Privacy Policy

Effective [EFFECTIVE DATE]

Chickadee is a private journal for your family. What you write stays private until you say so, and there’s no public feed. This policy explains what we collect, why, who helps us run the service, and what you can do about it.

“Chickadee,” “we,” “us” and “our” mean Chickadee Software LLC, an Ohio limited liability company. This policy covers the Chickadee iPhone app, our website at chickadeeapp.co, and app.chickadeeapp.co (together, the “Service”). If you have a question, email [email protected].

The short version

• We collect what you put into Chickadee, plus what we need to run your account and keep the app working.
• You decide who sees each post: just you, your household, or your Circle. Nothing is public.
• We don’t sell your information. We don’t show ads. There are no advertising or tracking tools in the app, and no third-party product analytics.
• We don’t use your posts, photos or voice notes to train AI.
• You can download a copy of your journal, free, at any time. You can delete your account from inside the app.

What we collect

Your account

• Your email address and password. Passwords are stored hashed by our authentication provider; we can’t read them.
• Your name, and the choices you make while setting up, such as the topics you’re interested in.
• Your settings, such as notification preferences and which tips you’ve seen.

The people you write about

To make prompts fit your family, you can add people to Chickadee, such as your children, a partner, or a pregnancy. For each, you might add a name or nickname, their relationship to you, a birthday or due date, and a profile photo. This information comes from you, not from them. Please only add what you’re comfortable keeping here.

What you post

• Posts: what you write, quotes, lists, moods, tags, who a post is about, the date, and celebrations such as firsts and big days.
• Photos: we save a resized copy (up to 2048 pixels on the longest side) and a small thumbnail, not the original camera file. We read the date a photo was taken so your post lands on the right day.
• Videos: short clips (Premium), compressed before upload, with a still frame.
• Voice notes: audio you record in the app.
• Measurements: things like height, weight, head size and teeth, if you log them.
• Other things you create: answers to prompts and prompts you skip or snooze, your own custom prompts, prompts you ask your partner to answer (and any note you add), reactions, books and their settings, and any feedback you give us on prompts.

Subscriptions

If you start a trial or subscribe, Apple handles the payment. We never see your card details. We receive a record of the purchase from Apple through RevenueCat: the plan, the price, whether it was a trial or offer, renewals, cancellations and refunds. We also record, inside the app, when a Premium offer is shown or tapped, so we can tell which offers are useful. Those records never include your posts, names or photos.

Device and diagnostic information

• Crash reports: when the app crashes or hits an error, it sends a report to Sentry. A report includes technical details such as your device model, iOS version, app version and what the app was doing, and it’s tied to your account by an internal ID number. We’ve set it up not to send your IP address, your email, screenshots, or anything you wrote.
• Push notifications: if you allow notifications, we store a push token for your phone so we can tell you when someone in your household or Circle posts, reacts or joins. You can turn each kind off in the app.
• Server logs: like most online services, our providers keep logs of requests to our servers, which can include your IP address and the time of sign-ins. We use these for security and to investigate problems.

Reports and support

If you report a post or a person, we keep the report, who filed it, and what it was about. If you email us, we keep the conversation.

Our website and waitlist

If you join the waitlist at chickadeeapp.co, we collect your email address, whether you’d like early access or just an email at launch, and, if you choose to tell us, your stage of life (for example, expecting, a baby, kids, or a grandparent). We also note which topic and version of the page you came in on, and where you came from (the referring site or campaign link). We use this to send you early access or launch news and to learn which messages resonate. We don’t use cookies to do this. Our website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts visits without cookies and without tracking you across sites.

What we don’t collect

The app doesn’t ask for your location or your contacts, and doesn’t use photo location data. It has no advertising SDKs and doesn’t track you across other companies’ apps or websites.

Where your information lives

Chickadee is built to work offline. Your journal is kept in a database on your iPhone and synced to our servers when you’re connected. Photos, videos and voice notes are stored in private cloud storage, and the app fetches them through short-lived links that only work for people allowed to see that post. Information on your phone may also be included in your phone’s own backups, which you control.

When you sign out or delete your account, the app clears your journal, cached photos and other account data from that phone.

How we use your information

• To run Chickadee: store and sync your journal, show it to the people you’ve chosen, build prompts and books, and send the notifications you’ve turned on.
• To manage your account and subscription, and to answer you when you contact us.
• To keep the Service working and safe: fix crashes, prevent abuse, investigate reports, and enforce our Terms of Use.
• To understand, in aggregate, how Premium offers perform.
• To send waitlist and launch emails, if you signed up. You can unsubscribe from any of them.
• To meet legal obligations.

We don’t read your journal to market to you, and we don’t look at your content except when you ask for help with it, when it’s been reported to us, when we need to keep the Service secure or working, or when the law requires it.

Who can see what you post

Each post has its own setting, and you can change it later:

• Just me: only you.
• Household: you and the partner you share your household with.
• Circle: your household plus the households you’ve connected with by invite, such as grandparents or close friends.

Your name, and the people a post mentions, are visible to whoever can see that post. Reactions are visible to the people who can see the post. If you share a post outside Chickadee using your phone’s share sheet, it leaves Chickadee and we can’t control what happens to it. People who can see your posts could also save or screenshot them, so please share with people you trust.

