The short version
- Dotdown stores your family's own data so that every phone in the family sees the same thing. That is the whole purpose of the app.
- There is no advertising, no profiling and no tracking, and nothing is sold, rented or shared with anyone outside the companies that host the service. The one thing that leaves your family's own data is a crash report, so faults can be found and fixed; it carries no names, messages, photos or location. It is described below.
- Location sharing is off until you turn it on, and each phone has its own switch.
- You can delete your account from inside the app at any time.
What Dotdown collects
| What | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Your name and email address | When you sign in with Google, or when a parent creates a username login for a child | To know who you are and which family you belong to |
| Your family's calendar: events, and calendars you subscribe to such as a school feed | As you add them, or as the app fetches a feed you subscribed to | It is the calendar |
| Chores, points, lists, recipes, meal plans, special days, workout reminders and pets | As your family adds them | The rest of the app |
| Health records: allergies, medications, conditions, doctor and insurance details | Only if a parent fills them in | So the family has them when needed. A parent chooses who can see them. |
| Profile photos | Only if you add one | To show who is who |
| Your phone's location | Only while "Share my location" is on for that phone | To show your family where you are on the shared map. See below. |
| A push notification token | When you open the app with notifications allowed | So another family phone can reach yours: a place alert, or a request for a fresh location |
| Places the family names, and arrivals and departures at them | Only if a parent sets places up, and only from phones that share their location | To tell the people a place names that someone arrived or left. See below. |
Health information
A family can record allergies, conditions, a blood type, a doctor and a dentist, insurance details, and the medicines somebody takes with the times they are taken. This can be recorded for anybody in the family, children included, and it is stored the way the rest of the family's data is: on the phone it was entered on, and in your family's own account on the database, so that the other phones in the family can show it.
Who can see and change it is decided by a parent, one family member at a time. Somebody a parent has given no permission sees nothing at all, including their own; a parent can allow a person their own records, or somebody else's. That rule is enforced by the database itself and not only by the app, so a phone is never sent a record it is not allowed to show.
Reminders to take a medicine are set by the phone itself at the times the family chose. Those times are part of the family's data and are not sent anywhere else.
None of it is a medical record, none of it is shared outside your family, and none of it is used for anything but showing it to the people a parent has allowed. It goes when the account or the family goes, as everything else does.
Location
Location sharing is off until the person holding the phone turns it on, under Location in the app, and can be turned off there at any time. A parent chooses, for the whole family, how phones report:
- When the app is open: a position is recorded when Dotdown is opened or brought to the front.
- Every so often: a position is recorded on a schedule, about every 15 to 60 minutes, even when Dotdown is closed or not in use.
- Continuously: positions are recorded as the phone moves, even when Dotdown is closed or not in use, with a persistent notification on that phone while it is on.
The two background options need Android's "Allow all the time" permission, which the app explains and asks for on screen before Android does. Each phone's positions are kept for seven days and then removed, so the family can see where a phone has been that week; the phone's latest position is kept for as long as sharing is on. A parent can also name places, such as Home or School, with a circle around each; a sharing phone that enters or leaves a circle records that and notifies the family members the place names. Who can see whom, including places and history, is set by a parent, per family member. Location is never used for advertising and never leaves the services listed below.
On Android, Dotdown may also ask for activity recognition. That tells the app only whether the phone is still, walking or in a vehicle, so a departure can be reported sooner and a stop named. It is never stored and never shared; it only decides when to take a position.
Children
Dotdown is for families, and children use it. A child's login is created and controlled by a parent, who sets what the child can see and do, can change or remove the child's account, and can delete the family's data altogether. Dotdown does not show advertising, does not profile children, and collects nothing from a child beyond what the family itself enters into the app.
Google account data
If you connect a Google Calendar, Dotdown asks Google for read-only access to your calendars and uses it only to show those events inside the app. It does not change your Google Calendar, and it does not use that data for anything else. Dotdown's use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Where the data is, and who else touches it
Dotdown has no servers of its own. It uses these companies as service providers, each only for the purpose named:
- Supabase stores the family's data, photos and backups, and handles sign-in. Access is restricted per family by rules enforced in the database itself.
- Google provides sign-in, read-only calendar access when you connect one, the map on Android, Firebase Cloud Messaging for the silent "where are you now" request between family phones, and the names of nearby places (Places API) for meal polls and for naming where a phone has stopped. A place lookup sends a position and a radius, never who asked.
- Expo delivers app updates and relays push notifications.
- Sentry receives crash reports, and the diagnostic lines a phone sends with a problem report, from every phone in the family including children's. These carry the model of phone, the app version and what the app was doing -- never names, messages, photos or location trails.
- TheMealDB answers recipe searches. Only the words you search for are sent.
Data travels between your phone and these services over encrypted connections. None of them is permitted to use your family's data for their own purposes, and none receives it for advertising.
How long it is kept
Your family's data is kept for as long as your family uses the app. The service takes a backup of each family every night, keeps a week of them and one a week for a month after that, so a deleted item can persist in a backup for up to five weeks after deletion. A family's own phones also keep a local copy of the family's data, which is cleared when that phone signs out.
Deleting your account or your family
- Your account: in the app, More, Settings, Account and sync, "Delete my account". This removes your sign-in, your place in the family, your photo, your location and your health record immediately. Chores and events you took part in stay with the family, as its record. If you are the family's only parent, the whole family is deleted with your account.
- The whole family: a parent can delete the family and everything in it from the same screen.
- Without the app: see how to request deletion.
Your choices
- Location sharing, notifications and the connection to Google Calendar are each optional and can be switched off in the app or in your phone's settings.
- A parent can save a complete copy of the family's data as a file at any time, from Settings, Data.
Changes
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the app will say so.
Contact
Questions about privacy go to contact@megalightgames.com.
Megalight Games, Colorado, United States.