Legal

Pod Privacy Policy

Last updated: 13 August 2026
Provided by: Pettingell Software Company LLC (“we,” “us,” “our”)
Contact: privacy@pettingellsoftwarecompany.com

1. Overview

Pod is a health and fitness app that helps small groups (“pods”) track training and readiness and take part in shared challenges. This policy explains what personal data we collect, why, how we handle it, and the choices you have. We designed Pod to collect only what the features need.

2. Data we collect

a. Account & identity data. Email address and authentication credentials (managed through our authentication provider), and a display name you choose. Used to create and secure your account and to identify you to other members of pods you join.

b. Health & fitness data. With your explicit permission, Pod reads health and activity metrics from Apple Health (HealthKit) and — where you connect them — supported wearable services (see the separate vendor authorizations). These may include: steps, active/exercise minutes and workouts, resting heart rate, heart-rate variability (HRV), and sleep duration/stages. We use these to compute in-app metrics such as training load, heart-rate zones, and a daily readiness score, and to show your progress over time.

c. Group & challenge data. Pods you belong to, your role in them, and your participation and results in challenges and leaderboards.

d. Technical & diagnostic data. Basic device and app-operation data needed to sync and run reliably (e.g., sync timestamps, error diagnostics), and — if you enable notifications — a push notification token identifying your device, used solely to deliver those notifications. We do not use this data for advertising.

We do not knowingly collect precise location, contacts, or financial account information, and we do not use tracking for cross-app advertising.

3. How we use your data

  • Provide core features: metrics, readiness/training-load scoring, charts, groups, and challenges.
  • Generate a short weekly reflection on your own training — see Section 6.
  • Sync your data across your devices and keep it consistent.
  • Show your display name — and, within a challenge you join, your challenge results — to other members of that pod.
  • Maintain security, prevent abuse, and fix bugs.
  • Communicate essential service messages.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with third parties for their advertising, marketing, or data-mining.

4. Apple Health (HealthKit) — specific commitments

In line with Apple's requirements:

  • We access Health data only after you grant permission, and only the categories the features need.
  • We do not use HealthKit data for advertising, marketing, or data-mining, or share it with third parties for those purposes.
  • We do not store your HealthKit-derived health data in iCloud. Pod's on-device database is explicitly excluded from iCloud Backup. The equivalent exclusion is applied on Android, so the app's health data is not copied into Google Drive backups either.
  • You can revoke access at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Health.

5. Wearable integrations (Garmin, WHOOP, Oura, and similar)

Where you choose to connect a wearable account, we receive the specific data categories you authorize during that service's sign-in, and use them only for the in-app features described above. You can disconnect a service at any time in Pod and/or in the provider's account settings; disconnecting stops future data retrieval. See our vendor authorization descriptions for the exact scopes requested per provider.

6. AI-generated weekly insights

Pod produces a short weekly reflection on your training. To generate it, we send weekly averages of your activity metrics — steps, exercise minutes, active energy, sleep duration, heart-rate variability, and readiness — for the week being summarized to a third-party AI provider (Anthropic).

  • No identifying information is sent. Your name, email address, account identifier, and any correlation identifier are deliberately excluded from the request. The provider receives only the aggregated numbers for one week.
  • No raw data leaves. Only weekly averages are sent — never your individual daily readings, workouts, or history.
  • We do not use your data to train AI models, and our provider does not train on it under our agreement. We also do not use batch processing for this feature, which would have meant a copy of each request and response being retained by the provider for several weeks. Requests are made one at a time and are not stored by us beyond the resulting reflection.
  • Insights are not medical advice. They are informational reflections on your own recorded activity. Pod is not a medical device and does not diagnose, treat, or offer guidance on any medical condition.

7. How your data is stored and shared

  • Storage. Account, group, challenge, and daily-metric data are stored in our managed cloud database and synced to your devices. The copy held on your device is excluded from your phone's cloud backups.
  • Service providers. We share data only with vendors that process it on our behalf in order to run the service:
    • Supabase — managed database and authentication.
    • PowerSync (JourneyApps) — synchronization between our database and your devices.
    • Anthropic — weekly insight generation, on the limited terms described in Section 6.
    • Google Firebase Cloud Messaging — delivery of push notifications you enable.
  • Sharing within pods. Other members of a pod can see your display name; within a challenge you join, they can see your challenge participation and results. They do not see your raw health metrics.
  • Legal. We may disclose data if required by law or to protect rights and safety.

8. Data retention & deletion

We keep your data while your account is active.

You can delete your account at any time from within the app, under Delete account. Deletion is immediate and permanent: your profile, health and activity data, challenge history, and insights are erased. Pods you created pass to their longest-standing member so that other members keep their own data; a pod with no other members is deleted with your account. We cannot recover deleted data.

You can also request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data by contacting privacy@pettingellsoftwarecompany.com; we will delete your account data within 30 days of a verified request, except where we must retain it to meet legal obligations.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live (e.g., EEA/UK under GDPR, California under CCPA/CPRA), you may have rights to access, correct, delete, port, or restrict processing of your data, and to withdraw consent. Health data is treated as sensitive/special-category data; we process it only on the basis of your explicit consent. To exercise any right, contact privacy@pettingellsoftwarecompany.com.

10. Children

Pod is not directed to children and is not intended for anyone under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from children under that age.

11. Security

We use industry-standard safeguards (encryption in transit, access controls) to protect your data. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure.

12. International transfers

Pod is currently offered only in the United States, and our service providers process data in the United States. If we begin offering Pod in other regions, we will update this section to describe the applicable transfer mechanism.

13. Changes to this policy

We will post any changes here and update the “Last updated” date; material changes will be communicated in-app.

14. Contact

Pettingell Software Company LLC — privacy@pettingellsoftwarecompany.com.