We collect your name, email address, date of birth (to check you are old enough to join), and content you post (photos, video clips, voice notes, text, replies). Date of birth is used only for that age check. If you choose to share a birthday with a group, we store the month and day on your membership in that group — never the year, and never with other groups — so we can put a birthday card in the feed. You can stop sharing at any time. To run the service we also store your timezone and language preference, a device token if you turn on push notifications, and the IP address of security-relevant actions (such as signing in) in our audit log. We collect this solely to operate the group service. If you ask to be told when the app is ready, we also store that email address — it is not an account, and we keep it only to send that one message.
Photos, video clips and voice notes are stored on private, encrypted object storage. Location metadata (GPS EXIF) is removed from every version of a photo shown in the app, and the original photo you uploaded is kept in private storage and never served to anyone. Video clips and voice notes are played back from the file you uploaded, so any metadata they carry travels with them to the other members of your group. Media is never publicly accessible — only active group members can view or listen via short-lived private links. Voice notes are written out by default, so your folk can read them as well as hear them. You can turn that off on any recording. When transcription is on, that one recording is sent to Groq, Inc. (our speech-to-text provider, based in the United States) to be written out, and the resulting text is stored with the voice note and shown only to your group. Groq handles it under a data processing agreement with standard contractual clauses, and their terms say they do not use it to train models. What we cannot yet promise you is that they delete the recording the moment it has been written out: we do not have that in writing, so we are not going to claim it. We are asking for it, and this page will say so plainly on the day we have it. If you would rather no recording of your folk ever left our storage, leave transcription off — that is what the setting is for.
We send transactional emails (sign-in links, notifications, the weekly digest, and birthday notes if you have that setting on). Birthday emails go only to current members of that group. If you asked to be told when AmongFolk is on the stores, we send that one email and then stop. You can leave that list from a link in the email, or by writing to privacy@amongfolk.com. We do not send marketing email without explicit consent. Photos are never embedded in emails; digests contain only text and a link into the app.
Only active members of your group. When you choose to share a moment with more than one of your groups, it is visible to the active members of each chosen group; those groups are not told about each other, and replies in one group are invisible in another. If you are removed from a group, your access ends immediately. Backed-up data may persist for up to 30 days in encrypted backups.
A group is paid for once — any adult member can volunteer to cover it. In the iOS app that purchase is made through Apple's App Store, and in the Android app through Google Play: the store takes the payment and we never see your card details. One App Store or Google Play account can fund one group. RevenueCat, Inc. validates the store receipt on our behalf and tells us whether the subscription is active; we send them your account identifier so the purchase can be matched to your group. On the web, card payments are handled by Stripe, Inc. — again, the card details go to them, not to us. What we store against the group is the plan, whether it is active, the renewal date, who is paying, and the payment provider's own customer and transaction identifiers. RevenueCat and Stripe act as our processors under a data processing agreement; Apple and Google sell the subscription in their own stores, under their own terms, and tell us only that it is paid for.
You may create an account from age 13. Only adults (18+) can create groups and act as the billing account holder. Children may appear in photos shared by group members. The group owner is responsible for ensuring all members consent to photos of children being shared within the group.
Database backups are retained for up to 30 days. Deleted photos may remain in encrypted backups during this window before permanent removal.
We collect minimal, first-party analytics and last-active times to understand product usage (e.g. how many groups were created or active this week). We do not use third-party trackers, advertising networks, or session replay tools.
We do not sell your data or share it for advertising. A small number of companies process it on our behalf so the service can run, each bound by a data processing agreement and permitted to use it only as we instruct: