Privacy Policy

Gatherby is a private household-organization app, made and operated by STUDIOKJ, LLC. We collect only what's needed to run it for you and the people you invite, and we do not sell your data.

What we collect

• Account details you provide - your name and email, and those of family members or guests you invite.
• The content you create in the app - calendar entries, tasks, lists, trips, and messages.
• Reading progress: how far along you are in the books on your Reading lists. The people in your household see it; nobody else does.
• If you import your Goodreads or StoryGraph history, the books, ratings, and read dates from the file become part of your household's lists. The file itself isn't kept.
• Quotes you save from a book are kept with your household and nobody else sees them. Scanning a book's barcode and picking out a quote from a photo of a page happen on your iPhone: only the ISBN or the words you keep are sent to us, and the page photo only if you choose to attach it.
• Basic technical data (device and app version) to keep the service working and to help with support.
• Your location, only when you check in somewhere, look for places near you, turn on arrival suggestions, or ask for local weather. See Location below.
• Subscription status for households that subscribe. Payments are handled by Apple through the App Store; we never see your card or payment details.

Email

We send sign-in links, notifications about your own activity (such as a task assigned to you or a booking confirmation), replies to support requests you send us, and a weekly household email that is on by default for adult household members with an email address and can be turned off in Settings > Notifications or through the unsubscribe link in any weekly email. Every recipient is either an account owner who signed up or a person they explicitly invited. We never send unsolicited or purchased-list email, and non-essential messages include a way to opt out. Mobile information and messaging consent are not shared with third parties for marketing.

Weekly email

Weekly email is on by default for adult household members with an email address. On Sunday at 7 pm in your household's time zone, Gatherby sends a summary of household plans and tasks you can access. Weeks with no updates are skipped. Private lists and their items are excluded. You can turn weekly email off in Settings > Notifications or use the unsubscribe link in any weekly email.

How we use it

• To provide the app and keep your household in sync.
• To send the transactional email described above.
• To provide support and keep the service secure.
• To understand, in aggregate, how Gatherby is used so we can improve it: which screens and features get used, on which device type, and how many households are active. We record this ourselves (no third-party analytics or ad trackers), look at it only as totals, and keep the detailed records for 90 days. Visits to this public website are counted without cookies. Our web server logs keep request details, including your IP address, the requested address and your browser or app version information, for up to 14 days. App requests are also kept in our app logs for up to 30 days, without your IP address, to operate, secure and troubleshoot the service.

Location

Gatherby uses your location only for the features that need it, and never for advertising or tracking.

• When you check in in the app, or have arrival suggestions turned on, the places around you come from Apple Maps, searched on your iPhone or Apple Watch, so your precise location goes to Apple for that search (see Apple's privacy policy), not to us. To suggest places others have checked in to, the app sends us only a rounded area about a kilometer across, which isn't stored with your account. When you check in, we keep the place you chose. Arrival suggestions are off until you turn them on, and need Location set to Always.
• When you look for places near you on the website or in a list, your location is sent to Foursquare to find the places nearby. Gatherby doesn't keep that location.
• When you check in somewhere, the check-in is saved with its place and location as part of your household's history. It stays until your household is deleted, or until you ask us to remove it.
• Places you check in to (not who checked in) help suggest places to others. Check-ins you keep to yourself aren't used.
• If you set a home location, it's saved for your household's weather and nearby places until you change it.
• For local weather, Gatherby sends Open-Meteo your household's home location, or on the website your device's location rounded to about a kilometer, to get the forecast. Gatherby doesn't keep the device's location.

Google user data

If you choose to connect a Google account, Gatherby requests only the access needed for the features you turn on, and uses it only to provide those features, at your request:

• Google Calendar (calendar.readonly, read-only) - to show your events on your household's shared board.
• Google Tasks (tasks) - to keep your Google Tasks and your Gatherby tasks in sync in both directions, so a task added or completed in one appears in the other.
• Google Contacts (contacts.readonly, read-only) - to suggest people's names and email addresses when you invite guests to an event.

• We do not sell Google user data, and we do not use it for advertising or for training AI/ML models.
• We do not transfer Google user data to others except as necessary to provide the feature (e.g. secure hosting), to comply with applicable law, or as part of a merger or acquisition with equivalent protections.
• You can disconnect a Google account at any time in the app; doing so revokes our access and deletes the stored authorization for that account.

Gatherby's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

How we protect your data

We apply safeguards appropriate to the sensitivity of the data we handle, including calendar and other Google user data:

• Encryption in transit - all traffic between your devices and Gatherby is served exclusively over HTTPS/TLS.
• Encryption at rest - data is stored on encrypted cloud infrastructure. In addition, the most sensitive fields are individually encrypted at the application layer using AES-256-GCM - Wi-Fi passwords and sensitive guest details such as dates of birth and dietary needs. OAuth access credentials (refresh tokens) are held securely server-side and used only to fetch the data you asked us to display.
• Encrypted backups - the database is replicated to Amazon S3 with server-side encryption. Continuous database backups provide about 24 hours of recovery history. Separate backup copies are retained for up to 30 days. Because the sensitive fields above are encrypted at the application layer, they remain encrypted in backups as well.
• Access controls - a household's data is visible only to the members that household explicitly invites. Internal access is least-privilege - limited to the minimum needed to operate and support the service, and restricted to authorized personnel.
• Secure, reputable infrastructure - Gatherby runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with standard operational and network safeguards.
• Data minimization & retention - we request the narrowest access needed (for example, read-only access to your calendar), and retain Google user data only while your connection is active.

Sharing

We don't sell personal information. We use a small number of trusted service providers who process data only to operate Gatherby on our behalf, under obligations to protect it: hosting (Amazon Web Services), email delivery, payments (Apple), place details such as opening hours (Google Maps Platform), book details such as covers and page counts (Open Library and Google Books, which receive the title or ISBN you look up), and AI processing that powers features you use, such as looking up a restaurant you add (Anthropic). These providers may not use your data to train their models or for their own purposes. Google user data is never used to train AI models.

Your choices & deletion

You can disconnect any connected Google account at any time from within the app. Disconnecting immediately deletes the stored OAuth tokens for that connection from our active systems and stops any further access to that account's data.

Gatherby's data download feature lets the head of household request a copy of household data they can access, including private lists shared with them and other members' contact details available to them. The download excludes private lists they cannot access, sign-in and connection credentials, and payment card details. A prepared download is available for 7 days and requires the requesting account to be signed in. We delete the prepared file from our server when it expires. We record download activity in the household's audit log.

You can delete your account at any time in the app, under Settings → Delete account. If you're the head of household, this permanently deletes the household and all of its data from our active systems for every member, including lists, tasks, events, photos, and connected accounts. Otherwise it deletes your own account and personal data.

Deleting your account doesn't cancel a subscription bought through Apple: cancel it in your Apple Account to stop being billed.

You can also email support@gatherby.app and we'll delete your account for you.

Deleted data can remain in backups for up to 30 days. We keep data only as long as needed to provide the service.

Contact

Questions? Email support@gatherby.app.