Privacy Policy
Last updated 25 September 2026
ChoreLock is a family app in two parts: a parent app and a child app. A parent sets up chores, app limits and bedtimes; the child app runs on the child's phone and enforces them. This policy covers both.
It is written to be read, not to be survived. If anything here is unclear, ask us and we will fix the wording.
The short version
- We collect what the app needs to do its job, and nothing else.
- We do not sell, rent or share your data. There are no advertisers, no data brokers and no marketing partners.
- There is no analytics or tracking SDK in either app. No Google Analytics, no Firebase Analytics, no Crashlytics, no third-party telemetry of any kind.
- We do not use advertising IDs, and we do not read any hardware identifier — no IMEI, no serial number, no Android ID, no MAC address.
- Your family's data is visible only to devices that a parent has paired into your family.
Who controls this data
The parent who creates a family is the person in charge of it. They decide which children are added, what is measured, and which devices are paired. ChoreLock stores that family's data on their behalf so their devices can stay in sync.
What the parent app collects
- Family and child profiles — the family name, each child's display name, chosen avatar, and birth year (year only, never a full date of birth).
- What you set up — chores, point values, rewards, app lock rules, screen-time limits and bedtime schedules.
- Approval history — which chores were approved or rejected, when, and the first name of the parent who did it.
- A push notification token for the parent's device, so we can tell them a chore is waiting for approval. Only parent devices register for push; the child app does not.
What the child app collects
This is the part that matters most, so it is spelled out per platform. The two platforms genuinely differ — this is not a policy choice we made, it is what each operating system permits an app to see.
| Data | Android | iOS | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Child's name, avatar, birth year | Collected | Collected | Set by the parent, so the right rules reach the right child. |
| List of apps installed on the child's phone | Collected | Not collected — not possible | So a parent can choose which apps to lock. On Android we list only apps that have a launcher icon, not every package on the phone. |
| Per-app screen-time minutes | Collected | Not collected — not possible | So screen-time limits can be enforced and shown to the parent. |
| Chore completion photos | Collected | Collected | Only when a parent marks a chore as requiring photo proof, and only the photo the child chooses to submit. |
| Points earned and rewards redeemed | Collected | Collected | The points ledger the child and parent both see. |
| Last check-in time, and gaps in coverage | Collected | Collected | So a parent can tell that the child app has stopped running. Explained below. |
| An anonymous device identifier | Collected | Collected | A random ID we generate on first run. It is not derived from the hardware and is not shared with anyone. |
| Location | Never | Never | ChoreLock does not request or use location at all. |
| Contacts, messages, call logs, browsing history | Never | Never | ChoreLock does not request or use any of these. |
| Notification contents | Never | Never | Explained in detail below. |
Why iOS collects less
Apple's Screen Time framework does not hand an app the information Android's does. When a parent picks apps to limit on iOS, the system returns an opaque token — the app can show that app's name and icon on screen, but cannot read which app it is, so there is nothing to send us. Usage totals work the same way: iOS reports only that a threshold has been crossed, and the actual minute counts are readable only inside a system component that our app is not permitted to read back from.
The practical result: on iOS, the list of your child's apps and their usage minutes never leave the device, because our app never learns them.
About "gaps in coverage"
If the child app is force-stopped or uninstalled, it stops reporting. To tell that apart from a phone that is simply switched off, the child app records how long the screen was switched on during the stretch it was not running, and reports that number when it comes back. This is a single duration — "the screen was on for 40 minutes" — and carries nothing about what was on the screen.
Permissions, and what each is actually used for
The child app asks for several Android permissions that deserve a plain explanation.
- Usage access — to see which app is in the foreground so a locked app can be blocked, and to count screen-time minutes.
- Display over other apps — to draw the lock screen on top of an app the child is not currently allowed to use.
- Notification access — see the box below. We do not read notifications.
- Run in the background, and start at boot — so limits still apply after the phone restarts.
- Camera — only to take a chore photo, and only when the child chooses to.
Notification access: we do not read your notifications
Android requires an app to hold notification access before it may pause media playing in another app. That is the only reason ChoreLock asks for it — so that when an app is locked, whatever it was playing actually stops.
The part of our app that receives notifications is deliberately empty: the callbacks Android provides for reading notification content are not implemented. ChoreLock never reads, stores, transmits or displays the contents of any notification.
What never leaves the device
- The parent's PIN. It is stored only as a salted hash on the parent's own phone. Neither the PIN nor the hash is ever uploaded.
- Original photo files. Only the compressed copy attached to a chore is uploaded; the file in the phone's own storage stays there.
- Everything, until a family is paired. ChoreLock keeps its data in a local database on each device. Syncing exists so that a parent's and a child's phone can agree with each other — not because the data belongs in the cloud.
Where your data is stored, and who can reach it
Synced data is held in Google Firebase (Cloud Firestore, Cloud Storage and Firebase Cloud Messaging), operated by Google LLC on our behalf. Google processes it as our service provider and does not use it for its own purposes. Data may be stored on servers in the United States.
Access is restricted at the database level to devices that have joined your family. A device joins only by entering or scanning a linking code that a parent controls. A family is limited to two parent devices.
We do not disclose your data to anyone else, except where we are legally required to.
Children's privacy
ChoreLock is meant to be set up by a parent or guardian for their own child. A child profile — including the child's first name and birth year — is created by the parent, and a child's phone can only join a family using a code that the parent provides.
We ask for birth year rather than a full date of birth because it is the least precise thing that still tells us the age range the app serves. We do not use it to build a profile of your child, and we do not advertise to anyone.
A parent can see, change and delete what is recorded about their child from within the parent app, and can request a full erase at any time — see Deleting your data.
COPPA and GDPR
Two laws in particular govern what an app like this may do with a child's information: the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), whose Article 8 covers children specifically. This is how ChoreLock meets them.
A parent consents by setting the family up. Both laws ask that a parent or guardian agrees before a child's information is collected. In ChoreLock that is not a box to tick and forget — it is the only way the app can work. The parent installs the parent app, creates the family, types the child's name and birth year themselves, and generates a code. Until they hand that code over, the child's phone belongs to no family and sends us nothing.
We collect the least we can. Birth year, never a full date of birth. No location, ever. No contacts, no messages, and none of the contents of any notification.
No advertising, and nothing sold or shared. There is no advertising in ChoreLock, no advertising identifier, and no analytics or tracking of any kind — not our own and not a third party's. Nothing about your family is sold, rented or shared with anyone.
A parent stays in control of it. They can see everything recorded about their child, change it, delete individual records, or erase the family entirely from inside the app. We do not charge for any of that and we do not ask why.
If you believe we hold information about a child that a parent did not agree to, write to chorelockapp@gmail.com and we will delete it.
How long we keep things
Your family's data is kept for as long as you use ChoreLock, because the app's whole purpose is to show you a history — points earned, chores done, limits applied. It is removed when you delete the relevant record in the app, or when you ask us to erase everything.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your data, and to object to how it is handled. In the EU and UK those rights come from the GDPR; several US states grant similar ones. The parent app already gives you direct access to all of it; for anything else, including a full erase, write to us and we will act on it. We do not charge for this and we will not ask you to justify the request.
In GDPR terms, the parent who creates a family decides what is recorded about their children and why, and we hold it on their behalf to keep their family's devices in sync. Our lawful basis for handling a child's information is the consent of the parent who set the family up — given by creating the child's profile and pairing their phone — which they can withdraw at any time by deleting the child, or the whole family, from within the app.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect, we will update the date at the top and describe the change on this page. We will not quietly broaden what we collect.
Contact
Email chorelockapp@gmail.com. A real person reads it.