Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-09-14

At ChoreAlert ("we," "us," "our"), we built this Service to be simple and privacy-respecting, and this policy reflects that — we only collect what we need to run the Service, and nothing more. This page describes what the Service actually does today, not what it might do one day.

The Short Version

• We don't sell your data, and we never will.
• There are no ads, no analytics, no tracking pixels, and no third-party scripts of any kind. Every file the Service loads is served by us.
• We don't collect phone numbers, and we never text or call anyone.
• Children in your household don't have accounts. We never ask anyone's age or date of birth — the only age-related question anywhere is a yes/no box confirming the account holder is an adult.
• You can delete everything yourself, at any time, and it is really deleted.

What We Collect, and Why

• Organizer account: your email address and a securely hashed version of your password. Your two-factor sign-in codes are sent to that email address, and we store the settings that make two-factor authentication work. If you choose to use an authenticator app, that setting is a secret this account already had, kept encrypted — we don't learn anything new about you. If you set up a passkey, we store its public key, an identifier for it, and the nickname you give it; a public key cannot be used to sign in as you, and your fingerprint or face never leaves your device and is never sent to us.
• Your confirmation that you're an adult: when you create an account you tick a box confirming you're 18 or older, and we record the date you did. We don't ask for your age or date of birth, and we don't check the answer — this is a record that we asked and what you said, nothing more.
• Beta access: ChoreAlert is currently invitation-only. We store the email address you gave us so the Service can recognize it when you register.
• Household members: a name, and nothing else about who they are. See "Children and Household Members" below.
• Household settings: your household's name and timezone, so chores are scheduled correctly.
• Chore data: the chores and tasks you create and their history — who was assigned what, when it was completed, deferred, or missed. This is the core of the Service, and it is what streaks, completion rates and summaries are calculated from.
• Earnings and payment records: if you use the paid-chores feature, we store the dollar amount attached to a chore or task, and a record of each payment you tell us you made to a member — the amount, the date, how it was paid (for example cash or a deposit to an allowance account), an optional note, and an optional reference such as a transfer ID or check number that you enter so the entry can be matched against your bank's own record. See "Money" below, which explains the limits of this clearly.
• Device pairing: when a device is paired, we store a randomly generated device token and, for organizer and member devices, a hashed PIN — never anything read from the device itself. See "Device Pairing" below.
• Push notifications: if you turn on reminders for a paired device, that device's browser gives us a push subscription (an endpoint URL and two encryption keys) so we can deliver notifications to it. We don't collect this unless you turn reminders on, it is tied to that one device, and it is deleted when you turn reminders off or the device is unpaired.
• Contact form: if you write to us, we store the name, email address and message you send, so we can reply. A copy is also forwarded to our own support mailbox through the email provider named below, so we see it promptly. That copy is plain text with links, email addresses and markup stripped out of the message before it is sent — a precaution against junk submissions, not a change to what we keep. What you actually wrote is what we store.
• Technical records: our servers keep ordinary logs of requests to the Service, and we record IP addresses temporarily in order to rate-limit sign-in attempts and invitation links — this is what stops someone guessing passwords or hammering the Service. Our logs are configured to mask email addresses. We don't build profiles from any of this, and we don't use it to track you between visits.

What We Don't Collect

We think what a service leaves out matters as much as what it keeps.

• No advertising or analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising network, no tracking pixel, no social media button, and no third-party script anywhere in the Service. Every stylesheet, font and script is hosted by us and served from our own domain, enforced by a strict Content Security Policy — so no third party is contacted by your browser when you use ChoreAlert, and none of them can learn that you did.
• No cross-site tracking, and no data brokers. We don't buy information about you from anyone, and we don't combine your household's data with anything from outside it.
• No phone numbers. We don't ask anyone for one — not for sign-in codes, not for invitations, not for reminders — and we never send text messages or make calls. Phone numbers given to earlier versions of the Service have been deleted.
• No location data. We never ask for or collect the location of any person or device.
• No card details. The Service is free, and we do not take payments from you. See "Money" below.
• No marketing email. The only email we send you is about your own account: confirming your address, your two-factor codes, a notice whenever the way you sign in changes (a passkey added or removed, or your codes switched between email and an authenticator app), password resets, invitations, and account deletion. If you ask for help at the two-factor step, your email address is sent to our own support mailbox so we can reply. There is no newsletter to unsubscribe from.
• No ages or dates of birth, for anyone. Confirming you're 18 or older is a yes/no answer — it tells us nothing about how old you are, and we never ask about a household member's age at all.

Children and Household Members

ChoreAlert is designed for households, which usually means children are the people doing the chores. We handle that in the way that collects the least:

• Only adults create accounts. An account with a login, an email address and a password belongs to an organizer, who must be an adult responsible for the household. Children do not create accounts, do not give us an email address, and do not set a password.
• What exists about a child is what you entered: a name — a first name or nickname is enough, and we recommend that — and the record of their chores. Nothing else.
• We have no way to contact a child. No phone number, no email address. The only notifications a member ever receives are ones turned on for their own paired device.
• You are in control of it. As the organizer, you can view, change or delete any member's information at any time from the Household page.
• We never ask a member's age. Because we don't ask, we don't know, and we have no interest in finding out.
• Nothing about a member is used for anything except running your household's chores. No advertising, no profiling, no sharing.

If you believe a child's information has ended up in the Service in a way you didn't intend, contact us and we will remove it.

Money

Two things are worth being precise about, because the word "payments" can suggest more than is happening here.

