Privacy policy

Last updated: May 16, 2026

This Privacy Policy describes how Best Friend Bioscience, Inc. and its affiliates (collectively, “Best Friend”, "we", "us", or "our") and/or http://store.bestfriend.bio and http://labs.bestfriend.bio (the "Site") collects, uses, and discloses “Data” (“Data”, and all other capitalized terms herein which are not defined herein, are defined in our “Terms of Service” which can be found on our Site and Apps) and your “personal information” when you visit, use our services, or subscribe to or make a purchase from the Site, any downloadable applications we make available to you (“Apps”) or otherwise communicate with us (collectively, the "Service"). For purposes of this Privacy Policy, (i) "you" and "your" means you as the user of the Service, whether you are a customer, website or Apps visitor, an individual communicating with us on behalf of a customer or another individual whose information we have collected pursuant to this Privacy Policy and (ii) “Service” means and includes our “Personalized Pet Nutrition, Functional Blends/Supplements and Treats”, “Pet Analysis”, “Photo Analysis” and “Subscription”. Best Friend and our Service are described in our Terms of Service which can be found on our Site and Apps.

Please read this Privacy Policy carefully. It applies to all of our Service and is incorporated by reference in our Terms of Service which can be found on our Site and Apps. By using and accessing any of the Service, you agree, accept and consent to the collection, use, and disclosure of your information as described in this Privacy Policy. If you do not unconditionally agree to the entirety of this Privacy Policy, you should not use or access or use the Site, Apps or any of the Service.

THIS PRIVACY POLICY DESCRIBES HOW INFORMATION ABOUT YOU AND DATA MAY BE COLLECTED, USED, STORED, MAINTAINED, SHARED, DISCLOSED, PROTECTED, AND ABLE TO ACCESS THIS INFORMATION. THIS PRIVACY POLICY FURTHER DESCRIBES OUR POLICIES ON OUR CUSTOMERS’ PERSONAL INFORMATION, PERSONAL DATA, PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION, SELF-REPORTED INFORMATION, PROTECTED HEALTH INFORMATION, AND SENSITIVE INFORMATION AS WELL AS ANY OF THE FOREGOING OF PERSONS WHO MAY COMMUNICATE WITH US ON BEHALF OF ONE OR MORE OF OUR CUSTOMERS. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time, including to reflect changes to our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We will post the revised Privacy Policy on the Site and Apps, update the "Last updated" date and take any other steps required by applicable law.

How We Collect and Use Data and Your Personal Information

To provide the Service, we collect and have collected over the past 12 months Data and personal information about you from a variety of sources, as set out below. The information that we collect and use varies depending on how you interact with us and can include:

information you provide directly to us, including, “Data” (defined in our Terms of Service) and other data, your pet’s medical information and history, information in response to our questionnaires, self-reported information; information we receive from our partner services; information, and Data and other data we retain in order to improve our data analytics methods and artificial intelligence engine and our Service; information, and Data and other data you provide us for the purpose of providing customer services; information, and Data and other data we retain for provisioning our Service and securing payments for same; information we collected through tracking technology, chatbot, web analytics, and other types of information, and Data and other data we receive about you or your pet from third party sources. In addition to the foregoing, we may collect information from you and third-party sources as well as tracking activity by telephone, mobile device or other means of communication.

In addition to the specific uses set out below, we may use information we collect about you to communicate with you, provide the Service, comply with any applicable legal obligations, enforce any applicable terms of service, including our Terms of Service, and to protect or defend the Service, our rights, and the rights of our users or others.

What Personal Information We Collect

The types of personal information we obtain about you depends on how you interact with our Site and Apps and use our Service. When we use the term "personal information", we are referring to information that identifies, relates to, describes or can be associated with you. To avoid confusion, we own all “De-Identified Data” (defined below) and all “Aggregate Data” (defined below) and they are not your personal information. The following sections describe the categories and specific types of personal information we collect.

