Privacy Policy
Effective date: 23 August 2026
Effective date: 23 August 2026
Hearthkin (“we”, “us”) is a private app for a single family or household. This policy explains what we collect, why, and your choices. We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising or cross-app tracking.
Hearthkin is operated by Serhii Malezhyk, an independent sole proprietor based in Poland. For any privacy question or request, contact [email protected].
Account information. When you sign in with Apple, we receive your name and an email address (or Apple’s private relay address). We use this to create your account and identify you to the family members you invite.
Location. With your permission, Hearthkin uses your device location — including in the background — to detect when you arrive at or leave home, or one of the places your family has saved. The matching happens on your device: iOS watches the boundary and tells the app when you cross it. Your position itself never leaves your phone.
To make that work, we store on our servers: a coordinate for your family’s home; a name, coordinate and radius for each place your family chooses to save (a school or a workplace, say); which of those places each member is currently at, if any; and, when a member taps “heading home”, their estimated arrival time. Everyone in your family can see this. We do not store a history of your movements, we do not store the coordinates of anywhere else you go, and we never share any of it outside your family. You can turn location access off at any time in iOS Settings; the presence feature simply stops working.
Your home coordinate and your saved place names are encrypted in our database, so a stolen backup or a leaked copy of the database contains nothing readable. The key belongs to the server, not to your family, so we could decrypt this data if we chose to — we are telling you it is protected against theft of the database, not claiming it is beyond our reach. The server never needs to read it to do its job: it stores the value and hands it back. Your device also never sends coordinates when it reports presence, only whether you are home and which saved place you are at.
You can pause sharing your presence with your family at any time from “Who’s home”. While paused, our server removes your presence before it sends the family’s data to anyone else.
Content you create. Notes, important dates, shopping list items and any photo you attach to one, and any profile photo you upload are stored on our servers and shared with the members of your family so the app can sync across your devices.
Device and push tokens. We store an Apple Push Notification token to deliver real-time updates (presence changes, reminders).
Usage data. Hearthkin records when the app is first installed and each time you open it, along with a random identifier created on your device, your device model, iOS version, and language. This runs on our own servers, with no third-party analytics SDK involved. It is not Apple’s advertising identifier, it is not used for advertising or cross-app tracking, and raw events are deleted after 180 days.
HomeKit. If you enable it, Hearthkin reads the status of your HomeKit accessories on your device to display it. HomeKit data is handled by Apple and is not collected, transmitted to our servers, or shared.
Shopping lists and Anthropic. In Hearthkin 1.4 and earlier, adding an item to a shopping list sent that item’s text and your category names to Anthropic’s API, so the app could suggest which category the item belonged in. Your name, email, and account identifiers were never sent, and Anthropic does not use the data to train its models. Hearthkin 1.5 removed this feature; newer versions send nothing to Anthropic. We will delete this paragraph once the older versions are no longer in use.
Hearthkin runs on a server we rent from DigitalOcean in San Francisco, United States, and stores your data in a MongoDB Atlas database hosted on AWS in Ireland (eu-west-1). Profile photos are stored on Cloudflare R2 and served from our content delivery network (content.hearthkinapp.com). Sign in with Apple, push notifications, and map and geocoding services are provided by Apple. Shopping-list categorisation for Hearthkin 1.4 and earlier is provided by Anthropic.
Your data is stored in Ireland, inside the European Economic Area. It is nonetheless processed outside the EEA: our application server sits in the United States, so your data passes through it whenever you use the app. Apple also processes data in the United States, as does Anthropic for the older app versions described above. These transfers are covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, which DigitalOcean, Apple, Cloudflare, and Anthropic each incorporate into their terms.
Your content and presence are visible only to the members of the family you create or join. We share data with the service providers named above (hosting, database, content delivery, push notifications, and shopping-list categorisation for older app versions) strictly to operate the app, and when required by law.
We keep your data while your account is active. You can delete your account at any time from within the app (Settings → Delete Account). This immediately removes your account, your profile photo, and your membership from our live database; if you created the family, it also removes the family’s notes, dates, home location and saved places. You may also email [email protected] to request deletion.
You can separately revoke Hearthkin’s access to your Apple ID at any time in iOS Settings → your name → Sign in with Apple.
We do not currently keep database backups, so deletion is immediate and final — there is no snapshot holding a copy afterwards, and deleted data cannot be recovered. If we start taking backups we will update this section to say how long they are kept.
Hearthkin is a family app, and we expect children to be part of a family. A parent or guardian can invite a child in as a restricted member, with fewer permissions than an adult member.
We rely on the parent or guardian who sends that invitation for consent to process the child’s data as described in this policy — including the child’s home/away presence, if the child uses Hearthkin on their own device. Across the EU the age of digital consent is between 13 and 16 depending on the country; in Poland it is 16. Below that age, a child should use Hearthkin only as part of a family set up by their parent or guardian.
The person who created the family can see everything stored about each member, change or remove any member, and delete the entire family from Settings. If you believe a child is using Hearthkin without a parent’s involvement, email us and we will remove the account.
If you are in the European Economic Area or the UK, we rely on:
If you are in the EEA or the UK, you have the right to access, correct, delete, and export your data, to restrict or object to processing, and to withdraw consent at any time. Contact [email protected] and we will respond within one month. Elsewhere, you may have similar rights under your local law — write to us and we will honour them.
You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority. In Poland, where we are established, that is the President of the Personal Data Protection Office (Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Danych Osobowych), ul. Stawki 2, 00-193 Warsaw — uodo.gov.pl.
We will update this page and the effective date above if this policy changes.