Privacy Policy

Family Thrive operates the Family Thrive app and is the data controller for the information described here — the "responsible party" under South Africa's POPIA and the "controller" under the UK and EU GDPR. You can reach us at familythrivetechnologies@gmail.com.

Family Thrive is operated from South Africa and used by families around the world. We apply one standard of care to everyone, and we comply with the law of your country where it applies to you:

South Africa: the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). United Kingdom and European Economic Area: the UK GDPR and EU GDPR. United States: applicable state privacy laws (such as the CCPA/CPRA in California) and COPPA for children. Elsewhere: your local data protection law, together with the baseline protections set out on this page.

Account information: your email address, a display name, and your role in the family (parent or co-parent). Passwords are stored only as salted hashes by our authentication provider — we never see them. If you sign in with Google or Apple we receive your email address and name only.

Family content you create: family and child names, ages, avatars, interests and goals; calendar events; routines, chores and rewards; mood and wellbeing check-ins; family meeting notes; consequence logs; meal plans and shopping lists.

Technical information: basic request data needed to run and secure the service, including the IP address used when a kid device code is entered, kept solely to block guessing attacks.

We do not use advertising SDKs, analytics trackers, or third-party marketing tools, and we do not build advertising profiles.

Solely to provide the app: syncing your family plan across the parents' devices and any kid device, showing age-appropriate suggestions, keeping your account secure, and responding to support requests.

Our lawful basis. Under the UK/EU GDPR we rely on performance of our contract with you (running the app you signed up for), our legitimate interests in keeping the service secure and preventing abuse, your consent as the parent or guardian for children's data, and legal obligation where we must keep records. Under POPIA the equivalent justifications are performance of a contract, our legitimate interests, and the consent of a competent person for a child's information.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are used in United States state privacy laws.

Parents in the same household see everything in the family. A co-parent in a separate household sees only the children you explicitly share, plus events you mark as shared — never your private calendar events, meal plans, shopping list, meetings or consequence log. A kid device sees only that child's chores, routines and rewards.

Access is enforced in the database with row-level security, not only in the app interface. We never sell your data and never share it with advertisers.

We use a managed cloud platform to host the application and database and to send authentication emails such as confirmations and password resets. These providers process data on our instructions only. If you sign in with Google or Apple, that provider handles the sign-in itself.

Paid subscriptions are sold through Paddle.com, our online reseller and Merchant of Record. Paddle receives the billing details you enter at checkout and processes them as an independent controller for payment, invoicing, tax compliance and order support. We never see or store your card details.

Family Thrive is run from South Africa on managed cloud infrastructure, and our providers and Paddle operate data centres and support teams in other countries, including the United States and the European Union. That means your information may be transferred across borders — including out of South Africa, the United Kingdom and the EEA — so we can run the service for you.

We only make those transfers where the law allows it: under POPIA section 72, on the basis that the recipient is bound by contractual terms giving effectively similar protection, or with your consent; and for UK/EU data, on the basis of an adequacy decision or the Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK Addendum where relevant), together with the technical safeguards described under Security below. You can ask us for details of the safeguards used at familythrivetechnologies@gmail.com.

Family Thrive uses only what it needs to work. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies, and we do not sell or share your data for advertising.

Essential storage: your sign-in session is kept in your browser's local storage so you stay logged in, and small preference values (such as the child last selected in Kid Mode, reminder settings and consent you have given at sign-up) are stored on your device.

Payments: when you open checkout, Paddle sets the cookies it needs to process your order securely and prevent fraud.

You can clear this at any time through your browser or device settings, or by signing out. Clearing essential storage will sign you out.

Family content is kept while your account is active. Mood and consequence entries are automatically limited by the retention window you choose in Settings (24 months by default). Kid-code attempt records are kept for 24 hours. When you delete your account, your family's data is deleted along with it.

Wherever you live, you can access and correct your data directly in the app, and Settings lets you export everything as a file and permanently delete your account and family data. On top of that you have the right to ask us to correct or delete information, to object to or restrict how we use it, to receive it in a portable format, and to withdraw a consent you have given (which does not affect what we did before you withdrew it).

United States residents may additionally request the categories and specific pieces of personal information we hold, ask us to delete or correct them, and opt out of any sale or sharing — we do neither. We will never treat you differently for exercising a privacy right.

Email familythrivetechnologies@gmail.com for any request we can't handle in-app. We respond within 30 days (one month for UK/EU requests), and we may ask you to confirm your identity first so we don't hand your family's data to someone else.

Please come to us first at familythrivetechnologies@gmail.com — most things we can fix quickly. You also have the right to complain to a regulator: the Information Regulator of South Africa, the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom, or the data protection authority in your own country or EU member state.

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is scoped per family by row-level security, passwords are checked against known breach lists, and kid-code entry is rate limited and locked out after repeated failures.

We'll update this page when our practices change and will ask you to re-accept if the change is material.