Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 25, 2026
Last revised: September 25, 2026

Thank you for using Fam Friends. Fam Friends is an app for small, private groups of family and friends. Each month, everyone in a group answers a few prompts, and the app turns those answers into a newsletter for the group.

This policy explains what information Fam Friends ("we", "us", "our") collects, how we use it, who can see it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. It applies to the Fam Friends iOS app (the "App"), our website at www.famfriends.app and join.famfriends.app (the "Website"), and the emails and notifications we send (together, the "Services").

This policy is part of our Terms of Service at https://www.famfriends.app/terms. Capitalized terms not defined here have the meaning given in the Terms.

We wrote this policy to describe what the Services actually do. If anything in it is unclear, or you do not agree with it, please contact us at support+privacy@famfriends.app before using the Services.

Fam Friends is operated by Reese Barnett, an individual based in the United States, who is the controller of your personal information. In this policy, "Fam Friends", "we", "us", and "our" mean Reese Barnett.

Contents

1. What information we collect
2. How we use your information
3. How we use AI to write newsletters
4. Who can see your information
5. Sign in with Apple and Google
6. Subscriptions and payments
7. How long we keep your information
8. Your choices and rights
9. Notices for United States residents
10. Children
11. Security
12. International data transfers
13. Our website
14. Changes to this policy
15. Contact us

1. What information we collect

In short: We collect what you give us to run your account and your groups, the answers and photos you choose to share with your group, and a small amount of technical data needed to keep the Services working. We do not collect your location, your contacts, or advertising identifiers, and we do not use analytics or tracking SDKs.

1.1 Information you provide

Account information.

• Email address. This is how you sign in. We use it to send you a sign-in code, and it identifies your account. If you sign in with Apple and choose "Hide My Email", we receive the private relay address Apple creates for you.
• Display name. The name your group members see. If you sign in with Apple or Google, the App may pre-fill this field from the name your provider returns, but that name stays on your device until you confirm it and create your profile.
• Birthdate. Collected once at sign-up to confirm you meet the minimum age. It is never shown to other members and is only ever returned to you.
• Time zone and language. Your device's time zone and locale, so prompts, reminders, and newsletters arrive at sensible local times and in the right language.
• Profile photo. Optional. Chosen through the system photo picker.
• How you heard about us and how you signed up. At sign-up we ask where you heard about Fam Friends (for example, a friend, family, social media, or the App Store), and we record the platform and sign-in method you used. These are used only to understand how people find the App. They are never shown to anyone in the App.

Group information.

• Group name and optional group photo.
• Your role in each group (owner, editor, or member) and when you joined.
• Email addresses of people you invite. When you invite someone, you type their email address. We store it so the invitation can be matched to their account when they sign in. We do not import or read your contacts.
• Requests to join a group made through an invite link.

Content you share with your group.

• Prompt answers. The text you write, the choices you pick, and any photos you attach. This is the most personal information the Services hold, and it is shared with your group as described in Section 4.
• Answers you share across groups. If you belong to more than one group, you can send one of your own answers to other groups you belong to. The copy carries your name and photos into that group.
• Newsletters. Each group newsletter is built from members' answers and photos, and includes narrative text written by an AI model (see Section 3).

Messages you send us.

• Feature requests you submit from inside the App, with the App version you were using.
• Newsletter reports. If you report a newsletter, we record the reason you choose, anything you write in the details field, the App version, and which newsletter and version you reported.
• Emails you send to our support addresses.

Subscription information.
If you subscribe to Fam Friends Paid, Apple processes the purchase. We never receive your payment card, billing address, or Apple ID password. Apple sends us signed transaction records containing the product purchased, the purchase and expiry dates, the renewal status, Apple's transaction identifiers, and an account token that links the purchase to your Fam Friends account. See Section 6.

1.2 Information collected automatically

• Device push token. If you allow notifications, Apple issues a push token for your device. We store it, along with the platform, App version, locale, and a random device identifier the App generates, so that we can send you notifications.
• App version. Every request from the App includes its version number, so we can keep old versions working or ask you to update.
• Server logs. When the App or the Website talks to our servers, our infrastructure records the request's IP address, the time, the kind of page or route requested, the status code, and, for requests from the App, your account identifier. These logs never contain your email, your name, your answers, or any message content, and the address of a specific invite page is never recorded. Our application logs automatically redact anything that looks like an email address or a sign-in token.
• Email delivery events. When we send you a sign-in code, our email provider records whether it was delivered, bounced, or was marked as spam.

