Saathi is a free, multilingual AI companion for immigrants in Canada, built by Hikari Grove. We designed Saathi the way we'd want a tool for our own families: useful, calm, and respectful of your privacy. This page explains, in plain language, what we collect and what we don't.
What you can use Saathi without giving us
- No name, email, or phone number is required to chat with Saathi.
- No account, no password, no sign-up.
- No tracking pixels, ad networks, or third-party analytics that profile you.
What we do collect
- The messages you send Saathi and Saathi's replies — so Saathi can remember the conversation and so our team can improve the service.
- Voice recordings (if you use voice mode) are sent to OpenAI's Whisper service to be turned into text, then deleted from our servers. Only the resulting text is kept with the conversation.
- Documents you upload to the Document Reader (a tax letter, lease, benefit notice, etc.) are sent to Anthropic's Claude vision model to be explained. We store a log of when you uploaded a document and its size, plus the explanation we gave you, so we can debug issues and improve responses.
- The language you chose (Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Tamil, Bengali, Gujarati, Tagalog, Arabic, or English).
- Follow-up details — only if you ask for one: name, WhatsApp number, and the time of day that works for you. We only collect these when you fill in the follow-up form.
What we don't collect
- Your IP address, location, or device fingerprint beyond what is in standard server logs.
- Cookies for advertising. We use no third-party advertising or marketing cookies.
- Anything you didn't type, speak, upload, or submit yourself.
How we use this information
- To actually answer your questions in the conversation.
- So a human from the Hikari Grove team can call you on WhatsApp — only if you asked us to.
- To improve Saathi: which topics are confusing, which languages need more work, where Saathi makes mistakes. We may read your conversation to do this.
- To detect abuse and protect the service.
We do not sell your data. We do not share your data with advertisers. We do not use your conversations to train external AI models.
Who we share data with
To run Saathi, we share the minimum necessary with these processors:
- Anthropic (Claude Sonnet 4.5) — to generate Saathi's replies and read your uploaded documents.
- OpenAI (Whisper for voice-to-text, TTS-1 for text-to-voice) — only when you use voice mode.
- Emergent — our hosting and API gateway provider.
- MongoDB Atlas — encrypted database storage.
All processors are bound by their own enterprise privacy agreements. None of them are permitted to use your data to train general-purpose models.
How long we keep your data
- Conversations: up to 180 days, then automatically deleted unless flagged for safety review.
- Follow-up requests: kept until you've been contacted, then archived for up to 12 months.
- Document upload logs: 90 days.
Your rights
Wherever you live, you can ask us to:
- See what we have about you
- Correct anything that's wrong
- Delete it all
- Take it with you in a portable format
Email privacy@hikarigrove.com with your WhatsApp number or conversation ID and we'll respond within 30 days. If you live in the EU/UK or California, the GDPR/CCPA give you these rights by law — we honour them for everyone.
Children
Saathi is not designed for children under 13. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest. Access to the admin dashboard is gated by a secret token held only by Hikari Grove staff.
Important — Saathi is not legal, medical, or financial advice
Saathi is a friendly AI. It can be wrong. For binding decisions about your health, money, immigration status, or rights, please speak to a licensed professional.
Changes to this policy
If we change anything material, we'll update the date above and post a notice in Saathi for at least 30 days before the change takes effect.
Contact
Hikari Grove
Privacy questions: privacy@hikarigrove.com
Everything else: hello@hikarigrove.com