Privacy

Effective 9 November 2026

The General is a project watchdog. It holds what a team puts on its board, and it reads two things from Google on request: an assistant mailbox, and — for the account owner only — a calendar. This page says exactly what that means, in the order that matters.

Who operates it

The General is a SwitchCo product, operated by SwitchCo Canada Inc., which is the company responsible for the data described here. Questions, requests for a copy of your data, and deletion requests all go to ai@thegeneral.tech, which is a monitored address and not an auto-responder.

What we hold

• Who you are. Your name, work email, phone number if you choose WhatsApp, your time zone, and which channel you want to be chased on.
• What you put on the board. Projects, next actions, subtasks, notes, goals and the standard you set for each one, your daily list, and your messages to and from The General.
• What we sent you. A delivery record for each chase, brief and reply: the channel, the address, the text, when it was sent, and the error if it failed.
• Sign-in records. We never store a password — there isn't one. Sign-in is a one-time code or link, and both the code and the session token are stored only as a hash, so the value in our database cannot be used to sign in as you.
• Access requests from this website. The name, email and message you type into the access form. It becomes a card on our own board and an email to us, and nothing else.
• Server logs. Our web server keeps ordinary request logs, which include IP addresses. They are used to run and secure the service.

We do not use cookies for tracking, run no analytics, and embed no advertising or third-party tracking scripts. The site keeps the last email you typed in your own browser's local storage as a convenience; it never leaves your browser.

Google data, specifically

Two Google permissions are involved, and they are asked for separately.

• The assistant mailbox (gmail.modify). The General has its own mailbox. It reads messages sent to that mailbox, labels the ones it has handled so it cannot act on the same message twice, and sends replies, chases and briefs from it. It is a working mailbox, not a window onto yours.
• The owner's calendar (calendar.readonly and calendar.events). For the account owner only, and never for staff. The reading is for one thing: showing how much of today is actually free, and which meetings are left, on the owner's own screen. We read the times and titles of events in a short window around today. Calendar data is held in memory only and is never written to our database — it is re-fetched every few minutes and no history of it is kept. The General can also create and change events on these calendars — booking a meeting is something you can ask it to do — and that is a separate permission (calendar.events) covering events only. It cannot create or delete a whole calendar, and it never touches an event it was not asked about. Reading is still all the Today screen does. When the account owner asks for a meeting with somebody and names them, their email address is put on the event as a guest and Google emails that person an invitation from the owner's calendar — so a person who does not use The General can receive mail because of it. Only addresses the owner has typed, or people already on his board, can be invited; guests cannot add further guests.

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

In plain terms: that data is used only to provide the features described above. It is not sold, not transferred for advertising or any other unrelated purpose, and no human reads it except where you ask us to, where it is needed to resolve a fault or address a security issue, or where the law requires it.

You can withdraw either permission at any time at myaccount.google.com/permissions. The calendar line on the owner's screen stops showing a figure; nothing else is affected.

Who else processes it

We keep the list short on purpose, and these are all of them:

• DigitalOcean — the server the service runs on.
• Google — the Gmail API, which is how email from The General is sent.
• WhatsApp (Meta) — only if you choose WhatsApp as your channel. Choose email and no message of yours goes near it.
• Anthropic — The General writes its chases, briefs and replies with Anthropic's Claude. The text of a message you send it, and the board text needed to answer, are sent to Anthropic for that purpose and are subject to Anthropic's own terms.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone else.

How long we keep it

Board content stays until you or your administrator deletes it — that is the point of a tracker. Delivery records are kept so a chase is never sent twice and so a failure can be explained. Deleting a person from a board deletes their sessions, their messages and their list with them. The calendar cache, as above, is never persisted at all. Ask us at ai@thegeneral.tech for a copy of what we hold about you, or for it to be deleted, and we will do it.

Security

Everything is served over HTTPS. Sign-in codes and session tokens are stored hashed. The owner-only parts of the service — the calendar line among them — are enforced on the server, not hidden in the page. Access to a board is by invitation; there is no public sign-up.

Children

The General is a tool for workplaces and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the effective date at the top changes with it, and anyone with a board is told by email. We do not quietly broaden what we collect.