Information We Collect Directly from You

Information that you directly submit to us through our Service may include:

Basic contact details, including your name, address, phone number, email.
Order information, including your name, billing address, shipping address, payment confirmation, email address, phone number.
Account information, including your username, password, security questions.
Shopping information, including the items you view, put in your cart or add to your wish list.
Customer support information, including the information you choose to include in communications with us, for example, when sending a message through the Service.
Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records, including PDF, image or scanned files containing veterinary, shelter, rescue, breeder, boarding, training or other animal-care records relating to your pet that you upload or transmit to the Service, and the structured clinical data fields (visit summaries, diagnoses, vaccinations, medications, procedures, dental records, laboratory results, weight and vital-sign history, treating-veterinarian and clinic identifiers and other comparable fields) that we extract from those documents and store in your BFB account. “Veterinary Documents”, “Clinical Records” and “AI Sub-Processors” are defined in our Terms of Service.

Some features of the Service may require you to directly provide us with certain information about you. You may elect not to provide this information, but doing so may prevent you from using or accessing these features.

BFB does not request, collect or retain any information about a human individual’s health status, provision of health care or payment for health care that constitutes “Protected Health Information” under the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, as amended (“HIPAA”). HIPAA does not apply to information about animals, and your pet’s veterinary and shelter information (including Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records as defined in our Terms of Service) is not HIPAA Protected Health Information. We collect and process your pet’s veterinary and shelter information under this Privacy Policy and Section 4A of our Terms of Service, with your authorization, and we treat such information with appropriate security and confidentiality safeguards.

Information We Collect through Cookies

We also automatically collect certain information about your interaction with the Service ("Usage Data"). To do this, we may use cookies, pixels and similar technologies ("Cookies") as well as collect information from telephone calls. Usage Data may include information about how you access and use our Site, Apps or Service and your account, including device information, browser information, information about your network connection, your IP address and other information regarding your interaction with our Site, Apps or Service.

Information We Obtain from Third Parties

Finally, we may obtain information about you from third parties, including from “Pet Professionals”, vendors and service providers who may collect information directly from you or on our behalf, such as:

Companies who support our Site, Apps and Service, such as Shopify and Stripe.
Our payment processors, including Shopify (for physical product orders) and Stripe (for digital service transactions such as plan subscriptions and credit purchases), who collect payment information (e.g., bank account, credit or debit card information, billing address) to process your payment in order to fulfill your orders and provide you with products or services you have requested, in order to perform our contract with you.
Our AI Sub-Processors, including Anthropic, PBC, which we engage on a zero-data-retention, no-model-training basis for the limited and specific purpose of extracting Clinical Records and other Reported Information from Veterinary Documents you upload. Anthropic returns the extracted fields to us, does not retain the Veterinary Document or extracted output beyond the period necessary to return a response, and is contractually prohibited from using your inputs or outputs to train any general-purpose model.
When you visit our Site or Apps or are otherwise using our Service, open or click on emails we send you, or interact with our Site, Apps, Service or advertisements, we, or third parties we work with, may automatically collect certain information using online tracking technologies such as pixels, web beacons, software developer kits, third-party libraries, and cookies.
Your Pet Professionals and other Pet Professionals.

Any information about you we obtain from third parties will be treated in accordance with this Privacy Policy. We are not responsible or liable for the accuracy of the information provided to us by third parties and are not responsible for any third party's policies or practices. For more information, see the section below, Third Party Websites and Links.

