Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated August 21, 2026

Introduction

The ReTern ("we," "us," or "our") operates theretern.com and provides coaching, education, and community services (collectively, the "Services") to help experienced professionals build and run independent fractional practices. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, share, and protect your personal information.

By using our Services, you agree to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use our Services.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email or prominent notice on our website at least 30 days before the changes take effect.

1. Information We Collect

Information You Provide Directly

When you use our Services, you may provide us with:

  • Account Information: Name, email address, phone number, password, profile photo
  • Payment Information: Credit card details (processed securely by Stripe), billing address
  • Assessment Data: Responses to Find Your BEACH™ and other questionnaires
  • Professional Information: Work history, skills, experience, industry, goals
  • Communication Data: Messages, emails, support tickets, and feedback you send us
  • User-Generated Content: Posts in community forums, testimonials, success stories, case studies

Information Collected Automatically

When you visit our website or use our Services, we automatically collect:

  • Usage Data: Pages visited, features used, time spent, clicks, navigation paths
  • Device Information: IP address, browser type, operating system, device identifiers
  • Location Data: General location (city/state) based on IP address
  • Cookies and Tracking: See our Cookie Policy below

Information From Third Parties

We may receive information about you from:

  • Payment Processors: Transaction data from Stripe
  • Social Media: If you connect your LinkedIn or other accounts
  • Referrals: Information from people who refer you to The ReTern
  • Google account (optional): If you connect Google in The Helm, see section 1A below.

1A. Google account data (Gmail, Calendar, and Contacts)

The Helm™ (helm.theretern.com) can connect to your Google account only when you choose to connect. We request read-only access. We never send, modify, or delete your email, calendar events, or contacts on your behalf.

What we access

  • Gmail (read-only): Your messages and settings, limited to what we need to sync relationship activity and surface what you owe a contact today (for example, an unreplied inbound email).
  • Google Calendar (read-only): Event titles, times, and attendees to log meetings with your contacts on your timeline.
  • Google Contacts (read-only): Your address book and "Other contacts" to import professional relationships into your private CRM for intro matching. We do not modify your Google Contacts.
  • Email address: To identify which Google account you connected.

How we use it

  • Build and update your relationship timeline (who emailed whom, meetings, follow-ups due).
  • Derive short, member-facing insights for you only (for example, what a thread is asking, or a stated need a contact mentioned). We process message content in memory for this purpose.
  • Power AI-assisted drafts and extraction using third-party AI services (see Service Providers). Processing is for your account and features you use, not to train general-purpose models on your mail.

What we store vs. what we do not store

  • We store, for 180 days: the whole message as your provider hands it to us. Who sent it, everyone it was sent to including anyone copied, the subject, the date, the thread it belongs to, the names and sizes of any attachments, and the message text itself.
  • After 180 days we delete the message text and keep the shape of it: who wrote to whom, when, about what, and the relationship facts we derived for you. Your email provider keeps the originals either way, so nothing is lost.
  • We also store calendar event details, imported contact fields, and derived relationship facts tied to your contacts, for as long as your account is open.
  • Nobody at The ReTern reads your messages. If we ever needed to, in order to fix something you asked us to fix, we would ask you first and you could say no.

Sharing and sale

Google user data from your account is not sold, not used for advertising, and not shared with other members except when you explicitly use a product feature to share a specific referral or object with another named member. It is not transferred to third parties except subprocessors listed in section 3 who help us operate The Helm under contract.

Disconnect and deletion

  • Disconnect: In The Helm, open Settings → Connect your tools, then Disconnect under Google Workspace. We stop collecting new Google data and revoke our access tokens.
  • Delete synced Google data: Email hello@theretern.com from your account email. We will delete or de-identify synced Google-derived data in your CRM subject to the retention rules in section 4.

Google API Services User Data Policy (Limited Use)

The Helm's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your personal information to:

Provide and Improve Services

  • Create and manage your account
  • Process payments and subscriptions
  • Deliver coaching, courses, and community access
  • Analyze usage to improve the platform
  • Develop new features and content
  • Generate AI-powered coaching content, call preparation briefs, and personalized recommendations using anonymized or pseudonymized data processed by third-party AI services

Communicate With You

  • Send transactional emails (receipts, account updates)
  • Provide customer support
  • Send marketing emails (with your consent - you can opt out anytime)
  • Notify you of changes to our Services

Legal and Security

  • Comply with legal obligations
  • Prevent fraud and abuse
  • Enforce our Terms of Service
  • Protect our rights and property

Marketing and Testimonials

  • With Your Written Permission Only: Use your name, photo, and success story in marketing materials, case studies, and testimonials
  • Track marketing campaign effectiveness
  • Personalize your experience on our platform

Important: We will NEVER use your testimonial or success story without your explicit written permission. You can revoke permission at any time by contacting hello@theretern.com.

3. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell your personal information. We share your information only in these limited circumstances:

Service Providers

We share data with third-party service providers who help us operate:

  • Stripe: Payment processing and subscription management
  • Supabase: Database hosting, user authentication, and file storage (hosted on AWS US East, Ohio)
  • Vercel: Website hosting and application delivery
  • Kit (ConvertKit): Email marketing, subscriber management, and automated sequences
  • Resend: Transactional email delivery (signup notifications, system alerts)
  • Google: OAuth authentication, Gmail sync (read-only), Calendar sync (read-only), and Google Analytics
  • Anthropic: AI-powered content generation, coaching recommendations, and email-derived fact extraction for features you use. Content from your connected Google account may be processed ephemerally to produce drafts or derived facts for your account only. Anthropic does not use this data to train general-purpose models for us.
  • Slack: Team and community communication, activity notifications
  • Cal.com: Appointment scheduling and booking management
  • SignWell: Electronic contract signing

These providers are contractually obligated to protect your data and use it only for the purposes we specify.

Legal Requirements

We may disclose your information if required by law, court order, or government request, or if we believe disclosure is necessary to:

  • Comply with legal obligations
  • Protect our rights or property
  • Prevent fraud or security threats
  • Protect the safety of our users or the public

Business Transfers

If The ReTern is acquired, merged, or sold, your information may be transferred to the new owner. We will notify you before this happens.

With Your Consent

We may share your information for other purposes with your explicit consent.

3A. Information About Non-Members (Your Contacts)

The Helm™ helps you manage and grow your professional relationships. To do that, the platform stores information about the people you know, your contacts, even though those people are not themselves members of The ReTern. This section explains what we store about your contacts, why, and how a contact can exercise their rights. The people you talk about did not sign up with us, so we hold their information narrowly and only to serve you.

What we store about your contacts, and where it comes from

We store contact information only from sources you give us or connect:

  • What you type or tell us: names, contact details, and notes you add about a person in your relationship tools.
  • Conversations and transcripts you provide: notes, recaps, or call and meeting transcripts you upload or paste in.
  • Accounts you connect: if you connect your email or calendar (read-only), we log who you communicated or met with and when, to keep your relationship history current.

From those sources, the platform may store facts a person shared, such as what they do, offer, or are looking for (including help they offer others), where they are located, groups or employers or schools they have mentioned, what they have said they care about, and a work situation they have described (for example, that they are between roles). We store a fact about a contact only when that person stated it themselves in something you provided. We do not guess or infer facts a person did not say.

It is private to you

Information about your contacts is owner-scoped: by default, only you, the member who knows them, can see it. We do not sell contact information, and we do not build a shared public directory of your contacts.

When you share a specific object. If you use a product feature to share a specific contact or a specific referral with another named member, we will show that member the shared object (and fields you include for that share) while the share is active. We will not grant them access to your other contacts. You can revoke the share in the product. Revocation ends their access through the Services.

We use contact information to help you remember, manage, and grow your own relationships, for example to remind you to follow up or to suggest a helpful introduction you could make. Any use to improve the platform for everyone is done only in de-identified, aggregated form that cannot reasonably be linked back to an individual, and only above a minimum group size. We do not use your contacts for our own advertising.

Our legal basis and our role

For information about your contacts, you are responsible for that relationship and that information, and The ReTern acts on your behalf (as your service provider, or processor) to store and organize it for you. We rely on the legitimate interest you and we share in helping you manage genuine professional relationships, together with your agreement (in our Terms of Service) that you have a real relationship with each contact and obtained their information lawfully. We do not use contact information for our own advertising, and we do not sell or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Sensitive information

  • We store a sensitive fact only when the person stated it themselves. We never infer it.
  • We never use protected characteristics (such as race, religion, health, sexual orientation, or similar categories) to decide who to introduce to whom.
  • We do not use sensitive information to infer anything else about a person.

How long we keep it

We keep contact information while it is useful to you and your account is active. Facts about a person's current situation are, by nature, temporary: life-situation and transition facts (such as "between roles" or "relocating") automatically expire after 12 months unless they are restated, so the platform does not treat a passing moment as a permanent label. When you delete a contact, or close your account, we delete or de-identify the information about that contact as described in the Data Retention section below.