1.3 Information we do not collect

• We do not collect precise or approximate location. Location metadata (such as GPS tags) is stripped from every photo you upload, both on your device before upload and again on our servers.
• We do not access your contacts, camera, microphone, or calendar. The App requests only one system permission, for notifications.
• We do not use advertising identifiers, cross-app tracking, analytics SDKs, crash-reporting SDKs, or advertising SDKs.
• We do not use cookies or any tracking technology on the Website.
• We do not collect a list of the other apps on your device.

1.4 Sensitive information

We do not ask for, and do not want, information about your racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, genetics, or biometrics.

Two things you should know:

• Mood and health check-ins. Some prompts ask how you are feeling or how your health has been, as a multiple-choice answer. Your individual answer is stored with the prompt for the retention period in Section 7, but it is only ever shown to your group, and to the AI model, as a group total. Nobody, including the group owner, sees which option you picked.
• What you write. Prompt answers are free text. If you choose to write about your health, your family, or anything else sensitive, that content is treated like any other answer: shared with your group, sent to the AI model as described in Section 3, and kept for the periods in Section 7. Share only what you are comfortable with your group reading.

We use sensitive information only to provide the Services you asked for. We never use it to infer characteristics about you, and we never disclose it outside your group and our service providers.

1.5 Where information comes from

• From you, when you create an account, set up a group, invite people, answer prompts, subscribe, or contact us.
• From your device, automatically: push token, App version, time zone, locale, and the technical data in Section 1.2.
• From Apple or Google, when you sign in with them (a signed token containing your email address) or subscribe through the App Store (signed transaction records).
• From other Fam Friends users. If someone invites you to a group, we hold your email address before you have an account, for up to 3 days, so the invitation can find you. If you never sign up, it expires and is deleted. When a member shares an answer to another group, or reports a newsletter, information about other members can appear in that content.

2. How we use your information

In short: We use your information to run your account and your groups, to build your group's newsletters, to keep the Services secure, and to respond when you contact us. We do not use it for advertising and we do not sell it.

The table below lists each purpose, the information it uses, and, for people in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom, and Switzerland, the legal basis we rely on.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have checked that those interests are not outweighed by your rights. You can ask us about that assessment, or object to the processing, using the contact details in Section 15.

Things we do not do with your information:

• We do not make automated decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects on you.
• We do not profile you, build interest categories, or infer characteristics about you.
• We do not use your content to train AI models, and our AI provider does not either (Section 3).
• When we work with aggregated counts, such as how many people heard about the App from a friend, we do not attempt to re-identify anyone from them.

3. How we use AI to write newsletters

In short: Newsletter narratives are written by an AI model. The model receives members' first names and written answers, never photos, email addresses, or birthdates. The provider does not use your content to train models.

At the end of each cycle, our servers send the group's answers to a large language model hosted on Amazon Bedrock inside our Amazon Web Services account. For each section of the newsletter, the model receives:

• The cycle's closing date and the section's title.
• Members' display names (first names) as contributors, or "a former member" for someone who has since left.
• The prompt text and each member's written answer or photo caption, verbatim.
• For photo prompts, only the number of photos shared and any caption. The photos themselves are never sent to the model.
• For multiple-choice prompts such as mood check-ins, only a group tally, never who picked what.
• For anonymous prompts, the answer with no name attached.

We run automated checks on the generated narrative against the group's original answers. Members' answers are treated by the model as content to write about, never as instructions it can follow.

Amazon Bedrock does not store your prompts or outputs, does not use them to train models, and does not share them with the model provider. Bedrock may route a request to any of AWS's commercial regions to find capacity, which means this processing can occur outside the United States (see Section 12).

The narrative sections of every newsletter are AI-generated. If a newsletter misrepresents you, you can report it from inside the App (see Section 8), and the group's owner or editors can regenerate or withhold it during the review window.

4. Who can see your information

In short: Your group sees what you share with your group. Nobody outside your groups sees your content. Group owners see the email addresses of the people they invite.

4.1 Other members of your groups

Fam Friends groups are private. Members of a group can see:

• Your display name, profile photo, role, and whether you have left the group.
• Your prompt answers and photos, once they are gathered into the group's newsletter. Some prompts are attributed to you by name. Some are anonymous, and for those your name is never sent to anyone in any role. Mood and health check-ins are only ever shown as group totals.
• Published newsletters, including the AI-written narratives that reference members by first name.
• A notification that you joined the group, containing the group name and your display name.