How We Use Your Personal Information

Providing Products and Services. We use your personal information to provide you with the Service in order to perform our contract with you, including to process your payments, fulfill your orders, to send notifications to you related to your account, purchases, returns, exchanges or other transactions, to create, maintain and otherwise manage your account, to arrange for shipping, facilitate any returns and exchanges and to enable you to post reviews.
Marketing and Advertising. We use your personal information for marketing and promotional purposes, such as to send marketing, advertising and promotional communications and to show you advertisements for products or services. Marketing and promotional communications by email, in-app or web push notification or SMS text message are sent only on the channels you have affirmatively opted in to through your account notification preferences, and you may change or withdraw your opt-ins at any time. We may also use postal mail, and we may use your personal information to better tailor the Service and advertising on our Site, Apps and other websites, consistent with applicable law.
Security and Fraud Prevention. We use your personal information to detect, investigate or take action regarding possible fraudulent, illegal or malicious activity. If you choose to use the Service and register an account, you are responsible for keeping your account credentials safe. We highly recommend that you do not share your username, password, or other access details with anyone else. If you believe your account has been compromised, please contact us immediately.
Communicating with you. We use your personal information to provide you with customer support and improve our Service. This is in our legitimate interest in order to be responsive to you, to provide effective services to you, and to maintain our business relationship with you.
Processing Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records. We use the Veterinary Documents you upload and the Clinical Records extracted from them to populate your pet’s clinical history in your BFB account, to generate personalized summaries, insights and reminders, and on a de-identified and aggregated basis to conduct or support research and analysis as described in our Terms of Service.

Cookies

Like many websites, we use Cookies on our Site and Apps. For specific information about the Cookies that we use related to powering our store with Shopify, see https://www.shopify.com/legal/cookies. For information about Cookies used by Stripe in connection with payment processing for our digital services, see https://stripe.com/legal/cookies-policy. We use Cookies to power and improve our Site, Apps and our Service (including to remember your actions and preferences), to run analytics and better understand user interaction with the Service (in our legitimate interests to administer, improve and optimize the Service). We may also permit third parties and services providers to use Cookies on our Site and Apps to better tailor the services, products and advertising on our Site, Apps and other websites.

Most browsers automatically accept Cookies by default, but you can choose to set your browser to remove or reject Cookies through your browser controls. Please keep in mind that removing or blocking Cookies can negatively impact your user experience and may cause some of the Service, including certain features and general functionality, to work incorrectly or no longer be available. Additionally, blocking Cookies may not completely prevent how we share information with third parties such as our advertising partners.

How We Disclose Personal Information

In certain circumstances, we may disclose your personal information to third parties for legitimate purposes subject to this Privacy Policy. Such circumstances may include:

With vendors or other third parties who perform services on our behalf (e.g., IT management, payment processing, data analytics, customer support, cloud storage, fulfillment, and shipping).
With business and marketing partners, including Shopify and Stripe, to provide services and advertise to you. Our business and marketing partners will use your information in accordance with their own privacy notices.
With our AI Sub-Processors (currently Anthropic, PBC), solely to extract Clinical Records from Veterinary Documents you upload, on a zero-data-retention, no-model-training basis under contractual data-protection obligations.
When you direct, request us or otherwise consent to our disclosure of certain information to third parties, such as to ship you products or through your use of social media widgets or login integrations, with your consent.
With our affiliates or otherwise within our corporate group, in our legitimate interests to run a successful business.
In connection with a business transaction such as a merger or bankruptcy, to comply with any applicable legal obligations (including to respond to subpoenas, search warrants and similar requests), to enforce any applicable terms of service, and to protect or defend the Service, our rights, and the rights of our users or others.
We have, in the past 12 months[d] disclosed the following categories of personal information and sensitive personal information (denoted by *) about users for the purposes set out above in "How we Collect and Use your Personal Information" and "How we Disclose Personal Information":

Categories of Recipients

Vendors and third parties who perform services on our behalf (such as Internet service providers, payment processors, fulfillment partners, customer support partners and data analytics providers)
Business and marketing partners
Affiliates

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for the purposes of inferring characteristics about you.

User Generated Content

The Service may enable you to post product reviews and other user-generated content. If you choose to submit user generated content to any public area of the Service, this content will be public and accessible by anyone.

