Privacy Policy

• We collect only what the app needs to work: your account info (name, email, profile photo) and the content you choose to share with your family (messages, ideas, votes, mood board items and photos).
• We do not run ads, sell data, or use analytics or tracking cookies.
• Your content is shared with the members of your family group — not with the public.
• Everything is stored on Google Firebase (Google Cloud).
• To delete your account or data, contact us at hello@kinhearth.co — self-serve deletion isn’t built yet.

Account information. When you sign up or sign in — with Google or with an email address and password — we store your email address, display name and profile photo (if you have one). If you sign in with Google, we receive these from your Google account; we do not receive your Google password or anything else from your Google account.

Content you share. Kin Hearth stores the things you post so your family can see them: chat messages, reunion ideas and your votes on them, mood board items (notes, links and images you upload), and reunion details created by family organizers. As photo albums, posts and comments launch, those will be stored too. Content you post is labeled with your name and profile photo so your family knows who shared it.

Invitations. When a family organizer invites someone, we store the invited person’s email address so we can connect them to the right family when they sign in. We do not send emails to that address — the organizer shares the invite themselves.

What we don’t collect. We do not ask for your phone number, birth date or home address. We use no analytics services, advertising trackers or error-tracking tools, and we do not log your browsing behavior.

Kin Hearth sets one cookie, which remembers that you entered the private-beta access password. It contains no personal information, is not used for tracking, and expires after 30 days. Your browser also stores a few things locally on your device: your theme preference, your most recently viewed family, and your sign-in session (managed by Firebase Authentication). There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

Your family group. Members of a family group can see each other’s names, profile photos and email addresses in the family directory, along with all content shared in that family — messages, ideas, votes (including who voted), mood board items and reunion details.

Not the public. Kin Hearth content is not visible to the general public or to search engines, and during the beta the whole site sits behind a private access password.

A beta limitation you should know about. Text content (messages, ideas, posts) is strictly limited to your family group. Uploaded image files are stored at unguessable addresses and are not listed or linked anywhere outside your family, but during the beta the underlying storage permissions are broader than we want: a signed-in Kin Hearth user outside your family who somehow obtained a file’s exact address could open it. We are working on tightening this so files are enforced as family-only at the storage level. Also, as with most photo services, if someone with access shares an image’s direct download link outside the app, anyone with that link can view the image.

No selling, no ads. We never sell your information or share it with advertisers or data brokers.

Kin Hearth runs entirely on Google Firebase / Google Cloud, which stores and processes data on our behalf: Firebase Authentication (sign-in), Cloud Firestore (profiles and content), Cloud Storage for Firebase (uploaded images) and Firebase App Hosting (serving the website). Data is stored in Google Cloud data centers in the United States (us-central1, Iowa). Google processes this data under its own privacy and security commitments (firebase.google.com/support/privacy). If you sign in with Google, your Google profile photo is loaded directly from Google’s servers. We use no other third-party services.

Kin Hearth is a family app, and family content naturally includes children — their names and, once photo features launch, their photos, shared by their adult relatives. Accounts, however, are for adults and teens: you must be at least 13 years old (16 in some regions) to create a Kin Hearth account.

If you share content about a child, please make sure you have the OK of their parent or guardian. If you are a parent or guardian and want content about your child removed, contact us at hello@kinhearth.co and we will take it down.

Editing and deleting content. You can delete your own chat messages, ideas, mood board items and posts at any time. Family admins can also remove content and members from their family group.

Deleting your account. Self-serve account deletion is not built yet. Email us at hello@kinhearth.co and we will delete your account, your profile and the content you authored. Some things you shared may persist in context — for example, a message quoted by someone else — and copies may remain in backups for a limited time before being purged.

Getting a copy of your data. Email us at hello@kinhearth.co and we will send you a copy of the personal data we hold about you.

Depending on where you live (for example the EU/UK under GDPR or California under the CCPA), you may have additional legal rights to access, correct, delete or port your data, and to object to certain processing. You can exercise any of these by contacting us; we do not sell personal information as defined by the CCPA.

We keep your account information and content for as long as your account exists or until you ask us to delete it. Content you delete in the app is removed from the live database right away.

Access to content is controlled by per-family permission rules, all traffic is encrypted in transit (HTTPS), and data is encrypted at rest by Google Cloud. The beta password gate adds an extra layer while we’re in private beta. No system is perfectly secure, though — please use a strong, unique password, and tell us right away at hello@kinhearth.co if you spot something that looks wrong.

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top and, for significant changes, let families know in the app. During the beta the app is evolving quickly, so expect this policy to be updated as features (like photo albums) launch.

Questions, requests or concerns: hello@kinhearth.co