cave — Privacy Policy
Last updated: 1 September 2026
cave is a training coach. This policy explains exactly what it collects, where that goes, and what you can do about it. It is written to be checkable against the app's behaviour rather than to sound reassuring.
Who we are. Abdullah Ahmed ("we", "us"), an individual developer based in Egypt. cave is operated from Egypt; your data is stored in the United Kingdom (see §3). Contact: abdullah@getcave.app.
Who publishes it. cave is distributed on the App Store through the Apple Developer account of Yaseen Ahmed, so that is the seller name shown on the App Store listing. That account is the publisher only: it has no access to your data, and everything described in this policy is done by, and answerable to, the operator named above.
1. Your account
cave asks you to sign in before anything else, with Sign in with Apple. It is the only way in: cave is an iPhone app, so you already have an Apple ID, and a second provider would mean sending your sign-in through one more company for no benefit to you. There is no cave password: you never create one, and we never see the one you use with Apple.
The account exists for one reason. Your plan, your logs and everything the coach has learned about you are attached to it rather than to the handset, so a new phone, a reinstall or a mis-tap on Delete App does not end your training history. Signing back in anywhere brings it with you.
What the provider tells us when you sign in
- A user identifier for you from Apple. This is what every row of your data is keyed to.
- Your email address, if you let the provider share it. With Sign in with Apple you can choose Hide My Email, in which case Apple gives us a relay address instead of your real one, or nothing at all. cave works exactly the same either way; nothing in the app needs your address, and we do not email you.
We do not ask Apple for your name, your profile photo, your contacts, or anything else, and we never receive your Apple password.
Signing out is not deleting. Me → Settings → Sign out leaves your data with us so you can sign back in and pick it up. Delete my data is the one that erases it — see §6.
2. What cave collects
When you sign in
- The user identifier, and the email address if shared, described in §1.
Things you tell it, to build your plan
- A first name, if you choose to type one. It is used to address you and nothing else.
- What you are training for, how many days a week you can train, and when.
- Constraints you select or type — including self-reported injuries or physical limits ("knees", "shoulder", "no gym", or anything you write yourself).
- Anything you type or say to the coach in conversation.
Things cave records as you train
- Sessions you log: what you did, how long, how it felt, whether you completed or skipped it.
- Sets and loads you record against an exercise.
- The training plan itself, and each approved change to it.
- Durable facts you approve for it to remember ("no barbell this month", "hip needs care").
Things you import, if you choose to
- PDFs, photos, and notes you add under Imports. These are stored only on your device. They are never uploaded to our server.
Things your device provides
- Microphone audio, only while you hold the mic, and only if you grant permission (see §3 for what happens to it).
Notifications: cave does not send them cave sends you no notifications of any kind. There are no push notifications from a server, and no local reminders scheduled on your device either. The app requests no notification permission and keeps no notification schedule. If a pre-release build had already queued a reminder on your phone, it is cancelled the first time you open this version.
What cave does NOT collect
- No password. No phone number, contacts, photos library, precise location, or device advertising ID. The only email address we may hold is the one your sign-in provider passes us under §1, and we do not use it to contact you.
- No analytics, attribution, advertising, or crash-reporting SDK of any kind. The app links no third-party tracking libraries.
- No health data from Apple Health. cave does not read HealthKit.
- We do not track you across apps or websites, and we do not sell or share your data for advertising. Our App Store privacy label reflects this.
3. Where it goes
On your device
Your plan, memories, chat history, imported documents, and app settings are stored locally. Chat transcripts and imported documents never leave your device except as described in §3.3.
Our server (Supabase)
Your profile, training plan, workout logs, exercise sets, and approved memories sync to a Postgres database hosted by Supabase (London, United Kingdom). Every table is protected by row-level security keyed to your account: one user's rows cannot be read by another. We do not run analytics over this data.
If you are in the EU, storage in the UK is covered by the European Commission's adequacy decision for the United Kingdom, so no further transfer safeguard is needed for it. The transfer that does need your consent is the one to the coaching model, described next.
The coaching model
When you ask the coach something, cave sends your message plus the context needed to answer it to a large language model through OpenRouter, which routes it to DeepSeek (deepseek-v4-flash), or to OpenAI (gpt-4.1-mini) if the first is unavailable.
That context includes: your name if you gave one, your goal, your current training week, your approved memories (including self-reported injuries and constraints), a summary of recent sessions, and — if you have imported documents — excerpts from them.
Two things about this you should know:
- We instruct OpenRouter to route only to providers that do not retain or train on the request (
data_collection: "deny"). We rely on OpenRouter and the provider to honour that; we cannot independently verify it. - DeepSeek is based in the People's Republic of China. Your coaching context is processed outside the UK/EEA and outside the United States. Your stored data sits in the UK (London), so sending it to the coach is an international transfer to a country the UK and EU have not found to offer equivalent protection. We rely on your explicit consent for that transfer, which is why cave tells you this on the screen where you first use the coach, before you send it anything. The coach is optional: if that is not acceptable to you, do not use it — the plan, the calendar, logging and everything else work without it.