Group owners and editors can additionally see draft newsletters and the members' original answers before publication. Group owners can see the email addresses and expiry of pending invitations they or other members sent.

Members cannot see your email address, your birthdate, your sign-in method, or how you heard about the App.

4.2 People with an invite link

A group's invite link opens a public web page at join.famfriends.app that shows the group's name and photo to anyone who has the link. Share invite links only with people you want in the group. Joining still requires a Fam Friends account and, where the group requires it, the owner's approval.

4.3 Service providers

We use the following companies to run the Services. Each acts on our instructions, may use your information only to provide its service to us, and is bound by its own terms and privacy commitments.

We do not share your information with advertisers, data brokers, or analytics companies. We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

4.4 Software in the App

The only third-party code in the App comes from the service providers named above: AWS's client libraries, which hold your sign-in session on the device and call our servers, and Google's sign-in library, which runs when you sign in with Google. Everything else is built into iOS by Apple, including purchases, Sign in with Apple, notifications, and the system photo picker, which lets you choose photos without giving the App access to your library.

None of this software is used for advertising, tracking, or analytics. Each provider's library is governed by that provider's privacy policy, and we do not receive any data those libraries may collect for their makers.

4.5 Other disclosures

We may disclose information when we believe in good faith it is necessary to:

• Comply with a law, regulation, subpoena, court order, or other legal process.
• Protect the safety of any person, including responding to child-safety reports.
• Investigate or prevent fraud, abuse, or security incidents.
• Enforce our Terms of Service.

If Fam Friends is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, or if the Services are transferred to a company later formed to operate them, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

5. Sign in with Apple and Google

In short: If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive a signed token that tells us your email address. Your name stays on your device unless you confirm it as your display name.

When you use Sign in with Apple, the App requests your email and name. We send Apple's identity token to our servers, which verify it and use the email address it contains as your account email. We also send the single-use authorization code Apple issues, which our servers exchange for a refresh token. We keep that token for one reason: Apple requires us to revoke your Sign in with Apple session when you delete your account, and the token is what allows us to do that. Your Apple user identifier is kept on your device so the App can notice if you revoke access in your Apple ID settings.

When you use Sign in with Google, the App sends Google's identity token to our servers, which verify it against Google's public keys and use the email address it contains. We do not store any Google token and we do not call Google on your behalf.

In both cases, the name your provider returns is used only to pre-fill the display-name step on your device. We never receive it unless you keep it and create your profile.

We do not control how Apple or Google use information about your sign-in. Please review their privacy policies.

6. Subscriptions and payments

In short: Apple handles all payments. We receive only subscription status, never payment details.

Fam Friends Paid is an auto-renewable subscription purchased through Apple's App Store. Apple bills you, handles refunds, and manages renewals and cancellations under the App Store terms and Apple's privacy policy. We never see your payment card or billing address.

Apple sends us signed records of your transactions, which contain Apple's transaction identifiers, the product, the purchase and expiry dates, the renewal status, and an account token that links the purchase to your Fam Friends account. We use these to apply your plan's limits and to show your subscription status in the App. We may also check your subscription status with Apple's servers to reconcile it.

Deleting your Fam Friends account does not cancel your App Store subscription. Cancel it in your device's Settings.

7. How long we keep your information

In short: Most working data is deleted on a fixed schedule. Newsletters are your group's archive and are kept for as long as the group exists.

When a retention period ends, the data is deleted from our active systems. Deleted objects may persist briefly in our provider's infrastructure before being purged.

We may keep specific information longer than the table says when the law requires it, when we need it to resolve a dispute or enforce our Terms, or when we reasonably believe it will be needed as evidence in a legal claim. In those cases we keep only what is needed, for only as long as needed.

8. Your choices and rights

In short: You can edit your profile, control notifications, and delete your account from inside the App. You can ask us for a copy of your data, or for corrections, by email.

8.1 In the App

• Edit your profile. Change your display name, time zone, and profile photo from the Profile screen.
• Notifications. Turn each kind of notification on or off from the Profile screen, or turn all of them off in your device's Settings.
• Leave a group. Leaving stops future prompts and removes you from the member list. Newsletters already published stay with the group.
• Manage your subscription. From the Profile screen or your device's Settings.
• Report a newsletter. From any newsletter, choose a reason and add details.
• Delete your account. From the Profile screen, choose "Delete account". See Section 8.2 for exactly what this does.

