🛡️ Privacy Policy

Psychedelics In Recovery™ (PIR®) · A 501(c)(3) nonprofit fellowship
Applies to: psychedelicsinrecovery.org, service.psychedelicsinrecovery.org, PIR®’s other subdomains (newsletter., publications., and the planned publicrelations.), PIR®’s GitHub organization and Pages sites, and PIR®’s Discord helpers: A.L.E.X. and the helpdesks, which also have their own terms of service and privacy notice.
Effective: October 2026 · Canonical source: this file, on GitHub. Both websites display a copy, and if they ever differ, this one wins.

Written by PIR® service members in plain language. It has been reviewed by service members, not legal counsel. If something here is unclear, ask us. That’s what we’re here for. 💚

Contents

1. Our promise, rooted in anonymity
2. The short version
3. What we collect, feature by feature
4. Cookies and analytics
5. How we use AI and helper tools (including meeting-minute transcription)
6. Discord, A.L.E.X. and the helpdesks
7. Who we share data with
8. How long we keep things
9. Your choices and rights
10. Keeping data safe, and what happens if something goes wrong
11. Automated decisions and profiling
12. Legal and regulatory notes
13. Children
14. PIR® on other platforms
15. Contact us
16. Changes to this policy

1. Our promise, rooted in anonymity

Anonymity is the spiritual foundation of our traditions. Taking part in PIR® can involve sharing that you’re in recovery, or that you’re curious about psychedelics as part of your path, and we know how personal that is. Spiritually, anonymity isn’t secrecy. It’s the reminder that no one is greater or less than anyone else. In a world of accounts, databases, and recording devices, we honor it by respecting everyone in our shared atmosphere. So we work from three commitments:

• We collect as little as we can, and only for a clear service reason.
• We never sell your information, never rent it, and never use it to advertise to you on other sites.
• We tell you plainly what our websites and tools do, including the less glamorous parts.

2. The short version

3. What we collect, feature by feature

Browsing our websites

• Our hosting provider (WPX) and security tools record standard technical information such as IP address, browser and pages requested. They use it to keep the sites running and safe from attacks.
• WP Statistics counts visits on our own server, with IP addresses anonymized and hashed, so we can’t identify you from them.
• Google Analytics (via Google Site Kit) also measures site usage. See Cookies.

Meeting notifications & newsletter signups

• Our meeting-notification signup has asked for your first name, last initial and email, and for two optional self-descriptions: that you have a desire to recover, and/or an interest in psychedelics as an aid to transformation. We know those statements are sensitive. We use them only to send meeting information and never share them. Older entries are kept while we migrate our tools, and we’ll delete yours on request (see §8).
• Newsletter and general signup forms collect your name and email. Signups are stored on our website and passed to our email provider (Brevo; previously Mailchimp and MailPoet) so we can send you mail. Every email has an unsubscribe link.

Contact & committee forms

Contact forms on both sites (and service-site forms such as meeting-room registration or surveys) collect what you enter, typically your name, email and message. We use it only to respond, or for the purpose the form describes.

Comments

If you leave a comment, we collect what’s in the form plus your IP address and browser details, for spam detection (Akismet, by Automattic). An anonymized string made from your email (a “hash”) may be checked with Gravatar to show your profile picture.

Convention passes & checkout (WooCommerce)

• When you buy a convention pass, we collect the order details needed to deliver it and to meet financial record-keeping requirements: name, email, billing address and order contents. Payments are processed by PayPal or WooPayments. We never see or store your full card number.
• If you start checkout but don’t finish, our cart-recovery tool saves the billing details you’ve typed, so we can send a gentle reminder or help if something went wrong. If you’d rather we didn’t keep those details, ask, and we’ll delete them by hand. (It’s a good example of a deletion request; see Your choices.)
• Checkout may offer an optional box to receive PIR® emails. It’s unticked unless you choose it.

Donations (our 7th Tradition)

• Donations go through PayPal. PayPal shares the donation details with us so we can keep records and thank you.
• In keeping with Tradition 7, PIR® is self-supporting and declines outside contributions.

Online meetings (Zoom)

Unless you join with camera or audio, other participants see only your display name (an alias is fine). PIR®’s Zoom hosts can see the email address or phone number you used to join. We use them only to run the meeting and never share them.

Website accounts (service members and editors)

If you have a login on either website (for example, as a committee editor), we store your username, email, and profile details. You can view and edit them any time, except your username. Password-reset emails include the IP address the request came from, so you can spot a request you didn’t make.

Media uploads

If you upload images, please remove embedded location data (EXIF GPS) first. Anyone who downloads an image can read it.

Embedded content

• Some pages embed content from other services, such as our meetings calendar (Google Calendar), YouTube videos and PDF viewers.
• Embedded content behaves as if you visited that service directly, which means the service may set its own cookies or learn that you viewed the page.

