Last updated: December 2024
Introduction
Aletheias.ai Inc. ("Aletheias," "we," "our," or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy while building the most powerful veterinary radiology AI in the world. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you use our service.
Our Core Philosophy: Collective Intelligence
This is important, so we're putting it front and center: Every image analyzed by Aletheias contributes to making our AI smarter. This isn't a side effect—it's the entire point.
When you use Aletheias, you're not just getting a second opinion on your radiographs. You're joining a community of veterinarians who are collectively building something more powerful than any single practice could achieve alone. Every case you submit helps the system learn. Every finding detected makes the next detection more accurate.
This is how AI works. This is why Aletheias has value. When you join, you benefit from everyone who came before you, and you make the system smarter for everyone who comes after.
If this model doesn't work for you, Aletheias isn't the right fit. We believe transparency about this is more important than trying to be everything to everyone.
Information We Collect
Account Information
When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, practice name, and billing information.
Medical Images & Analysis Data
We process veterinary radiographs and associated metadata to provide our AI analysis service. By using Aletheias, you agree that these images will be used to train and improve our AI models.
Usage Data
We collect information about how you interact with our service, including features used and analysis requests.
How We Use Medical Images
Let's be crystal clear about what happens with your images:
- Immediate analysis: Your images are analyzed by our AI to provide you with findings and insights
- AI training: After personally identifiable information (PII) is removed, the anonymized image data and associated findings are used to train and improve our models
- What we learn: Generic diagnostic patterns—"this image shows a fracture in this location"—not "Fluffy the cat belongs to Jane Smith"
The AI only ever trains on cleaned, anonymized data. Patient names, owner information, and practice-specific identifiers are stripped before any training occurs.
How We Protect Your Data
We take data protection seriously:
- Isolation: Your practice's data is isolated from other customers' data. When we store data that may contain PII, it exists in a segregated environment accessible only to your practice
- PII stripping: Before any data enters our training pipeline, all personally identifiable information is removed
- No data sharing: We never share your practice's identifiable data with other customers, third parties, or anyone else
- Access controls: Strict role-based access ensures only authorized personnel can access your data
A Note on DICOM & Data in Transit
We believe in transparency, even when it's uncomfortable: DICOM, the standard protocol used to transmit medical images, has no built-in encryption. This isn't our choice—it's an industry-wide limitation that dates back to when the protocol was designed.
Here's the reality: you already use DICOM today to communicate with your PACS system. We're not introducing new security vulnerabilities—these limitations already exist in your current workflow. We work within the same standards your existing systems use.
For practices that require encrypted transmission, we offer VPN-based connectivity as an add-on service. This provides a secure tunnel for all traffic but comes with additional monthly costs.
We'd love to see the veterinary imaging industry adopt more modern security standards, but we don't control the PACS ecosystem—we just work within it. Until the industry evolves, we're committed to being honest about these limitations rather than pretending they don't exist.
What We Never Share
To be explicit, the following is never shared, sold, or accessible to anyone outside your practice:
- Patient names or owner information
- Your practice name or location (in connection with specific cases)
- Any data that could identify a specific animal or client
- Your billing or financial information
- Raw, unprocessed images with embedded metadata
Data Retention & How AI Learning Works
We retain your account information for as long as your account is active.
Here's the honest truth about your images: We keep them. Not temporarily—indefinitely. Here's why this matters and why it's actually in your interest.
AI isn't a "train once and done" technology. Our models continuously improve through a process of applying different "weights"—mathematical parameters that determine how the AI interprets patterns. When we develop improvements to our models, we need the original training data to test whether new weights produce better results than the old ones.
Think of it like this: You remember the movie Die Hard, right? You don't have a pixel-by-pixel copy stored in your brain, but if someone says "Yippee-ki-yay," you know exactly how that sentence ends. The AI works similarly—it learns patterns, not individual images. But unlike your brain, we can "re-watch the movie" with fresh eyes by retraining the model with adjusted weights, finding new patterns we missed before.
This means your anonymized images become part of a living, evolving system. When you submit a case, you're not just getting today's analysis—you're contributing to every future improvement. The case that helps us catch a subtle pattern in 2026 might be one you submitted in 2025.
We're sharing all of this because we believe in being crystal clear about how your data is used and retained. When you use Aletheias, you're not just a customer—you become part of the AI's collective intelligence. That's a different relationship than most software, and you deserve to understand it fully.
Your Rights
You have the right to access, correct, or delete your personal account information. You can request a copy of your data or close your account at any time. Note that anonymized data that has already been incorporated into our AI models cannot be extracted or deleted, as it no longer contains any identifiable information.
Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at:
privacy@aletheias.ai