Privacy Policy

Information we collect

We collect the following categories of information:

• Account information: your email address and display name, provided through our identity provider when you sign in.
• Household and member information you enter: names, birth dates or age bands, contact methods, addresses, dietary and medical notes, relationships, and related notes for the people in your groups.
• Activity information: event attendance, meal and task sign-ups, accommodation and shopping intents, and similar coordination data you create in the Service.
• Technical information: limited, privacy-safe diagnostic and performance telemetry (see "Cookies and analytics"), and security audit logs that record events such as failed sign-ins using only salted-hash network identifiers. We never store your raw IP address.

How we use information

We use personal information solely to operate and provide the Service — for example, to authenticate you, maintain your groups and households, coordinate events, and keep the Service secure and reliable. We do not use your personal information for advertising or profiling.

We do not sell or share your information

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own purposes. This is true today and will remain true under any future paid or subscription model. We share information only with the service providers that operate our infrastructure, as described below, and only as needed to run the Service.

Service providers

We rely on Microsoft Azure to run the Service, and our data is hosted in the United States. These providers process data on our behalf under their contractual and security commitments:

• Microsoft Azure — cloud hosting, database, and key management (United States).
• Microsoft Azure Application Insights / Log Analytics — privacy-safe diagnostics and performance monitoring.
• Microsoft Entra External ID — authentication and account sign-in.

Cookies and analytics

Our analytics are cookieless and are designed never to receive names, emails, notes, or other personal details — only opaque identifiers, counts, and coarse metadata. Because of this, we do not display a cookie consent banner.

The Service uses only strictly necessary, first-party cookies: one to keep you signed in (your session) and one to remember your language preference. Our identity provider may also set its own cookie during sign-in to manage your authentication session.

Children's data

The Service is intended for adults. Account holders may enter information about their family members, which can include minors. If you enter information about a child or any other person, you are responsible for that information and confirm you have the authority to provide it.

We do not knowingly allow children to create their own accounts. If you believe a child has created an account, please contact us so we can address it.

How we protect information

We use industry-standard safeguards, including encryption in transit (TLS) and encryption at rest. Particularly sensitive fields — such as names, birth dates, contact details, addresses, and dietary or medical notes — are additionally protected using database-level always-encrypted columns. Each group's data is isolated from every other group's, and access is restricted based on role.

Data retention

We retain your personal information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the Service. When you delete your account or specific records, we remove them from our active systems promptly.

For integrity and recovery, our database keeps a temporal history of changes with a retention period of up to twelve months, and diagnostic logs are retained for approximately 90 days. Residual copies in this history and in encrypted backups are purged as they age out of these windows. Security audit records — which contain only identifiers, event types, and salted-hash network fingerprints, never names, notes, or other personal details — are retained longer for security and accountability.

Your choices and rights

You can review and update your account details and much of your household data directly in the Service. You can delete your account at any time from your account settings; doing so erases your personal data as described in "Data retention." If you are the sole owner of a group that still has other members, you will first be asked to transfer ownership, remove the other members, or delete the group.

Although the Service is focused on users in the United States, we aim to honor the core data-protection rights recognized elsewhere — including the right to access, correct, or delete your personal information. To make such a request, contact us using the details below.

International users

The Service is operated from and hosted in the United States. If you access it from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be processed in the United States, where data-protection laws may differ from those in your location.

Changes to this Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes, we will update the "last updated" date above and, where appropriate, provide additional notice.

Contact

If you have any questions about this document, you can contact us at contact@gatherstead.app.