Privacy Policy
Effective October 17, 2026
Battle Buddy (battlebuddyvet.com) is an AI companion for veterans, built by Sentient Systems Labs. It helps you remember, organize, and keep track of your appointments, reminders, documents, and VA questions. This policy explains what Battle Buddy keeps, why, and the control you have over it. Battle Buddy is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
What Battle Buddy keeps
- Your account: your email address, a password (stored only as a one-way hash), the name you like to be called, and your time zone.
- Your conversations: what you type or say to Battle Buddy and what it answers, so it can remember and pick up where you left off.
- Your memories: facts you ask it to remember, such as health details, medications, people in your life, your claim, and your preferences.
- Your documents: files and photos you choose to add (for example VA letters or medical records), the text read from them, a summary, and the dates, deadlines, amounts, names and numbers found in them.
- Your calendar and reminders: appointments and reminders you create.
- Safety log: if a message contains words about suicide or self-harm, Battle Buddy records that a safety alert happened and when, without the message itself, so it can show you the Veterans Crisis Line right away.
- Health tracking (only what you tell it or add): your daily check-ins (sleep, pain, mood, whether you took your medicines), your symptom diary, your medicine list (including what is read from a pill-bottle photo), appointment briefs, and your chart — one page about you that Battle Buddy rewrites every night from these and your documents — plus short day notes.
- Doctor-visit recordings (only if you record): the audio, the written transcript with who said what, the visit notes, and your confirmation that everyone in the room agreed to be recorded.
- Your claim: the claim tracker (conditions, status, ratings, evidence) and the drafts Battle Buddy writes for you.
- Family loop (only if you turn it on): the name and email of each person you add, and whether they confirmed.
- Your VA records (only if you connect them on My VA): the VA sign-in permission you gave (kept encrypted), your VA identification number, and copies of what the VA sends — ratings, service history, claims, appeals, health record, letters and benefits — kept encrypted and refreshed from the VA.
Recording a doctor visit
- Recording only starts when you tap Record visit, and only after you confirm everyone in the room said OK; that confirmation is saved with the recording. It is your responsibility to ask, and to follow the rules of the place you are in.
- In the Battle Buddy app the recording is saved on your phone first, in the app’s private storage, and uploaded over an encrypted connection. Your phone deletes its copy once Battle Buddy has confirmed it received every piece.
- On Battle Buddy’s server the audio, transcript and notes are encrypted like the rest of your records. Delete a visit on the Visits page, or everything from the Me page.
The family loop
Off unless you turn it on. If you add someone, Battle Buddy emails them once to ask them to confirm; after that they get only what you chose — whether you checked in and took your medicines that day, and/or a note if Battle Buddy has not heard from you for 2 days. They never get health details, conversations, documents or recordings. They can stop with the link in any email; you can switch it off or remove them on the Me page.
Your VA records (My VA)
- Off unless you connect it. You connect each VA service yourself by signing in with your own VA login (Login.gov or ID.me) at the VA and saying yes. Battle Buddy never sees your VA password.
- What Battle Buddy keeps: the encrypted sign-in permission, your VA identification number, and encrypted copies of what the VA sends, so the page loads fast (they are refreshed from the VA).
- Battle Buddy only reads your VA records. It does not change anything at the VA and does not share your VA records with anyone.
- Disconnect any VA service on the My VA page at any time; that also deletes its copies. Delete everything (Me page) removes all VA connections and copies.
- While the VA reviews Battle Buddy, it is connected to the VA’s test system, which holds no real veterans’ records.
How it is protected
- Your conversations, memories, documents and their text, names, and calendar details are encrypted before they are stored. Uploaded files are stored encrypted.
- Everything is kept on Battle Buddy’s own server and its own database in the United States, separate from any other product.
- All connections to Battle Buddy use encryption (HTTPS).
- Only you can see your information when you are signed in. We do not sell your information and we do not use it for advertising.
Who processes it
- AI processing: to understand your messages, your voice, and your documents, the relevant content is sent securely to the AI service provider we contract with to generate a response. It is used to answer you, not to advertise to you.
- VA questions: when you ask how the VA works, Battle Buddy searches public pages on va.gov. Your personal information is not sent to the VA.
- Email: reminders, appointment alerts, and password-reset links are sent from support@battlebuddyvet.com through Google Workspace.
- Hosting: the server and database run on a cloud provider in the United States.
- Recordings: a recording is turned into text by the same AI service (speech-to-text that tells the voices apart), then the visit notes are written from that text.
- Medicine facts: to show “About this medicine”, only the medicine’s name is looked up in the U.S. FDA’s public drug-label service (openFDA). Nothing about you is sent.
- VA rules: the VA’s rating schedule and claims rules are copied from the official public eCFR into Battle Buddy’s own library. Nothing about you is sent.
- The VA: if you connect My VA, your records come from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ official data service (VA Lighthouse) after you sign in with your own VA login and agree. When you ask Battle Buddy about them, the relevant part is processed by the same AI service.
Your Google account: Calendar, Drive, Tasks and Contacts (only if you connect it)
If you choose to connect your Google Calendar, Battle Buddy asks Google for permission to view and edit events on your calendar (the calendar.events permission). Battle Buddy uses it only to add the appointments and reminders you ask for, to move or cancel them when you ask, and to read the events already on your calendar so it can tell you what is coming up. It does not use your Google data for advertising, does not sell it, and does not let people read it except where you ask, where needed for security, or where the law requires. You can disconnect at any time in Battle Buddy, and you can remove its access at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
Battle Buddy also asks for the drive.file permission. It uses it only to create a Battle Buddy folder (with a folder for each kind of document) in that account’s Google Drive and to save a copy of each document you add into it. This permission lets Battle Buddy see only the folders and files it creates, nothing else in your Drive. Those copies belong to you: disconnecting or deleting your Battle Buddy account does not delete them. It also reads the email address of the Google account you connect, to show you which one is connected.
It also asks for Google Tasks (tasks), to put one-time reminders and the deadlines found in your documents on a “Battle Buddy” task list, and Google Contacts (contacts), used only to add a person you have said yes to (a doctor, VA office or your VSO). Battle Buddy does not read your task lists or your contacts for anything else. In your Battle Buddy Drive folder it keeps a “My VA Claim Summary” document and a “My VA Timeline” spreadsheet made from your documents.
Forwarding address and drive times. Emails you send to your personal Battle Buddy forwarding address are read from Battle Buddy’s own mailbox and filed to your account only when they come from your own email or your connected Gmail. If you add a home address, it is stored encrypted and used only, together with an appointment’s address, to estimate drive time through a public map routing service.
Battle Buddy’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Your choices and control
- Forget: ask Battle Buddy to forget something, or remove a memory on the Remember page.
- Delete everything: on the Me page, “Delete everything” permanently erases your account, conversations, memories, documents, files, calendar and reminders.
- Email reminders: you can ask us to turn them off.
- Questions or requests: email support@battlebuddyvet.com.
Not medical, legal, or emergency advice
Battle Buddy helps you keep track and prepare. It is not a doctor, a lawyer, an accredited VA representative, or a crisis service. For decisions about your health or your claim, talk to your VA care team or a Veterans Service Officer. If you are in crisis, call the Veterans Crisis Line (988, press 1) or 911.
Age
Battle Buddy is for adults 18 and older.
Changes
If this policy changes, the new version will be posted here with a new effective date.
Contact
Sentient Systems Labs · support@battlebuddyvet.com