8.2 What account deletion does

When you delete your account, we immediately:

• Delete your profile, sign you out everywhere, and disable sign-in.
• Remove you from every group. A group you own alone is deleted. A group you own that has other members becomes permanently read-only for them.
• Delete your unpublished prompt answers and their photos, and remove your contributions from newsletters that have not yet been published, regenerating those newsletters without you.
• Delete your profile photo, feature requests, device tokens, and live-update sessions.
• Delete your account from our sign-in provider, freeing your email address.
• Revoke your Sign in with Apple session, if you used it.

The following are not deleted:

• Published newsletters. These are the group's shared record. Your name as it was at publication, your attributed answers, and your photos remain in newsletters that were published before you deleted your account, for as long as the group exists. If you want specific content removed from a published newsletter, email support+privacy@famfriends.app and we will work with you.
• Invitations you sent expire on their own within 3 days.
• Newsletter reports you filed are kept as safety records.
• Subscription records are kept with the link to your account removed.
• Logs age out on the schedule in Section 7.

Deletion cannot be undone.

8.3 Rights you can exercise by email

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights. We extend them to everyone, wherever you live, as far as we reasonably can.

• Access. Ask whether we hold personal information about you, and receive a copy of it.
• Correction. Ask us to fix information you cannot change in the App, such as your email address.
• Deletion. Ask us to delete your information, including specific content in a published newsletter. Account deletion itself is in the App (Section 8.2).
• Portability. Receive a copy of the information you gave us in a common machine-readable format.
• Restriction and objection. Ask us to limit how we use your information, or object to processing based on our legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent. Where we rely on consent, such as for notifications, withdraw it at any time. Withdrawal does not affect processing that happened before.
• Appeal. If we decline a request, ask us to reconsider (see Section 8.4).
• Complain. Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority or attorney general where you live.

To exercise any of these, email support+privacy@famfriends.app from the email address on your account. We will not charge you for a request unless it is clearly excessive or repetitive, and we will never treat you differently for making one.

8.4 How we handle requests

• Verification. We need to be sure a request comes from the account holder. Usually replying from the email address on your account is enough. If it is not, we may ask you to confirm something only the account holder would know, such as the names of your groups. We never ask for a password, because there are none.
• Authorized agents. Someone else may make a request on your behalf if they give us written permission signed by you, or proof of power of attorney or similar legal authority, and you confirm the request with us directly.
• Timing. We will respond within 45 days of receiving a verified request, or sooner where the law where you live requires it. If a request is complex, we may extend that once by a further 45 days and will tell you why within the first 45.
• If we decline. We will explain why in writing. You can appeal by replying to that message with the word "appeal". We will answer the appeal within the time the law where you live allows, and in any case within 60 days, and if we still decline we will tell you how to complain to the relevant authority.
• Exceptions. We may keep information we would otherwise delete when the law requires it, when it is needed to complete something you asked for, when it is needed to detect or prevent fraud or abuse, or when it is needed to establish or defend a legal claim. The published-newsletter rule in Section 8.2 is the main case where this applies.

8.5 Rights in the EEA, United Kingdom, and Switzerland

If you are in the EEA, the UK, or Switzerland, the rights in Section 8.3 are yours under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and its UK and Swiss equivalents. The legal basis for each of our purposes is in Section 2. You can complain to the data protection authority in the country where you live. We have not appointed a data protection officer, because the law does not require one for a service of our size. Information about transfers outside the EEA is in Section 12.

9. Notices for United States residents

In short: We do not sell your personal information, share it for targeted advertising, or profile you, so there is nothing to opt out of. Residents of California and other states with privacy laws have the rights in Section 8, with the specifics below.

9.1 California

This section supplements the rest of this policy for California residents under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (together, the CCPA).

Categories of personal information we collect. In the last 12 months, we have collected the following categories of personal information as defined by the CCPA. Each is collected from you, your device, or Apple and Google as described in Section 1.5, used for the purposes in Section 2, kept for the periods in Section 7, and disclosed only to the service providers in Section 4.3 and, for content, to the members of your groups.

Sensitive personal information. We use sensitive personal information only to provide the Services you asked for, never to infer characteristics about you. Because of that, the CCPA's right to limit use of sensitive personal information does not apply, and we do not offer a separate limit control.

Your rights. You have the right to know what personal information we collect, use, disclose, and to whom; to delete it; to correct it; to receive it in a portable format; and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. Section 8.3 explains how to exercise them and Section 8.4 explains how we verify requests, handle authorized agents, and respond.

Sale and sharing. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we have not done either in the preceding 12 months. We have no actual knowledge that we sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. Because we do not sell or share, we do not offer a "Do Not Sell or Share" link, and there is nothing for a Global Privacy Control signal to change.

