Privacy Policy

Last updated 2026-11-01

Pals exists to help you stay in touch with people you already know. It collects the minimum needed to do that, never sells or shares data with advertisers, and lets you export or delete everything at any time.

What Pals stores

• Your account. When you sign in with Apple we receive a stable identifier and, if you allow it, your name and email address (Apple can give us a private relay address). Email is used only for the daily digest fallback.
• Friends you add. Names, the group you put them in (which sets how often to check in), their birthday (from Contacts or added by you), and their contact photo if they have one in Contacts. Notes you write about them, and their phone numbers and email addresses, are encrypted on your device before they are sent (see below): our servers cannot read them. Contacts you import from the Contacts app are stored only for the people you explicitly select.
• Check-ins. When you log a check-in, or when the Mac app finds a matching message or call, Pals stores who, when, the channel (iMessage, FaceTime, phone, in person) and the direction. A note you add to a check-in is encrypted on your device. Pals never stores message text, call audio, or attachments.
• Device tokens. A push-notification token for each device where you turn on reminders, used only to deliver your digest.
• Digest log. One record per day noting that a digest was sent and how many friends it mentioned.

Encrypted on your devices

Your account has its own key, made on your iPhone and kept in your iCloud Keychain, which carries it to your other Apple devices. It never reaches our servers. With it, the apps encrypt your notes and check-in notes, and each phone number and email address, before anything is sent. For matching messages and calls, the server keeps a fingerprint of each number or email: made with your key, it cannot be turned back into the number, and is useless to anyone without the key. What our servers hold for these is unreadable to us, to our hosting provider, and to anyone who might get hold of a copy of the database.

You can show the key in Settings to set up another device. If it is lost on every device, encrypted notes cannot be recovered by anyone, including us; numbers and email addresses come back from Contacts.

Keeping friends up to date with Contacts

If you allow Pals to access Contacts, the iPhone app checks your contacts when you open it and when Contacts changes. For people you have already added, it updates their name, phone numbers, email addresses, birthday and photo to match their contact card. Your other contacts are read only on your iPhone to find those matches; nothing about people you have not added leaves your device. Deleting someone from Contacts never deletes them from Pals, and a birthday you added in Pals is kept if their contact card has none. You can stop this at any time by turning off Contacts access for Pals in iOS Settings.

How the Mac app reads Messages and calls

With your permission (Full Disk Access) the Mac app reads the local iMessage and call history databases on your Mac. It extracts only timestamps, direction and the phone/email handle, and matches the handle against the friends you added by its fingerprint, made on your Mac with your key. Only the fingerprint is sent with each check-in record, never the number or email. Messages from people who are not in your friends list are ignored and never leave your Mac.

Where data lives

Your data is stored in a Supabase project (Postgres, hosted on AWS in the United States) protected by row-level security so only your signed-in account can read it. Push notifications are delivered through Apple Push Notification service; fallback emails, when enabled, are sent through Resend.

If one of our server functions fails unexpectedly, or the app crashes, an error report is sent to Sentry, our error-monitoring service, so we can fix it. A report holds the error message and where it happened (for a server function, the address of the request; for the app, the device model and system version); it never includes your friends’ details or message content, and it is not used for analytics or advertising.

So the app opens quickly and widgets can show your friends, a copy of your friends list and their photos is kept on your devices. It is removed when you sign out or delete your account.

What Pals does not do

• No advertising, tracking, or analytics SDKs.
• No selling, renting, or sharing of your data with third parties, other than the service providers named above that run Pals for us.
• No reading of message content.
• No access to friends’ data beyond what you add yourself.

Your controls

• Export. Settings → Export my data in the iPhone app downloads everything as JSON, with notes and numbers decrypted on your phone. The account page downloads the same, with those fields still encrypted (the website does not have your key).
• Delete.Settings → Delete account, or the account page, permanently removes your account and all data within seconds. Our hosting provider’s backups may hold a copy until they expire a short time later.
• Pause. Digests can be paused at any time in Settings.

Children

Pals is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect their data.

Changes and contact

We will update this page when practices change and note the date above. Questions: 1606underground@gmail.com.