Privacy Policy

What we collect

All of it comes from you, and all of it is used to run the service you signed up for.

What you give us when you make an account

• Your email address. It is how you sign in, how the weekly question reaches you, and how the digest comes back. If you sign in with Apple and choose to hide your address, we receive Apple's private relay address instead and that is all we ever see.
• Your name. It goes on your answers so your family knows who wrote them. It is shown to the people in your own circles and to nobody else.
• An account identifier we generate, and, if you sign in with Apple, the stable identifier Apple gives us for you. That identifier lets us recognize you on your next sign-in. It cannot be used to look you up in any other app.

What you give us when you answer

• What you write. Your answers, and any questions you add to a circle's queue.
• Photos you attach to an answer, and a profile picture if you set one. We do not accept video.
• Audio, if you answer by voice. The transcription happens on your own device, not on our servers - your phone turns the recording into text and sends us the text along with it. We never ship your voice to a transcription company, and no third party hears it. We do store the finished transcript next to the recording, so the answer can be read as well as heard.

What your device gives us

• A push notification token, if you turn on notifications. We store it so we can tell your phone that a question opened or a digest is ready. It is meaningless to anyone but Apple's notification service.
• The IP address you sign in from. Your account keeps the address of your current and previous sign-in, on the web and in the app alike, as part of its sign-in record. It is there to be looked at if we ever need to investigate something going wrong with an account. We do not use it to work out where you live, and it goes when your account goes.

What we do not collect

We want to be specific rather than reassuring, so here is the list. We do not collect your location, health or fitness data, your contacts, your calendar, your browsing or search history, or any financial information. Neither the app nor the website asks your device where it is. Billing runs on the website through Stripe, and Stripe handles your card details directly - the app never sees them, and neither do we.

Who can see your answers

While a question is open, your answer is yours. Nobody else in the circle can read it yet.

When the question closes, the answers become readable by the people in that circle. The digest email follows the close - sometimes right behind it, sometimes later, depending on the rhythm the circle is set to. So if you open the app after the deadline you may find the answers already there before the email arrives. It is the same moment either way: the question closes, and the circle can read what everyone wrote.

Answers stay readable to that circle afterward. That is the point of the product - the archive is the thing you are building, and a family should be able to go back and read 2015 in 2035.

Two honest exceptions. Our staff - which today means one person, the founder - can technically reach the database, and does so only to fix something that is broken or to answer a support request you sent us. And we will disclose information if a valid legal process requires it, which has never happened.

How we use it

• To run the weekly cycle: send the question, take your answer, close the question, send the digest.
• To show your family your answers, and to keep them readable in the archive.
• To send you service email - a question, a digest, a reminder that a question closes soon, a receipt, a password reset.
• To send push notifications, if you turned them on.
• To take payment for a subscription, through Stripe.
• To answer you when you email support.
• To keep the service working and secure - fixing errors, preventing abuse.

That is the complete list. We do not use your answers to train machine-learning models, and we do not read them to build a profile of you.

What we never do

• We never sell your personal information, and we never share it with data brokers.
• We never show you advertising, and we do not work with ad networks.
• We do not track you across other companies' apps and websites, and we do not let anyone else do it through us.
• The iOS app contains no analytics or crash-reporting kit from another company. There is no third-party code in it watching what you do.

The website and the app

The two are not identical, and it would be dishonest to describe them as one thing.

The website measures its own traffic using a tool called Ahoy that runs on our own servers - not a service we send your visits to. It records which pages were viewed and a handful of in-app events, and it sets a first-party cookie so that several page views in a row can be counted as one visit. In these traffic records the IP address is masked before it is stored, and we never look up a location from it. (The sign-in addresses described above are a separate thing, kept on your account rather than in the traffic records.) That is the extent of it: no third-party analytics, no advertising pixels, no session recording.

