Privacy policy

Who we are

HouseHold is made by Household Technology Inc., a company federally incorporated in Canada and based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. This policy covers the HouseHold app (iOS and web) and this website. If you have a question about this policy or your data, email us at contact@householdtech.ca. A founder reads every message, and we answer privacy inquiries within 30 days.

Guest mode: nothing leaves your device

You can use the HouseHold iOS app without creating an account. In guest mode, all of your data (your calendar, meals, recipes, and grocery lists) stays on your device. We don't see it, and it isn't sent to our servers, unless and until you choose to create an account and move your data across. If you never create an account, we never receive anything about your household. The web version of HouseHold is for signed-in accounts only, so guest mode is not available there.

What we collect if you create an account

Creating an account sends the following to our servers:

• Your email address, your first name, and your last name if you choose to give it.
• The household data you enter into the app: household names, events, meals, recipes, grocery lists, custom lists, meal suggestions and votes, and the roles, labels, and colours set for household members.
• If you invite someone to your household by email, the email address you invite is stored with that invitation.
• If you import a recipe from a link, our server fetches that web page on your behalf to read the recipe.
• When you sign in, a session record that may include your device's network address and the app or browser it identifies itself as. Sessions expire automatically.
• If you turn on push notifications, a device token that tells us where to deliver them (see below).

Your password is sent to our servers when you create your account or sign in, and is hashed there using Better Auth, an open-source authentication library. We store only the hash and never the password itself.

Where your data lives and how it travels

Account data is stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted on Amazon Web Services infrastructure in Canada (the ca-central-1 region), so your data stays in Canada. Every connection between your device and our servers is encrypted in transit over HTTPS.

Push notifications

If you turn on push notifications, the app registers a device token with our servers so we know where to deliver the notifications you've enabled. Turning notifications off stops us sending them. The token is removed when you sign out. If you delete the app without signing out, the token simply stops working; we remove it automatically once we detect that notifications can no longer be delivered to it, or as part of deleting your account, whichever comes first.

Advertising

The free tier of HouseHold shows contextual advertising from third-party advertising partners. Contextual means the ads are chosen based on the screen you are looking at, not on who you are: they are not personalised to you, they do not use your household data, and they do not use cross-app tracking. Before any ads go live, we will name our advertising partners in this policy and update the effective date. Nothing about the household data you enter is sold or shared with advertisers.

What we don't do

We don't sell your personal data to anyone, for any reason. We don't use third-party analytics or tracking in the app or on this website, and we don't build advertising profiles of you. This website sets no cookies of any kind and loads no third-party scripts. The launch list on this site is a plain email link: if you email us to join it, we keep your message and email address only to reply and to let you know when HouseHold launches. No third-party form provider is involved.

Deleting your data

You can delete your account and its data yourself from within the app. If you would rather ask us to do it, email contact@householdtech.ca from the email address on the account. We use that matching address to confirm the request is yours; if we cannot match it, we'll reply and ask you to resend from the account address before we act. We answer privacy inquiries, including emailed deletion requests, within 30 days of receiving them.

Deletion covers your account, your sign-in sessions, your name and email address, and any push tokens registered to you. Household data is shared: if you are the only member of a household, everything in it is deleted with your account. If other people are still members, the household and its events, meals, recipes, and lists stay with them, and your name is removed from the membership; entries you created remain because they belong to the household rather than to you. If you want specific entries removed as well, tell us and we'll remove what we can.

Children

HouseHold is built for families, but accounts are created and managed by adults. Children may appear in a household as members with a name, label, and colour, but they don't hold their own accounts or log in directly.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, we'll update this page and the effective date at the top.