Our own proxy passes these requests through and stores none of them. We keep no log of your conversations on our servers.
Apple
- Sign-in. When you tap Sign in with Apple, Apple authenticates you and tells us the identifier and (optionally) the email address described in §1. Apple learns that you signed in to cave, and handles that fact under its own privacy policy. We send Apple nothing about your training: not your plan, not your logs, not a word you have said to the coach.
- Speech. When you use voice, cave asks iOS to transcribe it. On devices that support on-device recognition this happens entirely on your phone. On devices that do not, Apple performs the transcription on its servers under Apple's privacy policy. cave never stores the audio itself.
- Purchases. cave is currently free and makes no purchases, so nothing is sent to Apple's payment systems and no subscription record exists. If subscriptions are introduced, they will be processed by Apple, we will never see your payment details, and we would store only whether an active subscription exists.
4. Why we are allowed to do this (UK/EU users)
Where UK or EU data protection law applies, our lawful bases are:
| Purpose | Basis |
|---|---|
| Creating and holding your account so your training survives the device | Performance of a contract |
| Running the app you asked for — building and adapting your plan | Performance of a contract |
| Sending your context to the coaching model to answer you | Performance of a contract |
| Keeping the service working and preventing abuse (rate limits) | Legitimate interests |
| Processing health-related information you tell us — injuries, physical limits | Your explicit consent, given when you enter it |
| Sending your context outside the UK/EEA to the coaching model (see §3) | Your explicit consent, given by choosing to use the coach |
You can withdraw consent for health-related information at any time by deleting those entries under Me → Memory, or by deleting your data. Withdrawing does not affect processing already carried out.
5. Health information
Some of what you tell cave — an injury, a joint that hurts, a limit a clinician gave you — is information about your health. We treat it as sensitive:
- It is used only to shape your training plan and to keep sessions off your week that would aggravate it.
- It is stored under the same row-level security as everything else.
- It is included in what is sent to the coaching model, because it is the reason the plan changes.
- It is never sold, never shared for advertising, and never disclosed to anyone except the processors named in §3.
Residents of Washington State, Nevada, and Connecticut have specific rights over consumer health data. See §9.
6. How long we keep it
We keep your data until you delete it. There is no automatic expiry, except:
- Temporary constraints you set ("no gym this week") expire on their own date.
- cave periodically proposes retiring memories that have gone stale; you approve or dismiss each.
Delete my data (Me → Settings) deletes your rows from every table we hold them in — profile, workout logs, exercise logs and sets, memories, plans, plan snapshots, win days, entitlement, and rate-limit records — and clears everything stored locally on the device. It is immediate and irreversible. Sign out, next to it, does none of that: it releases the device and leaves your data with us until you come back.
7. Security
Data in transit is encrypted with TLS. Data at rest is encrypted by Supabase. Access is restricted by row-level security tied to your account, so no other user of cave can read your rows. We hold no passwords: you never create one for cave, and the one you use with Apple is never sent to us. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
8. Children
cave is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact abdullah@getcave.app and we will delete it.
9. Your rights
Wherever you are, you can see everything cave remembers about you (Me → Memory), correct or delete any of it, and erase everything (Me → Settings → Delete my data).
Depending on where you live you may also have the right to access a copy of your data, to object to or restrict processing, to portability, and to complain to a regulator — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EU, your national authority.
California. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we do not use it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Exercising your rights will never get you worse service.
Egypt. cave is operated from Egypt, and Law No. 151 of 2020 on the Protection of Personal Data may apply to that processing. Under it you can ask what we hold about you, have it corrected, and have it erased. The fastest route to all three is inside the app — Me → Memory shows and edits everything cave remembers, and Me → Settings → Delete my data erases the lot — because neither needs us to identify you first.
Washington, Nevada, Connecticut. Where the My Health My Data Act or equivalent applies, the health-related information described in §5 is consumer health data. We collect it only with your consent, use it only to provide the app, and do not sell it. To exercise a right or withdraw consent, use Delete my data or contact abdullah@getcave.app.
To make a request, email abdullah@getcave.app from the address attached to your account, which is how we identify you. If you signed in with Apple and chose Hide My Email, write from the relay address Apple gave you — it reaches us and it matches your account. If the provider gave us no address at all, we have no way to connect an email to your rows, and the complete route is Me → Settings → Delete my data inside the app, which needs no verification because it acts from the signed-in device itself.
10. Changes
If we change what we collect or who we send it to, we will update this policy and its date, and show a notice in the app before the change takes effect.
11. Contact
Abdullah Ahmed · abdullah@getcave.app
The current version of this policy is published at <https://getcave.app/privacy>, and the same text is bundled inside the app under Me → Settings → Privacy Policy. They are rendered from one source, so if the two ever disagree, that is a bug worth reporting.