We do not control who will have access to the information that you choose to make available to others and cannot ensure that parties who have access to such information will respect your privacy or keep it secure. We are not responsible for the privacy or security of any information that you make publicly available, or for the accuracy, use or misuse of any information that you disclose or receive from third parties.

Third- Party Websites and Links

Our Site and Apps may provide links to websites or other online platforms operated by third parties. If you follow links to sites not affiliated or controlled by us, you should review their privacy and security policies and other terms and conditions. We do not guarantee and are not responsible for the privacy or security of such sites, including the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of information found on these sites. Information you provide on public or semi-public venues, including information you share on third-party social networking platforms may also be viewable by other users of the Service and/or users of those third-party platforms without limitation as to its use by us or by a third party. Our inclusion of such links does not, by itself, imply any endorsement of the content on such platforms or of their owners or operators, except as disclosed on the Service.

Children’s Data

The Service is not intended to be used by children, and we do not knowingly collect any personal information about children. If you are the parent or guardian of a child who has provided us with their personal information, you may contact us using the contact details set out below to request that it be deleted.

As of the Effective Date of this Privacy Policy, we do not have actual knowledge that we “share” or “sell” (as those terms are defined in applicable law) personal information of individuals under 18 years of age.

Security and Retention of Your Information

Please be aware that no security measures are perfect or impenetrable, and we cannot guarantee “perfect security”. In addition, any information you send to us may not be secure while in transit. We recommend that you do not use insecure channels to communicate sensitive or confidential information to us.

How long we retain your personal information depends on different factors, such as whether we need the information to maintain your account, to provide the Service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes or enforce other applicable contracts and policies.

Data Deletion Request

You may request your personal information be removed by sending your name and email to legal@bestfriend.bio with subject of “Data Deletion Request”. After we verify your information, we will process your request within 5 business days.

Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the rights listed below in relation to your personal information. However, these rights are not absolute, may apply only in certain circumstances and, in certain cases, we may decline your request as permitted by law.

Right to Access / Know. You may have a right to request access to personal information that we hold about you, including details relating to the ways in which we use and share your information.
Right to Delete. You may have a right to request that we delete personal information we maintain about you. You may also at any time delete individual Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records, and export a copy of the Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records associated with your pets, through features provided in the Service.
Right to Correct. You may have a right to request that we correct inaccurate personal information we maintain about you.
Right of Portability. You may have a right to receive a copy of the personal information we hold about you and to request that we transfer it to a third party, in certain circumstances and with certain exceptions.
Right to Opt out of Sale or Sharing or Targeted Advertising. You may have a right to direct us not to "sell" or "share" your personal information or to opt out of the processing of your personal information for purposes considered to be "targeted advertising", as defined in applicable privacy laws. Please note that if you visit our Site with the Global Privacy Control opt-out preference signal enabled, depending on where you are, we will automatically treat this as a request to opt-out of the "sale" or "sharing" of information for the device and browser that you use to visit the Site.
Right to Limit and/or Opt out of Use and Disclosure of Sensitive Personal Information. You may have a right to direct us to limit our use and/or disclosure of sensitive personal information to only what is necessary to perform the Service or provide the goods reasonably expected by an average individual.
Restriction of Processing: You may have the right to ask us to stop or restrict our processing of personal information.
Withdrawal of Consent: Where we rely on consent to process your personal information, you may have the right to withdraw this consent.
Appeal: You may have a right to appeal our decision if we decline to process your request. You can do so by replying directly to our denial.
Managing Communication Preferences. BFB sends two categories of communications: (1) Required transactional communications, which we send by email about your account, security, orders, shipping and the operation of the Service. These are required to provide the Service to you and cannot be turned off while you maintain a BFB account. (2) Optional communications, which include marketing emails, newsletters, promotional offers, product recommendations, health and care reminders, weight-goal alerts, sample and report status reminders, community alerts, birthday alerts and news articles. Optional communications are sent only on the channels you have affirmatively selected in the notification-preferences section of your account settings; available channels are email, in-app or web push notification and, where you have provided a valid U.S. mobile telephone number, SMS text message. You may change or withdraw any of these channel-level opt-ins at any time through your account settings, by clicking the unsubscribe link in any promotional email or, for SMS, by replying STOP to any text message from BFB. Replying HELP to an SMS message will return help information. Message and data rates may apply for SMS, and message frequency varies based on the notification types you have enabled and your activity in the Service. Opting out of marketing or SMS does not affect your continued receipt of the required transactional emails described above.

