Privacy policy

Who we are

Gathr is a family intercom made by Gathr (“we”). Questions, requests, or complaints: hello@gathr.family.

What we collect, and why

• Your parent account. When you sign in with Apple or Google we receive your email address and, if you share it, your name. That's the account. We never see your password.
• The household you build. Kids exist as first names you type: no kid emails, no birthdates, no kid accounts. Devices exist as names you give them ("Kitchen", "Jack's iPad") and who they play for.
• Voice messages. When you speak, the clip is stored just long enough to deliver, and written out once — on your own phone as you send, not on a server — so the message can be shown as well as heard (on the receiving screen, the notification, your thread). The audio is never sent to any transcription or AI service. Transcripts are display-only: never used for analysis, personalization, advertising, or anything else.
• Replies. A kid's tap ("coming") or short custom reply travels as text on a delivery receipt.
• Device presence. Each device reports whether it's reachable and whether headphones are connected, so routing works and so we can tell you honestly where a message played. Presence is never location. We don't collect location at all.
• Invite requests. If you request an invite on this site we store the email you give us, to send the invite.
• Basic infrastructure logs. Our hosting and backend providers keep standard operational logs (IPs, timestamps) to run the service.

How long things live — our retention policy

This section is our written data retention policy: for each kind of data, why we collect it, why holding it is necessary at all, and when it is deleted. Nothing is kept indefinitely — every row ends at a clock or at an event you control.

• Voice clips — collected to deliver the spoken message; held only so it can be redelivered until the receiving device confirms playback; deleted the moment delivery is confirmed, or within 24 hours, whichever comes first.
• Transcripts and sent replies — exist so the message and the answer can be shown as text; held only while the message itself is deliverable; deleted on the same clock as the clip.
• Household data (names, devices, delivery history) — this is the household you built, held so the intercom works; kept while your household exists; deleted when you delete it. Delivery history is content-free after the 24-hour scrub: what remains is "a message played at 5:12," never what it said.
• Device presence (reachable? headphones?) — held so routing works; only the current state is kept, overwritten in place; removed when a device is unpaired.
• Feedback — the text of what you report, kept until we've read and acted on it, then deleted by hand. We won't pretend an automated clock exists for this one; it doesn't.
• Invite requests (the site's former sign-up form, now closed) — kept until you ask us to remove you.

What we will never do

• No selling or sharing of personal data. Ever.
• No advertising, no ad SDKs, no trackers in the apps.
• No content analysis of your family's voice or words beyond the single transcription used to display the message — and that transcription happens on the sender's own device, not on ours or anyone else's.
• No location tracking. Gathr is an intercom, not a map.
• No public surface: households can't be discovered, joined, or contacted from outside.

Who processes data for us

We run on a small set of infrastructure providers, each used only to operate the service: Google Firebase / Google Cloud (accounts, database, storage, push delivery), LiveKit (carrying the audio of live calls, and nothing else), Apple and Google (sign-in and push notifications on their platforms), and Cloudflare (this website). No AI or transcription service is on this list because none is used: transcription happens on the sending device. We have no analytics SDK in the kid experience.

Your controls

• Rename or remove kids and devices any time in the app; removing a device signs it out immediately.
• Kids can pause their own intercom; pauses are shown honestly to parents, and if a parent overrides one, the kid is told.
• To delete your account and household entirely, email hello@gathr.family from your account address; we'll confirm and delete.

Children

Kids are the point of Gathr, so their privacy gets its own page, written to be read: Kids privacy & COPPA. One structural fact worth stating here too: kid devices cannot record voice messages at all — there is no record button on the kid side, and our servers independently refuse audio from kid devices. Recordings of your kid's voice do not exist in Gathr. A kid's live voice is only ever heard during a call the kid chooses to answer, and calls are never recorded.

Feedback

Feedback travels by email now: hello@gathr.family, and the app's feedback card opens exactly that. Earlier builds had a "Gathr team" voice tile — the one kind of audio that deliberately left your family. That path is retired. The written-out text of voice feedback already sent stays with us until we've acted on it; its remaining audio is being deleted as we close out the last of those reports, and no new feedback audio can be created. The intercom itself keeps its promise: voice between family members is live or short-lived, deleted on delivery or within 24 hours, never used for anything but delivering it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll say so plainly on this page and, for material changes, in the app. The date at the top is the version.