Rights for the people in your contacts

If you are someone a member has stored information about, you have rights over that information, including to know what is held, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, and to opt out of its further use. To exercise them, email hello@theretern.comand tell us who you are. Because this information is private to the member who knows you, we may need to confirm your identity and coordinate with that member to locate and act on it. We will respond within 30 days. You can also ask a member you know directly to update or remove what they have stored about you.

4. Data Retention

We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to provide our Services and comply with legal obligations:

  • Active Accounts: We keep your data while your account is active
  • After Termination: We delete or anonymize your data within 30 days of account closure, except:
    • Information required for legal compliance (tax records, fraud prevention)
    • Anonymized data used for analytics (cannot identify you)
    • Backup systems may retain data for up to 90 days
    • Google Data: Synced Gmail data in our CRM includes the whole message for 180 days, which means sender, all recipients including anyone copied, subject, date, thread and message identifiers, attachment names and sizes, and the message text. After 180 days the message text is deleted and we keep only the participants, the timing, the subject and the relationship facts derived from them, as described in section 1A. Calendar event details, imported contact fields and derived facts are kept while your account is open. If you disconnect Google in Settings → Connect your tools, we stop new collection; existing synced rows may remain in your history until you request deletion at hello@theretern.com, and that deletion reaches the stored messages as well as the derived facts.

You can request deletion of your data at any time by contacting hello@theretern.com.

5. Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the following rights:

All Users

  • Access: Request a copy of your personal information
  • Correction: Update inaccurate information
  • Deletion: Request deletion of your information (with exceptions for legal obligations)
  • Opt-Out: Unsubscribe from marketing emails via the "unsubscribe" link
  • Portability: Receive your data in a portable format

California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)

You have additional rights under California law:

  • Right to know what personal information is collected
  • Right to delete personal information
  • Right to opt-out of "sale" of personal information (we do not sell your data)
  • Right to non-discrimination for exercising your rights

European/UK Residents (GDPR)

You have additional rights under European law:

  • Right to object to processing
  • Right to restrict processing
  • Right to lodge a complaint with your data protection authority

To exercise your rights: Contact us at hello@theretern.com. We will respond within 30 days.

6. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar technologies to:

  • Remember your preferences and login status
  • Analyze how you use our Services
  • Measure marketing campaign effectiveness
  • Provide personalized content

Types of Cookies We Use

Essential Cookies: Required for the Services to work (login, security, payment processing)

Analytics Cookies: Help us understand how visitors use our site (Google Analytics 4)

Marketing Cookies: Track advertising campaign performance

You can control cookies through your browser settings. Note that disabling cookies may limit some features of our Services.

7. Security

We implement reasonable security measures to protect your personal information, including:

  • Encryption of data in transit (SSL/TLS)
  • Secure password storage (hashed and salted)
  • Regular security audits
  • Limited employee access to personal data
  • Secure third-party service providers

However, no system is 100% secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security of your information.

8. Children's Privacy

Our Services are not intended for individuals under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If we discover we have collected information from a child under 18, we will delete it promptly.

If you believe we have collected information from a child, contact us at hello@theretern.com.

9. Third-Party Links

Our Services may contain links to third-party websites (LinkedIn, payment processors, etc.). We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these sites. Please review their privacy policies.

10. International Data Transfers

The ReTern is based in the United States. If you access our Services from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have different data protection laws than your country.

By using our Services, you consent to this transfer and processing.

11. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by:

  • Posting the updated policy on our website with a new "Last Updated" date
  • Sending an email to your registered email address (for significant changes)

Your continued use of our Services after changes take effect means you accept the updated Privacy Policy.

12. Contact Us

Questions about this Privacy Policy or your personal information?

Email: hello@theretern.com
Mail: The ReTern, 5 N. Beach, Nantucket, MA 02554

13. Acknowledgment

By accessing or using our Services in any way, you acknowledge and agree that:

  • You have read and understood this Privacy Policy
  • You agree to the collection, use, and sharing of your information as described
  • You understand how to exercise your privacy rights
  • This Privacy Policy is part of our Terms of Service

If you do not agree to this Privacy Policy, you must immediately stop using our Services.

Your continued use of the Services after we post any changes to this Privacy Policy means you accept those changes.

Last Updated: August 21, 2026
Effective Date: February 20, 2026