You may exercise any of these rights where indicated on our Site or Apps or by contacting us using the contact details provided below.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights. We may need to collect information from you to verify your identity, such as your email address or account information, before providing a substantive response to the request. In accordance with applicable laws, You may designate an authorized agent to make requests on your behalf to exercise your rights. Before accepting such a request from an agent, we will require that the agent provide proof you have authorized them to act on your behalf, and we may need you to verify your identity directly with us. We will respond to your request in a timely manner as required under applicable law.

We use Shopify's ad services such as Shopify Audiences to help personalize the advertising you see on third party websites. To restrict Shopify merchants that use these ad services from using your personal information for such services, visit https://privacy.shopify.com/en.

Regarding Pet Analysis and Data

Our Pet Analysis, which is more fully described in our Terms of Service, including definitions of “Samples”, “Sample Data”, “Test Data”, “Data” and “Aggregated Genetic and Reported Information” and more about our rights and obligations with respect to Data, involves: (i) Sample Data (that is, molecular data created from the Samples you provide for testing and analysis) and includes primary sequencing and other types of analysis including RNA and DNA, microbiome analysis, microbial gene expression analysis, animal gene expression, and animal genotype.

(ii) Test Data (that is, information we extract from Sample Data for use in our Pet Analysis that produce data and test results that help us provide you with accurate and personalized recommendations and Service for your pet).

We remove personal identifiers to you from Samples and related information you provide to us (including information relating to your pet that may be provided to us on your behalf, including by your Pet Professionals and other third parties) (rendering them “De-Identified Data”) immediately upon receipt and assign a unique code for each Sample or data, and perform all downstream testing, research, and data analyses relevant to the Sample or data only using that unique code. Your Sample and Test Data are used with your personal information only to the extent necessary and for the purpose of delivering the Service to you and communicating directly with you when necessary. For all other purposes, including for research and research studies, analysis, improving our Artificial Engine and commercial purposes, we use the De-identified Data.

We retain De-Identified Data as well as “Aggregate Data” (defined below) for all commercial and non-commercial purposes, including publication, sale, data analysis and research, and you agree that you have no rights, and we have no obligation to you, with respect to De-Identified and Aggregate Data, including related to privacy or compensation. “Aggregate Data” means high-level information or data collected from a group of individual Samples or other data combined with similar data of the others and compiled into data collections or summaries such that when evaluated as a whole, that no specific individual may be reasonably identified, and includes Aggregated Genetic and Reported Information. To avoid confusion, we own all De-Identified Data and all Aggregate Data and they are not your personal information.

Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records

The Service allows you to upload veterinary, shelter, rescue and other animal-care documents relating to your pets (“Veterinary Documents”) so that we can extract structured clinical information (“Clinical Records”) and display it back to you through dashboards, summaries and insights in your BFB account. This section describes how we handle Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records and supplements other sections of this Privacy Policy. Capitalized terms used in this section and not defined here have the meanings given in our Terms of Service.

What we collect. Veterinary Documents typically contain information about your pet (such as breed, age, weight, diagnoses, treatments, medications, vaccinations, laboratory results and clinical notes), about you as the pet’s owner (such as name, address, phone number and email), and about the treating veterinarian, clinic, shelter, rescue or other third parties (such as veterinarian and staff names, clinic name, address and phone number). When you upload a Veterinary Document, we receive all such information that is present in the document.