4. Cookies and analytics

• Essential cookies: logging in (2 days; 2 weeks with “Remember Me”), screen options (1 year), comment-form convenience (1 year, only if you opt in), and checkout and cart sessions.
• Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Tag Manager on the main site, and GA4 on the service site. These help us understand which pages help people. Logged-in editors are excluded. Google acts under its own privacy policy.
• Jetpack (Automattic): site statistics, security (firewall and brute-force protection), and email subscriptions.
• Brevo: our email provider may use a small tracking script to understand which pages subscribers visit, plus optional browser push notifications that you must explicitly allow.
• No social advertising pixels are connected. Some store plugins that could connect to ad platforms are installed but unused. We’ll update this policy before connecting any of them.

You can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time. The site will still work, though checkout needs session cookies.

5. How we use AI and helper tools

PIR® is run by volunteers. To make our small amount of service time go further, some of our trusted service members use AI assistants to help with the behind-the-scenes work: keeping the websites tidy, drafting documents like this one, organizing committee tasks and watching shared inboxes so nothing falls through the cracks. Here’s how we keep that respectful:

• The helpers work for service members, not on you.
  • Our Tech chair uses Claude Code CLI (by Anthropic) as a coding and writing assistant. Other servants use tools such as Claude Code, ChatGPT, Codex, and Gemini, each under their own account.
  • Some helpers connect to our websites and tools through MCP connectors and browser agents such as Claude in Chrome. Every website change they make is logged and can be rolled back.
  • 🔌 These tools connect to each other. AI assistants today come with many integrations:
    • Littlebird.AI connects to other services through sign-ins (OAuth), such as our Tech chair’s GitHub account, and to our WordPress sites through MCP.
    • Our WordPress sites run MCP connectors (EMCP Tools, Astra MCP), and we’ve tested Jetpack AI alongside Claude.
    • Claude can read Littlebird.AI’s context through MCP, and Augment shares a context engine with Claude.
    • Some PIR® Google accounts, such as the De Vine News account, are also used through the Google Workspace CLI with Claude.
    • ✅ Each connection is set up deliberately by a service member, covers only what that member can already access, and can be revoked at any time.
  • Some of our members use Littlebird.AI in their personal workflows, as an organizational assistant that keeps track of their work, observes the screen of the member who uses it, and prepares a daily summary of some PIR® role inboxes for the service member who monitors them.
• What they can see:
  • website content and settings;
  • documents in our GitHub organization;
  • and, for Littlebird.AI, the role mailboxes it’s asked to summarize, such as board@ or convention@. If you email one of those addresses, an AI assistant may help a service member read and sort your message.
• What we don’t do:
  • we don’t deliberately feed member lists or personal shares into AI tools;
  • we don’t use AI to make decisions about you;
  • we don’t build profiles of anyone.
• Training:
  • Littlebird.AI states that it doesn’t use personal data to train AI models, deletes data when an account is closed, and holds zero-data-retention agreements with the AI providers it uses.
  • Anthropic lets account holders choose whether their conversations help train Claude. PIR® asks service members to turn training settings off wherever a tool offers that choice.
• 🎙️ AI note-takers and personal assistants are part of the world now. Service members may use transcription and assistant tools such as Fathom, Otter.ai, Fireflies.ai, Notion, Zoom AI Companion, Wispr Flow, Parakeet, FreeFlow, Meetily, and Littlebird.AI. Some of these observe a person’s own screen, so they can capture whatever that person sees, including a Zoom or WhatsApp window. These tools run on individual members’ devices and accounts. PIR® doesn’t operate them and can’t technically control them.
  • Service meetings (committee, board, and business meetings) may be transcribed to help draft minutes. Members who transcribe are asked to say so. Most service members dispose of transcripts once the minutes are written, but each tool keeps data under its own settings.
  • Recovery meetings should never be recorded or transcribed. Many meetings say so explicitly, and some read a script intro reminding newcomers that, in a virtual room, others may be “watching with more than human eyes.”
  • Like recording a virtual court hearing, capturing other people’s shares without consent breaks trust. In our community it’s held together by mutual respect, not a technical gate. Please honor it.
• Access is limited to specific service members and revocable at any time, and every change our helpers make to the websites is logged and can be rolled back.

We think these tools are a gift to a volunteer fellowship, and we use them with the same care we’d want for our own information.

6. Discord, A.L.E.X. and the helpdesks

PIR®’s Discord has a helper called A.L.E.X. (Astral Logic Endpoint eXpander). It answers questions using PIR®’s public website and published literature, and runs our LitCom, TechCom, GitHub, PR and moderation helpdesks.