Financial incentives. We do not offer financial incentives in exchange for personal information.

Shine the Light. California Civil Code §1798.83 lets you ask what personal information we disclosed to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. The answer is none.

Minors' content removal. If you are under 18 and a California resident, you can ask us to remove content you posted by emailing support+privacy@famfriends.app. Removal from published newsletters is handled as described in Section 8.2.

9.2 Other states with consumer privacy laws

If you live in a state with a comprehensive consumer privacy law, you have the right to:

• Confirm whether we process your personal data and access it.
• Correct inaccuracies.
• Delete personal data you provided or we obtained about you.
• Obtain a copy of your personal data in a portable format.
• Opt out of targeted advertising, the sale of personal data, and profiling in furtherance of decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects. We do none of these, so there is nothing to opt out of and no universal opt-out signal changes our processing.
• Appeal a decision we make about your request.

Section 8.3 explains how to exercise these rights and Section 8.4 explains verification, authorized agents, response times, and appeals. If we deny your appeal, you may contact your state attorney general's office, and we will include instructions for doing so in our response.

The categories of personal data we process and why are in Sections 1 and 2. The categories of third parties we share with are in Section 4. Our handling of sensitive data is in Section 1.4: we process it only to provide the Services you asked for, which counts as your consent under these laws, and you can withdraw that consent by deleting the content or your account.

9.3 Nevada

Nevada law gives residents the right to opt out of the sale of certain personal information. We do not sell personal information as Nevada defines it. If you would still like to register an opt-out preference so that it applies if our practices ever change, email support+privacy@famfriends.app.

10. Children

Fam Friends is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 (or under 16 in the European Economic Area, or under whatever higher age applies where you live). We ask for your birthdate at sign-up and refuse accounts for anyone under 13.

If you believe a child has created an account, or has shared information with us, email support+privacy@famfriends.app and we will delete it promptly.

11. Security

In short: Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, photos are stored privately and stripped of metadata, and there are no passwords to steal.

• All traffic between the App, the Website, and our servers uses TLS 1.2 or later.
• Data is encrypted at rest in our provider's storage.
• Photos are stored in private storage that is never publicly accessible. The App receives short-lived, signed links to view them.
• Every uploaded image is re-encoded on our servers, which removes all embedded metadata including GPS location. Files that are not valid images are deleted.
• Sign-in uses one-time codes sent to your email, or Apple or Google sign-in. We do not store passwords.
• Our sign-in and API endpoints are rate-limited to slow down abuse.
• Our logs are built from a fixed list of allowed fields and automatically redact email addresses and tokens.
• Email addresses, birthdates, message text, and photo locations are never placed in web addresses, where they could be recorded or shared.

No system is perfectly secure. If you believe someone has accessed your account without permission, or you become aware of an attempt to gain access to your information, email support+privacy@famfriends.app right away. If we learn of a breach that affects your information, we will notify you and any relevant authorities as required by law.

12. International data transfers

In short: We are in the United States, and that is where your information is stored. AI processing may take place in other regions of our cloud provider.

Our servers are in the United States. If you use Fam Friends from outside the United States, your information is transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those where you live.

One exception: requests to the AI model in Section 3 go through Amazon Bedrock's global routing, which may run them in any AWS commercial region worldwide to find capacity. No photos, email addresses, or birthdates are ever part of those requests, and nothing is stored in the region that handles them.

For people in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, we rely on legally recognized transfer mechanisms, such as standard contractual clauses, in our agreements with our service providers for transfers to the United States. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards using the contact details in Section 15.

13. Our website

The pages at www.famfriends.app and the invite pages at join.famfriends.app do not use cookies, run no JavaScript, load nothing from third parties, and contain no forms. Our infrastructure keeps standard request records for these pages — the IP address, the time, the kind of page requested, and the status — to keep the Website available and to block abuse. The address of a specific invite page is never recorded. Apart from those records, the only way to send us information from the Website is by emailing us. Because we do not track you across sites and do not build a profile from these records, we have nothing to change in response to "Do Not Track" or Global Privacy Control signals, but we honor the intent of both.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the Services change. When we do, we will post the new version at https://www.famfriends.app/privacy and change the "Last revised" date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will notify you in the App or by email at least 30 days before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask for your consent. Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.

15. Contact us

Questions, access requests, corrections, deletion requests, and appeals: support+privacy@famfriends.app

General support: support+app@famfriends.app