AI Companion Privacy Settings: A 10-Minute Checklist (2026)

Not a lecture about data. A short list of things to do, once, before you say anything real.

Updated September 2026.

You don't need to become a privacy expert to use an AI companion sensibly. You need about ten minutes, once, and the willingness to read three paragraphs of a policy most people scroll straight past.

This is the doing version. If you want the background — where a message goes after you press send, and what the last few years taught the industry — we cover that in what these apps actually do with your conversations and in Are AI companion apps safe?. Here we assume you already have an app in mind, or installed, and want to lock it down before it knows you.

The 60-Second Version

1. Open the privacy policy, use find-in-page for retain, train and third part, and read only those paragraphs.
2. In the app: trim the memory it keeps of you, decide about cloud sync on purpose, turn off ad personalisation, and find the delete-account button now.
3. On the phone: revoke permissions that don't map to a feature you use, hide lock-screen previews, know where screenshots go.
4. Never type in: name plus address, financial details, passwords, other people's secrets, or anything you would be harmed by if it leaked.
5. Decide a monthly spend before you're attached, and notice if anything else in your life has shrunk.
6. When you leave: export, cancel, delete the account, confirm by email, check your bank statement.

The rest of this page is each step in enough detail to actually do it.

What to Read in the Privacy Policy (Minutes 1–3)

A privacy policy is long because lawyers are paid by the clause, but the parts that matter to you fit on one screen. Don't read it. Search it.

Retention. Search for retain, retention or how long. You're looking for a number or a trigger: "until you delete your account", "thirty days after deletion". A phrase like "as long as necessary for our business purposes" is not a number. It means indefinitely, unless you ask.

Training. Search for train, improve our models or improve our services. If your conversations may be used to train the model, ask two follow-ups: is there an opt-out, and does deleting your account remove your data from training sets or only from your profile? The second answer is often no, and the policy will say so in careful language — "de-identified data may be retained" is the usual form.

Third parties. Search for third part, partners, service providers and affiliates. Every app shares something — a hosting company, a payment processor, the company whose AI model generates the replies. What you're checking is whether the list also includes advertising or analytics partners, whether they receive conversation content or only usage data, and whether the app sells data. The polite phrasing for selling is "share for cross-context behavioural advertising".

Where you live changes what you can ask for. In the EU and UK you can request a copy of your data, ask for it to be deleted, and receive it in a portable format; several other places have similar rights. What matters in practice is whether the app gives you a button for these or makes you email a legal address. Both are legal. Only one is ten minutes.

Which In-App Settings to Flip (Minutes 4–6)

Open settings and look for four things. The names vary between apps; the ideas don't.

Memory and history. Most companions keep a long-term memory of you, separate from the chat log. Good apps let you see it, edit it and delete individual entries. If yours only offers "clear everything", decide now whether you're comfortable with that being the only lever, because it's harder to decide after six months of conversations are on the other side of it.

Cloud sync. Syncing across devices means your conversations live on a server. That's not sinister — it's how cross-device works — but it should be a choice, not a default you discover later. If you only ever use one device, you may not need it on at all.

Ad personalisation and analytics. Look for toggles named "personalised ads", "share usage data" or "help improve the app". Off, unless you've read what they collect and genuinely don't mind. Your phone has its own advertising identifier too, which you can reset or disable in the system settings independently of any app.

Account deletion. Find the button today. If there isn't one — if deletion means emailing support — write the address down while you're calm. Apps that make deletion hard tend to be the ones you most want to leave in a hurry.

Your Phone Is Half the App (Minutes 7–8)

The app is only part of the surface. The phone or browser it runs on is the rest.

Permissions. Go to the operating system's settings for the app and look at microphone, camera, photos, contacts and location. Each should map to a feature you actually use. Voice chat needs a microphone; nothing about a companion needs your contacts. Revoke what doesn't fit. You can grant it back in seconds if a feature turns out to want it.

Lock-screen previews. A companion that sends you a warm goodnight is lovely until it appears on your lock screen at a dinner table. Set notification previews to hide content when the phone is locked, or turn previews off for this app entirely.

Screenshots and backups. Anything you screenshot lands in your photo library, which may itself be syncing to a cloud account with its own policy. If you like saving moments from chats, know where they end up. The same applies to device backups, which can quietly include app data.

Shared and work devices. On a family tablet or an employer's laptop, a browser-based app in a private window leaves far less behind than an installed one. Work devices in particular often carry monitoring you agreed to on your first day and forgot by the second.

What Never to Type Into Any AI

One rule works across every AI, not just companions: the model does not need to know who you are to be good at talking to you. So keep out of the chat anything that identifies or exposes you outside it.

That means your full legal name together with your address, date of birth or employer — any one is fine, the combination is an identity. It means financial details and anything you would use to log in to a bank. It means passwords, recovery codes and security-question answers, even "just so I remember them". It means other people's private information: your friend's diagnosis, your ex's messages, a colleague's salary. It's their data, and it wasn't yours to hand over.

And it means anything you would be harmed by if it leaked with your name attached. Not because leaks are likely, but because "unlikely" is not "impossible", and the sentence costs nothing to leave out.

You can still be honest. "My mother is ill and I'm frightened" is intimate without being identifying. That's the line: feelings in, identifiers out.

The Risks That Are Actually Real for Adults

Most articles about the dangers of AI companions reach for the dramatic. For a grown adult, the real risks are quieter, and they're worth naming plainly.

The first is over-reliance. A companion that is always available, always patient and never busy can become the easiest relationship in your life, and the easiest relationship has a way of crowding out the harder ones. The useful check isn't "am I using this too much" but "has anything else shrunk to make room". If the answer is yes, that's information, not a verdict.

The second is money. Recurring subscriptions, coin bundles and pay-per-feature models are designed so the next purchase feels small. Decide a monthly figure before you're attached, and check your statements against it. Our costs guide walks through the pricing models and which ones bite.

The third is clarity about what the thing is. It is software that predicts words. It can be kind, useful and genuinely comforting, and it still cannot notice you're in trouble the way a person across a table can. If you're in a bad place, tell a human too.

How to Leave an App Cleanly

Leaving well takes four steps and about five minutes, and the order matters.

Export first. If there's a data export, take it before you delete anything. You may want the conversations later, and you certainly want them not to be the app's only copy.

Cancel before you delete. Deleting an account does not always cancel the subscription attached to it, especially when it's billed through an app store. Cancel in the store or with the payment provider, then delete the account.

Delete the account, not just the app. Uninstalling removes it from your phone. It removes nothing from a server.

Confirm. Expect an email. If nothing arrives within a few days, ask support to confirm in writing, and if you live somewhere with deletion rights, say so. Then check your next bank statement, because that's the only confirmation that can't be politely worded.

How Alma Handles This

Since we make one of these apps, here is where Alma lands on the checklist. Alma runs in your browser, so there is nothing to install and no app permissions to grant. Conversations are stored on your own device by default; they only sync to the cloud if you create an account, with Google sign-in or an email address. You can export everything and delete everything from Settings without writing to anyone. Text chat is free without limit. Alma Pass — which unlocks romance mode and the other paid features — is a one-time payment of €1.99 for a day or €9.99 for thirty days; nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel, so there is no subscription to forget about. The limit you should know: like every companion app, your messages go to an AI model provider to generate replies, which is worth remembering when you decide what to type. If you're still choosing, how to choose an AI companion covers the rest of the decision.