Privacy
Last updated 1 September 2026
What we collect, why, and who else can see it.
What we never ask for
- Your real name. A display name is all we store, and it can be anything. Most people here use something that is not their name.
- The name of the person you care for. There is no field for it anywhere in the system.
- Your address, your phone number, or your location. Nothing in Kind Soup reads GPS. You can tell us your town if you want to, which is below.
- Any diagnosis or medical record. Care marks are self-selected labels you choose from a list; they are not medical data and nobody verifies them.
What we store
Your email address. Used only to sign you in and recover your account. If you sign in with Apple and use their private relay, we never receive a real address at all.
Your profile. Display name, picture, care marks, how long you have been caring, and the optional note you write for your circles.
Gender, if you provide it. Optional, and used only to decide which single-group circles are open to you. The same goes for whether you tell us you are trans.
What you write. Posts, replies and direct messages, stored so the people you sent them to can read them.
The year you were born. Asked once, because Kind Soup is for adults and that has to be checked. It also lets the feed lean gently toward people near your own age.
Your town or city, if you give it. Optional, and used to put you in a circle for your area, so the people you meet are near enough to meet. You can clear it or leave the circle whenever you like.
Who you look after. A parent, a child, a partner, and so on. It decides what we call you beside your name — parent, partner, sibling — and what your feed leans toward.
What you read and what you use. Which posts you have opened, and which parts of the app you tap, recorded against your account. This is how we know a circle has gone quiet, whether a feature is worth keeping, and whether people are finding what they came for.
Photos you attach. Location and camera metadata are stripped on your device before upload. Images live in private storage and are served through links that expire within the hour, so a photo cannot be forwarded by copying its address.
Basic technical data. Your device sends an IP address when it connects, which our hosting provider logs for security and abuse prevention. We do not use it to build a profile of you.
What stays private even from us
Kept posts. Private, and the author of a post you keep is never told.
Direct messages. Not moderation material. A moderator sees one only if you or the person you were writing to reports it.
Anonymous posts
A post marked anonymous shows no name and no picture to any other member, permanently. Your care marks still show, because the room needs to know what you are speaking for.
We do store which account wrote it, so that a report about it can be acted on. A moderator can reveal that only by opening a report, and the act of looking is itself written to a permanent audit log.
Who can see what
Your profile. Anyone signed in who shares a circle with you can see your display name, your picture, your care marks, the word for who you look after, your headline and the note you write for your circles, how long you have been caring, and roughly how long you have been here.
Not on your profile: your email address, your gender, the year you were born, your town, and the list of who you look after. Those are used for the things described above and are not shown to another member.
Your posts. A post goes either to one circle or to everyone on Kind Soup, and you choose which before you send it. A circle post is readable by the active members of that circle, and by an administrator. A post to everyone is readable by every signed-in member.
About that administrator. One person at Kind Soup can read inside any circle. That is how someone answers a report about a room they are not in, and what lets us keep the child safety commitments we publish. The platform administrator only, not the caregiver moderating your circle. Circle moderators see their own circles and nothing else.
Neither is public. Nothing on Kind Soup is indexed by search engines, reachable by a link, or visible without an account. A logged-out request returns nothing at all.
Who we share data with
- Supabase hosts the database, authentication and file storage.
- Resend delivers your sign-in emails, and therefore sees your email address.
- Expo delivers app updates and, if you enable them, push notifications.
- Vercel hosts this website. It does not hold any member data.
Nobody else. We do not sell data, and there is no advertising.
Where your data lives
Our database is hosted in the United States. If you are elsewhere, using Kind Soup means your data is transferred there.
How long we keep it
What you write stays until you delete it or delete your account. Sign-in codes expire within the hour. Data export files are removed after seven days.
Moderation records are the one exception, and they outlive your account: if action was taken about you, a row naming the action, the date and the moderator survives deletion, with your identifying details removed. Otherwise anyone removed could come back by deleting and registering again.
Your rights over your data
Depending on where you live you may have a legal right to access, correct, export or erase your data, and to object to how it is used. You have all of them here, wherever you live:
- Access and export. Settings → Download everything I’ve written produces a file containing your profile, posts, replies, messages and reactions.
- Correction. Everything on your profile is editable in the app.
- Erasure. See the next section, and Deleting your account.
If you are in the UK or EU: our lawful basis for storing your profile and what you write is performance of a contract: we cannot run the service without it. For security logging and abuse prevention it is legitimate interest. Gender, where you provide it, is optional and given with your consent, and you can clear it at any time.
Deleting
Three separate things:
- Pause my account hides everything of yours. Nothing is visible to anyone. Nothing is deleted. Reversible.
- Delete everything I’ve written removes every post, reply and message, along with the replies people left on your posts. Your account remains. Not reversible.
- Delete my account does all of the above plus the account itself, your name, your picture and your circles. Removed from our backups within 30 days. Not reversible.
Cookies and tracking
No advertising trackers, no third-party analytics and no pixels, here or in the app. The app keeps your session on your device so you do not have to sign in every time, and this website stores nothing at all.
Anything we add goes in the list above, and it will never be an advertiser.
What we can see
Keeping this a safe place means we can see what happens here: what gets written, which posts get read, and which parts of the app get used. That is how a moderator reaches a cruel reply before you have to, and how we know what is worth building next.
That is all we use it for, and if you close your account it goes with you.
Children
Kind Soup is for adults. You must be 18 or older to have an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger we will remove it.
How we keep it safe
Everything travels encrypted, and the database decides what you are allowed to read rather than the app deciding for it. A bug in the app cannot show you a circle you are not in, because the app is not what is holding the door.
Photos live in private storage behind links that expire within the hour. Access to the live database is limited to the person running Kind Soup. And when an administrator reveals who wrote an anonymous post, the act of looking is itself written to a permanent log.
If something goes wrong
If member data is ever exposed, we will tell the people affected directly, promptly, and say plainly what happened.
Changes to this page
If what we do with your data changes materially, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect.
Contact
Questions, or a request to access or erase your data: privacy@kindsoup.com.
If you are in the UK or EU and think we have handled your data badly, you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.