• ChoreAlert does not move money. We are not a bank, a payment processor, or a money transmitter. We never touch your funds, never hold a balance for anyone, and cannot send, receive or transfer anything. When you record a payment, you are writing down something that already happened between you and a member of your household — like a note in a ledger.
• We don't take card or bank details. We never ask for a card number, an account number, or banking credentials, and there is nowhere in the Service to enter one. The optional "reference" field is for a number you already have from your own bank — a transfer ID or check number — so that a line here can be matched to a line on your own statement. Please don't put an account number in it.

Device Pairing & Your Privacy

ChoreAlert is a web app, not an app-store app — pairing a device just links it to a household member's chores, and it's separate from adding a home screen or desktop icon for quick access, which is a shortcut to the website, no different from bookmarking it, not something ChoreAlert installs or controls. Either way, this is designed to collect as little as possible: we don't track the device's location and don't collect any information about the device itself — only the name a household organizer enters. The pairing itself is just a revocable token: if a device is lost or a member leaves the household, the organizer can revoke it instantly from My Account or the Household page, and it immediately loses access.

To pair a device that isn't in front of you, you can share its pairing link yourself, from your own phone or computer. ChoreAlert doesn't send that link, and doesn't learn who you sent it to or how.

A household can also pair a shared board — a tablet or screen left up somewhere like a kitchen. Because anyone walking past can read it, a board is deliberately limited: it shows only today's chores and who they belong to. It never shows earnings, balances or payments, never shows a member's own private reminders, and cannot reach any other part of the Service. Like any paired device, it can be revoked at any time.

Cookies

We use cookies only to keep you signed in and to remember which device you're using. They are all set by ChoreAlert itself; there are no third-party cookies, and none of them are used for advertising or analytics. That is why the Service has no cookie banner — there is nothing optional to consent to.

• Session and sign-in cookies keep you logged in while you use the Service, and — only if you tick "remember me" — for up to 14 days afterwards.
• A two-factor cookie, again only if you ask for it, lets a browser you've used before skip the emailed code for up to 14 days. It never skips your password.
• Device cookies identify a paired organizer device, member device, or shared board. Revoking a device makes its cookie useless immediately.

Signing out, or using "Sign out everywhere" in My Account, invalidates these.

How We Use Your Information

• To run the Service — schedule chores, send the reminders you asked for, keep your household's records, and show your dashboard.
• To keep accounts secure — two-factor codes, and rate limiting to block guessing attacks.
• To communicate with you about your own account, by email.
• To fix and improve the Service, using our own logs and whatever you choose to tell us.
• To comply with legal obligations.

We Do Not Sell Your Data

We will never sell your data. This isn't a data business — it's a household tool we intend to charge a small amount for instead, exactly so we don't have to. We share information only:

• With the service providers who make the Service work: our email provider, for the account emails listed above; your browser vendor's own push service (Google, Mozilla, or Apple) when you have turned on notifications, which is the only way a notification can reach your device; and the hosting provider that runs our servers and database. Each receives only what that job requires.
• If required by law.
• To protect the rights, safety, or property of ChoreAlert, our users, or the public.

Any future third-party integration will be evaluated first against the same standard we hold ourselves to: does it respect your privacy, and does it keep the Service simple? If it doesn't, we won't add it. If we ever introduce a paid plan, payments would be handled by a third-party payment processor, we would not store your full card details, and we would update this policy before that change took effect.

How Long We Keep Things

• Your household's data is kept while your account exists. Chore history stays so that streaks, completion rates and summaries remain accurate.
• Completed one-off tasks are cleared automatically after 30 days, unless a payment amount was attached to them, in which case they're kept as part of that member's earnings record.
• Payment records are kept for as long as the household exists. A payment you record is never edited or deleted — a mistake is marked void and stays visible, so the ledger can still be reconciled against your bank's record.
• Account deletion links expire after one hour.
• Rate-limiting records expire on their own, within hours.

Security of Your Information

Passwords are hashed with Argon2 and are never stored or recoverable in readable form. Two-factor authentication is mandatory for every organizer account: the emailed code is always available, and you can additionally use an authenticator app or a passkey. A passkey can sign you in on its own, because unlocking it with your fingerprint, face, or device PIN proves two things at once — that you hold the device and that it is you. None of these methods needs a phone number, and we never ask for one. Traffic is encrypted in transit, session cookies are restricted to our own site, and a strict Content Security Policy means your browser will not load code from anywhere but us. We take these measures seriously, but no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, so we can't guarantee absolute security.

Your Choices

• See and change it: everything we hold about your household is visible in the Service itself, and you can edit or remove members, chores and records at any time.
• Revoke a device at any time from My Account or the Household page.
• Turn notifications off from the same toggle that turned them on, which deletes that device's push subscription.
• Sign out everywhere from My Account, which invalidates every session and remembered device at once.
• Delete your account and your data. You can do this yourself from My Account. We email you a link to confirm, and the final step asks for your password. If you are the only organizer in your household, deleting your account deletes the whole household — every member, all chore history, and all earnings and payment records, for everyone in it. This cannot be undone, there is no backup we can restore from, and the Service tells you exactly what will be removed before you confirm.
• Withdraw your consent. Because everything the Service does with your information is needed to actually run your household's chores, there is no optional processing to switch off separately — so withdrawing consent means closing your account and deleting your data, using the same control described above. We'd rather say that plainly than offer a switch that doesn't do anything.

Where Your Data Is Held

ChoreAlert is operated from the United States, and your information is stored and processed there. If you use the Service from elsewhere, you're sending your information to the United States.

Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We'll post the new policy here and update the "Last updated" date. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the update.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or want something removed? Contact us.