Email. We keep a record of the messages we send you, and we note when you click a link in one, so we can tell whether the weekly question is actually arriving. Links in our email carry a tag identifying which message they came from, which is how that click gets counted. We do not use invisible tracking pixels to detect whether you opened an email.

The iOS app has no analytics at all. It talks to our servers and to Apple's notification service, and to nothing else.

You can use the service entirely by email if you prefer. Answering by replying to the weekly question works, and it is how several members of the original family circle have always used it.

Where your information lives

On servers in the United States. If you are writing to us from outside the US, your answers are stored in the US.

We use a small number of companies to run the service. Each one is listed with exactly what it touches, so you can see the shape of it rather than take our word for it:

• Heroku - runs the application and the database.
  Data accessed: everything stored in the account - your name, email address, answers, transcripts, and account records.
• Amazon Web Services (S3) - stores the files you upload.
  Data accessed: photos, profile pictures, and voice recordings.
• Stripe - takes payment for subscriptions.
  Data accessed: email address, billing details, and card information, which goes to Stripe directly and never reaches us.
• Resend - delivers our email.
  Data accessed: email address, and the contents of the messages we send you - which for a digest means the answers inside it.
• Apple - delivers push notifications, and handles Sign in with Apple if you use it.
  Data accessed: your device's notification token and the short text of a notification; for sign-in, the identifier Apple gives us and the address, real or relayed, that you chose to share.

None of them is permitted to use your information for their own purposes. There is nobody else on this list: no advertising network, no analytics vendor, no data broker.

How long we keep it

Your answers stay until you delete them or delete your account - keeping them is the product. Server logs are kept briefly, for days rather than months, and are used to diagnose problems. Billing records are kept as long as tax and accounting rules require.

If something goes wrong

We protect your family's answers as carefully as we know how. If despite that there is ever a breach affecting your personal information, we will tell you - not bury it, not wait to see whether anyone notices.

We will notify the people affected without unreasonable delay after we discover it, as Tennessee law and any other applicable law require. We will tell you what happened, what of yours was involved, and what we are doing about it, in the same plain language as the rest of this page.

Deleting your account

In the app: go to Profile, then Delete Account. It asks you to confirm, and then it is done. Deleting your account removes your profile, your answers and their transcripts, your photos and audio, your notification tokens, and your sign-in records. It is permanent. There is no undo and no grace period, so if you want to keep what you wrote, save it first.

On the web: email us at support@answers2answers.com from the address on your account and we will delete it. We aim to do it within a few days and will write back when it is done.

If you would rather have your information than erase it, ask us and we will send you a copy of what we hold.

Children and family circles

This is a product for families, and children answering questions alongside their parents is one of the things it is for. We have tried to write this section the way it actually works rather than the way these sections usually read.

You must be at least 13 years old to hold an account of your own. For a younger child, a parent or guardian creates and controls the account, holds its password, and stays responsible for how it is used. The account belongs to the adult; the child answers through it.

Because the adult holds the account's password, they can sign into it and read that account's own answers whenever they like, including before a question has closed. That is not a special parental power - it is how every account works, since your own answers are always visible to you. What the adult does not get is any earlier view of what other people in the circle wrote; those still wait for the close, the same as for everybody else.

A parent can delete the account, and everything the child wrote in it, at any time.

We do not knowingly let a child under 13 hold an account of their own. If you believe one does, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will email the address on your account at least 30 days before it takes effect, and the effective date at the top of this page moves to the new date.

Smaller corrections - a typo, a sentence made clearer, a service renamed - move only the last-updated date. The effective date stays where it is, because nothing about what we actually do has changed, and it should not look as though you agreed to something new when you did not.

We will not quietly start doing something this page says we do not do.

Contact us

Write to support@answers2answers.com. A person reads it. We aim to respond within 30 days, and usually a great deal sooner.

Answers to Answers is operated by
Thede Technologies, LLC
Knoxville, Tennessee, United States

The Terms of Service cover the rest of the arrangement, including how a dispute gets settled.