Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 4, 2026

Kinship is a recovery app. The fact that you use it says something private about you, and what you write in it is more private still. This policy explains what we collect, what we do not, who else touches it, and what you can do about it.

It applies to the Kinship app and to trykinship.app. It forms part of our Terms of Service.

1. Who we are

FourSeven Creative LLC is the controller of the personal information described here.

2. Consumer health data

Some of what you choose to record in Kinship, such as what you are quitting, your day count, urges you log, and what you write to Kin, may be treated as consumer health data or as sensitive personal information under laws including the Washington My Health My Data Act, Nevada SB 370, and the California Privacy Rights Act.

We collect that information only to provide the features you are using. Most of it never leaves your device at all, and the backup we hold is encrypted with a key we do not have (see Section 3). We do not sell it, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not use it to profile you. We do not offer it, and will not offer it, for sale under any circumstances. Where the law requires your consent or authorisation before a specific use, we will ask for it separately and plainly.

We are not a HIPAA covered entity or business associate, and Kinship is not a healthcare provider, so HIPAA does not apply to this information.

3. What stays on your device

Your sobriety clock, urge logs, daily logs, savings, and your reasons for quitting are stored on your device. Two backups exist so a lost phone does not cost you your progress, and both are yours:

• Your clock (your start date and what you are quitting, nothing else) is saved to your own iCloud under your Apple ID.
• Your full history is saved as an end-to-end encrypted copy. The key is generated on your device and kept in your iCloud Keychain. It never reaches us. We hold only ciphertext we cannot read, not linked to your phone number. Deleting your data destroys the key, which makes every stored copy permanently unreadable, including ours.

Your location never leaves your device. The nearby filter measures distance on the phone itself. That coordinate is never uploaded, stored, or shared.

4. What we collect

• Your phone number, to sign you in and keep the account yours. Never shown to other members.
• Your handle, the only identity other members see.
• Optional profile details: a first name (used only to greet you and sign emails, never shown to other members), a bio, a general metro area, photos, and social links.
• What you share: posts, comments, likes, group posts, and the groups and events you join or create.
• Direct messages (see Section 7).
• Who you follow, request to follow, and block.
• Your email address, if you give one, for occasional announcements.
• A push notification token, if you turn notifications on.
• Whether your Kinship Plus entitlement is active. Apple processes payment and we never receive your card details.
• Reports you file, so we can act on them.
• Basic technical information necessary to operate and secure the service, such as the timestamps and identifiers our database and server functions record when your device makes a request, and the abuse-prevention signals Firebase App Check produces.

We do not collect analytics, usage tracking, advertising identifiers, or crash telemetry, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

5. How we use it, and on what basis

We use personal information to provide and operate the service, to keep your account yours, to deliver the notifications you asked for, to enforce our Terms and keep the community safe, to respond when you contact us, and to comply with law.

If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, our legal bases are: performing our contract with you (running your account and the features you use); your consent (optional profile details, notifications, email announcements, location, and Kinship Plus, each of which you can withdraw at any time); our legitimate interests (security, abuse prevention, and keeping the service working); and compliance with legal obligations. Where we process special category data about health, we rely on your explicit consent, which you give by choosing to record it, and which you can withdraw by deleting it or your account.

We do not use your personal information to make decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects, and we do not use it for automated profiling.

6. Kin, and Kinship Plus

Free Kin runs entirely on your device. Nothing you say to it is sent anywhere.

Kinship Plus is powered by Anthropic's Claude. When you use it, your message and relevant context from your recovery profile, such as your day count and what you are working on, are sent to Anthropic to generate the reply. Anthropic processes it on our behalf under their commercial API terms and does not use it to train their models.

If you would rather nothing you write leaves your phone, do not use Kinship Plus. Free Kin, and every safety tool in the app, work without it.

7. Direct messages

Direct messages are private between you and the person you are messaging. Other members cannot see them, and the app gives no one, including us, a way to read them. Our security rules deliberately exclude staff and admins from message access, which is not true of the group content we moderate.

