Deleting your Ari data.
Ari is made by Keith Vassallo. Almost everything it knows stays on your phone and never reaches us at all — so for most people there is nothing on our side to delete. Here is how to check, and how to remove what there is.
What we actually hold
At most three things, and only if you chose to send them. A bug report, if you tapped the report button in the app and ticked the consent box. Contributed recordings, if you switched on sharing in Settings › Developer › Recordings. And your email address, if you applied to the testing programme. Ari has no accounts, no profiles and no analytics, so if you have done none of those, we hold nothing about you whatsoever.
A bug report has two halves. The public half becomes an issue on GitHub — what you typed, your app and Android versions, your device model. The private half is the diagnostic files you ticked: a scrubbed log, a screenshot, this session's conversation, voice recordings.
How to delete it
In the app, in three taps
Open Ari and go to Settings › Debug › My Reports. Every report you have sent from that phone is listed. Tap Withdraw on any of them and confirm.
This erases the diagnostic files immediately and blanks your description from the public issue.
Recordings you chose to share
Open Ari and go to Settings › Developer › Recordings. Tap Delete my shared data and confirm.
Every recording stored under your contributor code is erased and sharing is switched off, so nothing new goes up either. Recordings on the phone itself are left alone — clear those with the delete buttons on the same screen.
If you no longer have the phone
That list lives only on the device that sent the report, so a reinstall or a new phone leaves you without it. Email privacy@heyari.dev with the words “Ari data deletion” in the subject.
Include the report ID if you have it — it looks like r_01J… and appears at the bottom of the GitHub issue. If you do not, say roughly when you sent the report and what it was about, and we will find it.
For recordings, include your contributor code — the one shown on the Recordings screen, which looks like 8b1d4e70-9c2a-…. It is the only thing that identifies your recordings, so without it there is genuinely nothing we can look up. That is the same property that stops anybody else deleting them.
If you applied to be a tester
Email privacy@heyari.dev, or simply reply to any email we have sent you, and ask to come off the list. We take your address off the tester list in the Google Play Console and delete the application from our inbox.
Do note that this removes your access to the pre-release builds, because being on that list is what grants it.
Everything on the phone itself
Conversation history, voice recordings, your settings and anything Ari has remembered about you are all on the device. Clear them in Settings › Developer › Recordings, or uninstall Ari — uninstalling takes the lot with it.
What is deleted, what is kept
| What | On withdrawal | Otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnostic files — logs, screenshots, conversations, recordings | Erased. They are ours to delete and they go. | Deleted automatically 90 days after you sent them. |
| Your description and private note | Blanked from the issue. GitHub keeps an edit history, so it can still be read by anyone who looks — see below. | The private note is deleted with the files at 90 days. |
| The GitHub issue itself | Kept. It is Ari's bug history, and other people may have replied to it. | Kept indefinitely. |
| Recordings you chose to contribute | Erased, and sharing is switched off so no more go up. | Kept until you ask — there is no clock on these, because a training set that deletes itself is no use. |
| A model already trained on those recordings | Unchanged. A model cannot be untrained — see below. | Ships with Ari like any other part of the app. |
| Your email address, if you applied to be a tester | Deleted from the Play Console tester list and from our inbox, on request. | Held while you are a tester, and not used for anything else. |
| Everything on your phone | — | Never sent to us. Yours to clear or uninstall at any time. |
The honest caveat: withdrawing takes your words out of view, not out of the world. GitHub retains the edit history of every issue, so somebody who goes looking can still read what was originally written. The files are the part we can genuinely promise are gone, because those are the part we hold.
And the same in the other direction: deleting contributed recordings erases the audio, and it cannot reach into a model that has already learned from it. We would rather say that than let you assume otherwise.
Retention
Bug reports: 90 days, automatically, with no exceptions. Diagnostic files and the record that ties them to a report expire on their own whether or not you ask. Withdrawing simply brings that forward to now.
Contributed recordings: kept until you ask. They are a training set, and one that expired every 90 days would never be worth training on. That is the trade, said plainly rather than buried: they stay until you delete them, and deleting is two taps away in the app.
Tester email addresses sit outside both: we hold one for as long as you are a tester, and delete it when you ask. More detail on all of this is in the privacy notice — bug reports, contributed recordings and the testing programme.