If you leave a household or remove someone from your Circle, they stop seeing your posts the next time their app syncs. A copy they saved to their own phone is outside our reach.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell or rent your personal information, and we don’t share it for advertising. We share it only in these ways:

Service providers

These companies process information for us, under contract, to run the Service:

• Supabase: our database, sign-in, file storage and server functions. Holds your account and journal.
• PowerSync: syncs your journal between our database and your phone.
• Expo: delivers push notifications to your phone (through Apple’s push service) and delivers app updates.
• RevenueCat: manages subscriptions and trials alongside Apple. It receives your internal account ID and your App Store purchase records.
• Sentry: crash and error reporting, as described above.
• Apple: App Store payments and push notification delivery.
• Cloudflare: hosts our website and app.chickadeeapp.co, and provides cookieless website analytics.
• Google Workspace: our email, including support conversations.
• Our email provider: sends waitlist and launch emails. We may change this provider over time.

Legal reasons and safety

We may preserve or disclose information if we believe in good faith it’s needed to comply with the law or a valid legal request, to protect someone’s safety, or to protect the rights of Chickadee or others. In particular, if we become aware of apparent child sexual abuse material, we are required by U.S. law to report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and we will preserve the related account and content as the law requires, even if the account holder asks us to delete it.

If the business changes hands

If Chickadee is involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of it. This policy, or one at least as protective, would continue to apply, and we’d tell you before it changed.

How long we keep it

• Your journal stays as long as your account does, or until you delete it.
• When you delete a post, it’s removed from our database, and its photos, videos and voice notes are queued and removed from storage shortly after.
• When you delete your account, see the next section.
• Crash reports and server logs are kept for a limited time by our providers, then deleted.
• Purchase records are kept for our financial records, but are disconnected from your account when you delete it.
• Reports about posts or people may be kept after the post or account is gone, so we can deal with repeat abuse.
• Waitlist information is kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, or until we no longer need it.

Downloading and deleting your data

Download: in the app, go to Account, then Your data, to make a copy of your household’s journal: every post, photo, video and voice note, plus a page you can open or print on any computer. It’s free. Photos come at the quality they were saved in Chickadee. Posts other families shared with your Circle are theirs, so they aren’t included.

Delete: in the app, go to Account and choose Delete account. This permanently deletes your account and everything you added: your posts, photos, videos, voice notes and reactions. It happens right away and can’t be undone. If you share a household with a partner, they keep the family’s shared records (such as your kids’ profiles and milestones) and their own posts. If you were alone in your household, the household and its Circle connections end too.

Deleting your account doesn’t cancel a subscription, because Apple bills it. Cancel it in your Apple ID settings first.

Copies may remain for a short time in our providers’ backups before they’re overwritten. We may also keep information where the law requires it, including content preserved for a child-safety report. You can also email us to ask for deletion.

Your rights and choices

• See and change: you can view and edit your posts, people and settings in the app at any time.
• Who sees it: change any post to Just me, Household or Circle.
• Notifications: turn push notifications off in the app or in iOS Settings.
• Emails: unsubscribe from any marketing email using the link in it.
• Copy and delete: as described above.

Depending on where you live, you may have further rights. Email [email protected] to use them. We may need to confirm it’s you first, and we’ll respond within the time the law allows. We won’t treat you differently for using your rights.

California residents

If you live in California, you have the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose; to get a copy of it; to correct it; and to ask us to delete it. We collect the categories described above: identifiers (such as your email and an account ID), the content you post (which may include photos, audio and information about your family), purchase records, and device and diagnostic information. We collect them from you and your device, for the purposes described above, and share them only with the service providers listed. We don’t sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we haven’t done so in the past 12 months. We don’t use sensitive personal information to infer characteristics about you. You may use an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf.

EEA, UK and Switzerland

If you live in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, Chickadee Software LLC is the controller of your personal information. We rely on these legal bases: to perform our contract with you (running your account and the Service); our legitimate interests (keeping the Service secure, fixing problems, and understanding how offers perform, balanced against your rights); your consent (push notifications and waitlist emails, which you can withdraw at any time); and legal obligations. You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to our use of your information, and to receive it in a portable format. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.

International transfers

Chickadee is based in the United States, and our providers may process information in the United States and other countries whose data protection laws may differ from yours. Where the law requires, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as standard contractual clauses, for these transfers.

Children

Chickadee is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account. Children don’t use Chickadee and can’t have accounts. The Service isn’t directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them.

Parents and family members use Chickadee to write about their children. That information, such as a child’s name, birthday, photos and milestones, is provided by the adult, about their own family, and is kept private to the audience that adult chooses. If you believe a child has created an account or given us information directly, email [email protected] and we’ll delete it.

Security

We work to protect your information. Traffic between the app and our servers travels over HTTPS (encrypted in transit). Our database and storage providers encrypt stored data at rest. Media files are kept in private storage and served only through short-lived links, and database rules check who is allowed to see each post. On your phone, your sign-in session is kept in the iOS Keychain.

Chickadee is not end-to-end encrypted, which means our systems can technically access your content. We limit that access to the purposes in this policy. No system is perfectly secure, so we can’t guarantee absolute security. If we learn of a breach that affects you, we’ll tell you as the law requires.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this policy as Chickadee changes. We’ll post the new version here with a new effective date, and if a change is significant, we’ll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact us

Chickadee Software LLC, Ohio, United States

Email: [email protected]