• A.L.E.X. can’t read your chats. It only sees what you type into its own slash commands, buttons and forms, such as /ask or /techcom.
• 💬 One exception, clearly marked: the ask-alex channel. When its conversation mode is switched on, A.L.E.X. reads messages posted in that one channel only, so members can talk to it without commands. Those messages are handled exactly like /ask and are not stored. The channel’s pinned message always says whether conversation mode is on.
• When you /ask:
  • your question goes to an AI model to write the answer;
  • during our pilot that’s an NVIDIA-hosted model, and later possibly Anthropic’s Claude;
  • we send only the question text, never your name or Discord ID;
  • we keep only anonymous counts (for example “a question was asked”, or “👍”).
• If something sounds like a crisis, A.L.E.X. skips the AI entirely and shows crisis resources right away. It may also alert a human support role.
• When you open a helpdesk ticket:
  • your request goes into a private Discord thread that only you and the relevant committee can see;
  • LitCom, TechCom, GitHub and PR tickets also create an entry in that committee’s private GitHub repository, so the work can be tracked;
  • moderation reports stay inside Discord.
• The web desk uses a one-time email link, with no password. We don’t store your email address: your tickets are matched by a scrambled tag made from it, and your session stays in your own browser.
• Discord itself operates under Discord’s privacy policy.

The full step-by-step data flow is in the A.L.E.X. privacy notice, with its terms of service.

7. Who we share data with

We share only what each service needs to do its job for us:

We’ll disclose information if the law requires it, and we’ll tell you if we’re allowed to.

Data we receive from others: payment and donation confirmations from PayPal and WooPayments; the interaction details Discord sends when you use A.L.E.X. (§6); aggregate (not personal) statistics from Google Analytics, Jetpack, and Brevo; and spam verdicts from Akismet.

8. How long we keep things

• Orders: as long as financial record-keeping rules require.
• Abandoned-checkout details: until they’re no longer useful for helping you finish (we’re setting an automatic clean-up), or immediately on request.
• Older form signups (e.g. past meeting-notification lists): kept while PIR® migrates its tools, and deleted on request. Email tech@psychedelicsinrecovery.org.
• Email lists: until you unsubscribe.
• Comments: kept indefinitely, so we can recognize returning commenters, unless you ask us to remove them.
• Helpdesk tickets: kept while useful to the committee, then archived. Ask us any time to delete yours.
• A.L.E.X. questions: not stored.
• Service-meeting transcripts: held in individual members’ tools under those tools’ settings; most are disposed of once minutes are written. Approved minutes are kept as PIR®’s official records, as our bylaws require.

9. Your choices and rights

You can ask us to show you, correct, export or delete what we hold about you, except what we’re legally required to keep. Unsubscribe links are in every email. Email helpdesk@psychedelicsinrecovery.org, or tech@psychedelicsinrecovery.org for data deletion (or use /privacy in our Discord). A real person will reply, usually within a week.

10. Keeping data safe, and what happens if something goes wrong

• Our sites use HTTPS, a firewall, brute-force protection, regular backups and least-privilege access for helpers and service members.
• Credentials are held by a small number of trusted servants.
• If we learn of a breach affecting your information, we’ll tell affected people and our board promptly, explain what happened and what we’re doing about it, and notify authorities where the law requires.

11. Automated decisions and profiling

We don’t make decisions about people with automated systems, and we don’t build profiles of anyone. The closest thing is A.L.E.X.’s safety check, which only decides which resources to show: crisis resources, or a kind note that we can’t give dosing or medical advice. It never stores or reports what you wrote.

12. Legal and regulatory notes

• PIR® is a peer-support fellowship and nonprofit, not a healthcare provider. We don’t provide medical, clinical, or crisis services, and we aren’t a HIPAA covered entity. Please don’t send us medical records.
• Card payments are handled entirely by our payment processors under their own security standards (PCI DSS). We never store card numbers.
• 🌍 PIR®’s members live all over the world: the US, UK, EU, Switzerland, New Zealand, Costa Rica, and beyond. Whatever privacy law applies where you live, you have the rights in §9, and we honor the same requests for everyone.

13. Children

Our sites and services are intended for adults. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe we have, contact us and we’ll delete it.

14. PIR® on other platforms

You can also find PIR® on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Spotify and Buzzsprout (podcast), WhatsApp, Discord, and GitHub. When you interact with us there, that platform’s own privacy policy applies.

15. Contact us

• Privacy and helpdesk: helpdesk@psychedelicsinrecovery.org
• General: info@psychedelicsinrecovery.org
• Publications: publications@psychedelicsinrecovery.org
• Data deletion: tech@psychedelicsinrecovery.org
• Convention: convention@psychedelicsinrecovery.org
• 🏛️ Board of Directors: service site · 📡 Contact page
• Everyone and everything else: PIR® contacts directory

If you’re in crisis, please don’t wait for an email reply. Call or text 988 (US), text HOME to 741741, or see our Crisis Resources. PIR® is not a crisis service.

16. Changes to this policy

🌱 This is a living document. We update it whenever our tools change, and before connecting anything new that affects your data. PIR®’s websites have been built by many volunteers over the years, and a well-meaning servant may sometimes add a plugin or tool before its privacy effects are understood. When we discover one, we review it, update this policy, and remove or reconfigure it if needed. Spot something we missed? Tell tech@psychedelicsinrecovery.org. Every change is recorded in the GitHub history of this file.

This page mirrors PIR®’s canonical document, maintained on GitHub. Edits happen there first.