The Pattern Without the Person: Privacy in AI Coaching

A coach I talked with while building Grove told me about Facebook. She started using it in college, back when it was four schools and a handful of students who had no idea what they were building a habit around. They posted pictures. It felt small and new. Twenty years later she looks back and sees something she never agreed to in any moment she could point to: a company that knows a great deal about her, assembled for free, from a thousand small posts she made before she understood what the thing was.

Then she named the fear underneath it. She is afraid the same thing is happening again with AI, and this time the data is not her vacation photos. It is her clients.

That fear is correct, and most coaching-plus-AI setups earn it.

What pasting into ChatGPT actually does

Here is the default move, the one the field has quietly normalized. A coach has a session coming up, opens a chat assistant, and pastes in their notes to get help thinking it through. “Sarah has been missing her morning walks, she mentioned her mother’s surgery, here is where we are stuck.” It works. The suggestions are useful.

It also just sent Sarah’s name, Sarah’s mother’s surgery, and Sarah’s struggle to a server the coach does not own, attached to each other, in plain language. Sarah never met that company. Sarah cannot see what was sent. And the coach, who would never read a client’s file aloud in a coffee shop, has done something with a longer half-life: handed a named person’s private life to a system that keeps it.

Board-certified coaches work under a confidentiality ethic. The textbook says client information is held in trust. The Tuesday-afternoon reality is a copy-paste into a chat box that quietly breaks that trust, because the easy tool and the ethical tool are not the same tool, and nobody set out to do harm. They set out to prep for a session.

Sage starts with consent

Grove’s first answer to that is not a clever algorithm. It is permission. For clients with Grove accounts, Sage requires both the client’s AI opt-in and their practice’s AI opt-in. For a client who does not use Grove, the coach must attest to having that person’s knowledge and any required consent before enabling Sage. Both switches start off. If either one is missing, or a client turns theirs back off later, the request is blocked before it is ever built. The model does not get a careful version. It gets nothing, because nothing is sent.

This is the part that is easy to admire and genuinely hard to do by hand. Consent is a real obligation in coaching, and it is also exactly the kind of thing that is simple to mean and simple to forget on a full week. A coach prepping at 9pm is not going to stop and write a data-use disclosure before pasting into a chat box, and almost no one does. Grove makes the asking a built-in step instead of a good intention, so “did this client agree to this” has an answer that does not ride on anyone remembering to have the conversation.

Sage requests pass through text redaction

Consent decides whether a Sage request runs at all. What is inside it when it does is the other half of the protection.

Before a Sage text request leaves Grove for Anthropic, Grove replaces known coach and client names with neutral placeholders. Email addresses, phone numbers, and internal account identifiers are redacted too. What the model receives can read less like “Sarah skipped her Tuesday walk after her mother’s surgery” and more like someone, unnamed, with that same pattern of weeks and habits and setbacks.

There is a limit: Grove replaces the names it knows, and detects email addresses and phone numbers in free text, but it does not scan that text for other names. Other identifying details can remain. Redaction reduces what is shared; it does not make every piece of coaching content anonymous.

The placeholders are not the AI’s invention, and undoing them is not the AI’s job. After the model answers, Grove puts the real names back mechanically, by direct substitution, in our own code. Names represented by those placeholders are restored by Grove. This does not remove the limits of redaction: a name that was not recognized in the original text can still reach the model.

Be honest about what the AI does see

A privacy claim is only worth something if it is precise about its own edges. Stripping the identifiers is not the same as sending nothing, and it would be a different kind of dishonest to let you think the model works in the dark.

Sage does see the substance of the coaching after these text redaction controls have been applied. The shape of someone’s check-ins, the habit that keeps slipping, the reflection they wrote, the measurements they logged, the rhythm of a streak that broke. That has to be true for the help to be real. A tool that saw nothing could tell you nothing. The point is not that the model works blind. The aim is to share less identifying information while preserving useful coaching context. It is not a guarantee that the remaining content cannot identify someone.

So the comparison is not “Grove uses AI” versus “this coach is careful.” A careful coach can leave the client’s name out of the paste, and the conscientious ones do. Two things are harder to strip by hand. The first is yourself. You are logged in, so the provider knows which coach is asking, and a record builds under your account across every session you run, nameless clients and all. The second is consistency, because the name has to come out perfectly every time, on the rushed Tuesday as reliably as the slow one, and people are not perfect at that. Grove applies its text redaction controls to Sage requests by default, so that step does not depend on anyone remembering. Coaches still need to be thoughtful about names and sensitive details they write in free text.

Voice memos take a different path

The text controls above describe Sage. When a coach or client sends a voice memo, Grove stores the recording in AWS S3 and sends the actual audio to OpenAI for transcription. That includes the speaker’s voice, any names spoken aloud, and any sensitive details in the recording. The audio is not de-identified before transcription.

Voice memos require recording consent from the person who records them: the practice for a coach’s memos, the client for their own, separately from Sage AI consent. Turning off Sage does not turn off voice-memo transcription; typed messages are an alternative. Voice-memo transcripts are kept with the message and are not supplied to Sage. A typed caption may still be used as Sage message context under its existing consent and text redaction controls.

Grove keeps voice audio for 90 days after the message is sent, then deletes the recording. The transcript remains with the message. See the Privacy Policy for retention and deletion details. Grove does not use coaching content, voice audio, or transcripts to train AI models or permit its AI providers to do so.

The wedge underneath this

There is a smaller idea hiding inside the privacy one, and it is the part I care about most. The reason this is even possible is that Grove treats the AI as a tool inside a system a person controls, not as the place the relationship lives. The coach stays the one who knows Sarah. The software carries the draining parts, the remembering and the drafting and the pattern-spotting, and it applies text redaction to reduce the identifying details shared for that work. The judgment, the name, the relationship, the decision about what to actually say, those stay with the human who has the duty of care.

The coach who told me about Facebook was not anti-AI. She wanted the help. What she did not want was to look back in twenty years and find she had given a system access to her clients that none of them understood they were granting.

That is the right thing to want. The work was making sure she would never have to choose between the leverage and the promise she made to keep what her clients tell her.