Why we collect it. We use Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records to (i) populate and maintain your pet’s clinical history in your BFB account, (ii) generate personalized summaries, insights, reminders and recommendations for your pet, (iii) operate, secure, audit, debug and improve the Service, and (iv) on a de-identified and aggregated basis, conduct or support research and analysis as described in our Terms of Service.

How we process it. When you upload a Veterinary Document:

The document is stored in our secure cloud storage operated by our infrastructure providers on encrypted-at-rest storage, scoped to your account.
The document is transmitted over an encrypted connection to our AI Sub-Processor (currently Anthropic, PBC) solely for the purpose of extracting Clinical Records. Anthropic does not retain the document or the extracted output beyond the period necessary to return a response and is contractually prohibited from using your inputs or outputs to train any general-purpose model.
The extracted Clinical Records are stored in your BFB account, where you can review, edit, export and delete them.

How we share it. We do not sell, rent, lease, license or otherwise commercialize individually identifiable Clinical Records. We will not disclose your individually identifiable Veterinary Documents or Clinical Records to any third party except:

as you direct or affirmatively opt in (for example, by using a feature in the Service to share with a family member, partner, caregiver, treating veterinarian, shelter, rescue or other recipient you designate);
to our AI Sub-Processors and infrastructure providers solely as necessary to provide the Service to you, in each case under contractual data-protection obligations;
as required by applicable law, court order, subpoena or similar lawful process; and
in connection with a business transaction such as a merger, acquisition or bankruptcy, in which case we will use commercially reasonable efforts to require the successor entity to honor the commitments in this Privacy Policy.

Research and aggregated use. Consistent with our Terms of Service, we may use Clinical Records to create De-Identified Data and Aggregate Data, which we may use for any commercial and non-commercial purpose, including association studies (for example, evaluating relationships between diagnosed conditions and microbiome composition or other biomarkers), product development, publication, sale or sublicense, in each case on a de-identified basis such that no specific individual or pet may be reasonably identified.

Retention and deletion. We retain Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records for as long as your BFB account is active or as needed to provide the Service to you, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements. You may delete individual Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records through the Service, or request deletion of your entire BFB account by following the procedures in “Data Deletion Request” above. Deletion of individually identifiable Clinical Records will not require us to delete De-Identified Data or Aggregate Data already derived from those records.

U.S. state veterinary practice acts. Animal veterinary records are not subject to HIPAA, but several U.S. states regulate the disclosure of veterinary records by veterinarians and their service providers. BFB acts as a data processor for your individually identifiable Veterinary Documents and Clinical Records and does not require any veterinary clinic, shelter or other Pet Professional to disclose records to BFB. By uploading a Veterinary Document to the Service, you (as the pet’s owner) make the disclosure to BFB and authorize the processing described in this Privacy Policy and Section 4A of our Terms of Service.

Complaints

If you have complaints about how we process your personal information, please contact us using the contact details provided below. If you are not satisfied with our response to your complaint, depending on where you live you may have the right to appeal our decision by contacting us using the contact details set out below, or lodge your complaint with your local data protection authority.

International Users

Please review our Terms of Service regarding requirements to access or Site and Apps and to use our Service and note that we may transfer, store and process your personal information outside the country you live in, including the United States. Your personal information is also processed by staff and third-party service providers and partners in these countries.

For transfer of your personal information out of Europe, if applicable, we will rely on recognized transfer mechanisms like the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, or any equivalent contracts issued by the relevant competent authority of the UK, as relevant, unless the data transfer is to a country that has been determined to provide an adequate level of protection.

Contact

Should you have any questions about our privacy practices or this Privacy Policy, or if you would like to exercise any of the rights available to you, please contact us at:

Best Friend Bioscience, Inc.
1887 Main Street, Suite 204
Washougal, WA 98671
Telephone: 1-360-230-8606
Email: legal@bestfriend.bio