Privacy Policy

What syncd collects

Only what the app has to have in order to work. There is no advertising identifier, no analytics SDK, no crash reporter and no tracker in this build. The privacy manifest the app ships declares the same list to Apple, and says the app does no tracking.

• Your name and the Apple ID you sign in with — so the app knows which circles are yours, and your circle knows who you are. Your name, your picture and your app settings are also kept with your account, so signing in on a new phone does not mean setting yourself up again.
• Your location while sharing is on: where you are, how fast you are going, your battery level, and the trail of where you have been.
• What you add: notes, links, reminders, calendar events, messages, shopping items, chores, whiteboard drawings and photos.
• Which of your devices to alert, kept as a push token, so an SOS or a new message reaches the right phone.
• Whether your circle's plan is active. The App Store takes the payment; syncd never sees a card number.

Where it is stored

In Google Firebase — Cloud Firestore for the app's data, Cloud Storage for full-size photographs — under your circle's id, reachable only by the people in that circle. The rules that enforce that are part of the app's own source and run on the server, so a modified client cannot read another family's data.

Two things sit outside a circle, under your account instead: the list of circles you belong to, and your own name, picture and settings. Your account document is readable and writable only by you — not by your family, and not by anyone else who signs in.

Nobody else is given any of it. There is no advertising network, no data broker and no analytics provider in this app, because none is in the build.

Who can see what

• Your circle sees your location while sharing is on, along with the circle's places, calendar, lists, notes and group chat.
• A direct thread is visible only to the people in it. The server checks the participants of every message, so a thread cannot be read by leaving it out of a query.
• Your read markers — which threads you have opened — stay yours, on your own devices. Nobody in your circle gets a read receipt.
• SOS and possible-collision alerts are visible to your circle and cannot be deleted afterwards, because the record of who answered is the whole point of them.

How long it is kept

Location history has a window, and it is enforced by a scheduled job on the server rather than by hiding rows in the app: seven days on the free plan, thirty days on a paid one. Older samples are deleted.

Chat shows the last thirty days. Everything else — notes, lists, the album, the calendar, the shopping list — stays until someone in the circle deletes it.

What you control

• Location sharing is a switch in your profile and on your own pin on the map. With it off, your position stops being written, history recording pauses, and the circle's map says you are not sharing. The trail recorded while it was on stays until it ages out of the window — ask and it can be removed sooner.
• Leaving a circle is a button. The owner of a circle can remove a member.
• Everything your circle holds is readable inside the app, and a copy of it is a button in your profile rather than a request: it writes a folder you keep — or a zip of that folder, in one file, if you would rather send it on — holding the circle's members and places, its notes, links, calendar, lists and chores, the chat you can see, the album's photographs at display size, and the location history inside your plan's window. Full-size album prints stay in the album, and a direct thread you are not part of is not in it.
• There is no advertising in syncd, at any plan, and there never will be.

Deleting your account, and closing a circle

Deleting your account is a button in your profile, and it says what it will do before it does it. It removes your profile and photo, your location history in every circle, which messages you have read, the trips you claimed, the alerts you raised, this device's push registration, and the sign-in itself.

It also revokes the access you gave syncd through Sign in with Apple: Apple is told to take back the token this app was granted, so syncd stops being listed under your Apple ID with access to your account. Deleting the account is the whole of it, and needs no request to us.

What you gave a circle stays with it: messages and photographs remain readable by the family that kept them, with your name no longer attached to them. Those are the circle's record as much as yours, and one person leaving cannot be allowed to empty an album five people share. If you want a particular photograph or message of yours taken out, ask at cameronhoward13@yahoo.com and it will be.

If you are the owner of a circle and other people are in it, deleting your account closes the circle — theirs goes too, as the app tells you and names them before you do it. A circle cannot outlive its owner, and there is no way to hand one to somebody who did not ask for it.

Children

A parent adds a child to the circle, and that child's location is shared exactly the way anyone else's is. The person who created the circle decides who is in it, and can remove any member. What a child shares is their household's decision — the app shows the same thing to everyone in the circle, and hides it from nobody in it.

Questions, and changes

Write to cameronhoward13@yahoo.com.

When these words change, the date at the top changes with them, and this page and the published copy at syncd-connect.web.app/privacy are the same document.