same search, your report's leans and your current development cycle. Anthropic writes the answer and returns it to us. Nothing from your journal is sent.
• We keep each question and its answer, with names replaced, so you can reopen your past searches.
• The authors read a small number of searches to check that the answers are accurate and safe. They see a code in place of your name and email, never who you are.
• After 90 days we delete the text of your question, the answer and the passages found for it. We keep only which chapters and sections of the book the answer drew on, with the date, so we can see which parts of the book people turn to. Searches older than 90 days no longer appear in your past searches. The app also keeps a copy of your recent searches on your own device so you can read them offline; it is refreshed each time you open the app (so it follows our deletion), hides anything older than 90 days, and is removed when you sign out.
• Nothing we send to Voyage AI or Anthropic, and nothing they send back, is used to train any AI model.

If you'd rather not use Ask the book, nothing is sent: it runs only when you search.

The services we use

• Supabase (database, sign-in and file storage) and Netlify (hosting).
• Resend, to send email such as sign-in links, results and reminders.
• Stripe, for payments.
• Anthropic: for the 90-day review (when you turn it on), for Ask the book's answers, and for reading a book receipt or student document you upload.
• Voyage AI, to match your Ask the book questions to passages in the book.
• Backblaze, to keep encrypted weekly backup copies.

Deleting your account

Profile, then Delete your account, starts the deletion of your account. It is not immediate: for 30 days the account is kept but locked and hidden. You are signed out on every device, you drop out of the rosters and lists your coach or mentor, program administrators, your organization's leaders and our team's People list show (our team can still find the account by your email address, for example to help you restore it), your results stop counting in any figure, and we send you no email, push notification or reminder. If you sign in within those 30 days, you can restore the account in one step, exactly as it was.

After 30 days we remove it for good: your account, journal, plan, cycles, reviews, photo, access and coach connections (with the notes on them). Your assessment answers stay in our research data with your name, email and organization removed, so they can no longer be linked to you. The same applies to your Ask the book searches: they are kept, with names already replaced, until their text is deleted after 90 days, and can no longer be linked to you. We keep the record of which terms you accepted, any listing report you sent, and the record of actions taken on your account by our team (including that you asked to delete, and when the account was removed), as we need them to show what was agreed and done.

The recovery file. Before you delete, you can ask for a recovery file. It is a ZIP of your data (the same as Download my data) with a file of the rows we need to restore it, and a signature we add with a secret key that only we hold. The signature covers every file in the ZIP and your email address, so a changed file, or a file for another address, is refused. We do not keep a copy of the file: it is built for you, you download it (we also email you a link that works for 24 hours, and delete the copy we made after that), and from then on you are the only one who holds it. It contains your assessment answers and everything you wrote, so it is private: anyone who has the file can read it. Keep it somewhere only you can open, and do not share it.

If your account has been removed and you later sign in with the same email address, you can upload the file (Profile, Restore from a recovery file). We check the signature and the address, and restore your results, journal, 30-day cycles, development plan, 90-day reviews, email settings and any lifetime access or book year that had not ended. We do not restore coach or mentor connections, organization membership, subscriptions, your photo or your choice about AI reflection reviews. Each file works once, and we record in our log that a restore happened, when, and what it restored (counts only, never the content). Where we have since stored your assessment answers in the research data, the restored result replaces that anonymous copy, so it is not counted twice. If you never make a recovery file, nothing from your account can be restored after the 30 days.

Backups

So we can recover from a failure, we keep backups of our database and of uploaded files (photos, logos and the like). They are encrypted, and they are used for nothing but recovery. Our database host keeps daily backups for seven days, and we keep weekly backup copies for four weeks, encrypted before they leave our systems, with Backblaze. When you delete your account, your data can therefore remain in those backups for up to about five weeks, until they expire and are deleted automatically.

Questions

Write to privacy@thebestbosseffect.com.

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