To be straight with you: direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted, unlike your recovery vault. They are stored in our database, so unlike the vault, which is mathematically unreadable to us, messages are technically reachable by us as the operator of that database. We do not read them and we have built no tool to. Please do not put anything in a message that you would be harmed by us being able to reach.

8. What other members see

Your public identity is always your handle. Your real name and phone number are shown to nobody, ever.

New accounts are private by default. Others see your handle, days sober, bio, general area, badges, and follower counts.

When you set up your profile you choose whether your photo is shown to the community. It is on by default, and you can change it any time in Edit Profile; with it off, others see an initials avatar instead. Accounts created before that choice existed keep the initials avatar unless you turn it on.

Your extra gallery photos and your social links stay hidden either way until you accept someone's follow request, and only someone you have accepted can message you. You can go public at any time in Edit Profile.

Who you follow, and who follows you, is as open as your account. While you are private, only someone whose follow request you have accepted can open those lists. On a public account, anyone signed in can. Either way the counts are visible on your profile.

Anything you post to the community can be seen, saved, or screenshotted by the people who can see it, and we cannot control what they do with it afterwards. Please post accordingly.

9. Who else touches it

We do not sell your personal information and never have, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We share it only with providers who process it on our instructions:

• Google Firebase: sign-in, database, file storage, notifications, and our server functions. Stored in the United States.
• Anthropic: Kinship Plus only, as described in Section 6.
• Apple: purchases and subscriptions. We never receive your payment details.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, in response to lawful legal process, to enforce our Terms, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone. If we are ever part of a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, personal information may transfer as part of that, and this policy will continue to apply until you are told otherwise.

10. International transfers

We operate from the United States and our providers store data there. If you use Kinship from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have different data protection laws. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards, including the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, for transfers out of the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom.

11. How long we keep it

We keep account information for as long as your account exists. Community content stays until you or we remove it. Reports are kept while we act on them and for a reasonable period afterwards, so repeat behaviour can be recognised. Backups are overwritten on a rolling basis. We may keep information longer where we must to comply with law, resolve a dispute, or enforce our agreements.

12. Security

We use industry-standard measures including encryption in transit, encryption at rest by our infrastructure provider, server-enforced access rules, and end-to-end encryption for your recovery vault. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that unauthorised access will never happen. If a breach affecting your personal information occurs, we will notify you and any regulator as the law requires.

13. Advertising

Kinship does not currently display advertising. The app contains no third-party advertising or analytics SDKs, and we do not use advertising identifiers or track you across other apps and websites. If that ever changes, we will update this policy and tell you in the app before it takes effect, and we will not use your consumer health data, or anything from your recovery vault, your daily logs, or your conversations with Kin, to target advertising.

14. Your choices and your rights

In the app you can: edit or clear any profile detail; stay private, which is the default; block anyone, silently, so they are not told; turn notifications off by category or entirely; delete your account; and opt out of emails via any unsubscribe link or by clearing your email in Edit Profile.

Wherever you live, including California under the CCPA and CPRA and the European Union and United Kingdom under the GDPR, you may ask us to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and to object to or restrict certain processing. We honour these rights for everyone, whether or not the law where you live requires it. Email hello@trykinship.app. We will verify your request through the account it concerns and respond within the time the law allows. You may use an authorised agent. We will never treat you differently or offer you a worse service for exercising a right.

We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of, and we treat a Global Privacy Control signal as a valid request regardless. If you are in the EEA or the UK you also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

15. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings. That erases your on-device recovery data and destroys your vault key, which makes every encrypted backup permanently unreadable, and it deletes your profile, your vault, your handle reservation, and your phone sign-in.

The limit, honestly: what you already shared into the community, including posts, comments, and messages you sent to other people, is not automatically pulled back, because the other person's copy of a conversation is not only yours to erase. If you want everything removed, email hello@trykinship.app and we will do it by hand.

16. Children

Kinship is for people 18 and older. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

17. Not a medical service

18. Changes to this policy

If we make a meaningful change we will update the date above, post the new version here and in the app, and tell you in the app where the change matters. Where the law requires your consent, we will ask for it before the change applies to you.

19. Contact