Kinly Privacy Policy

Last updated: June 22, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Kinly ("we", "us", "the app") collects, uses, and shares information when you use the Kinly mobile application. By creating an account or joining a family in Kinly, you agree to the practices described here.

If you have any questions, contact us at privacy@gokinly.com.

What Kinly is

Kinly is a family location-sharing and ride-coordination app. Members of a household ("a family") share their real-time location with each other, request rides from each other, and receive notifications about each other's arrivals and departures. By default, your data is scoped to your own family.

Carpools are the one exception, and only with your explicit, per-carpool consent. Kinly also lets families coordinate carpools with other families (for example, parents taking turns driving kids to the same practice). When — and only when — an adult in your family affirmatively joins a specific carpool and accepts its sharing terms, a limited set of your family's information is shared with the other families in that carpool, for the duration of that carpool. This is described in detail in the "Carpools and cross-family sharing" section below. Outside of carpools you explicitly join, no Kinly data is shared beyond your family except with the infrastructure providers described here.

Information we collect

When you use Kinly, we collect the following categories of information:

Account information

• Your email address and (if you use the email/password sign-in option) a password — passwords are stored only as hashed credentials by our authentication provider, Firebase Authentication; we never see or store your password in plain text
• Your name and role within the family (Guardian or Child)
• A profile photo, if you choose to upload one

Sign-in providers (Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google)

You may also sign in to Kinly using Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google. When you do, the provider returns to Kinly:

• A stable, opaque user identifier (so we can recognize you on subsequent sign-ins)
• An email address (which may be a real address or, for Apple, a private-relay address like xxx@privaterelay.appleid.com if you chose "Hide My Email")
• Your name, if you chose to share it

That's the only data the SSO providers share with us. We do not share data with Apple or Google in the other direction beyond the account-creation handshake — they don't see your family members, location, or any Kinly activity.

Location information

• Your device's GPS coordinates (latitude, longitude, accuracy, heading, and speed), collected while location sharing is enabled. We collect more frequently while you are moving (for example, during a drive) and less frequently while you are still, to balance accuracy against battery life.
• The time of each location reading
• Your device's battery level and charging state, recorded alongside each location reading
• Whether your device is currently inside any of the saved Places (geofences) your family has configured (e.g., Home, School)
• A road-aligned version of your recent trips, which we generate on our own servers by matching your location trail to the road network so the map can draw a clean route instead of a jagged line of points. This is a processed copy of the location data above, computed in-house — not a new kind of data — and a child's location trail is never sent to any outside company for this.
• An occasional fresh location reading taken when a family member who is allowed to see you opens your place on the map and your last reading is stale. In that case our server asks your device to take a single new reading and send it, so the map isn't showing an out-of-date position. This collects the same location data described above; it just refreshes it on demand.

You can pause or stop location sharing at any time in your Kinly profile.

Family content

• Saved Places — addresses your family has labeled (e.g., Home, School, Gym), including the address text, latitude/longitude, and a notification preference per family member per place
• Ride requests and their lifecycle — pickup and destination addresses, who requested the ride, who claimed it, timestamps, and an optional note
• Emergency (SOS) alerts — when raised, the alert includes the originator's name and last known coordinates so other family members can respond
• "On my way" pickup alerts — when a guardian taps On My Way on a family member's card, we store who is being picked up and who is driving (first names), a one-time snapshot of the location where the pickup was requested, and a live estimate of the driver's arrival time. We use this solely to send that family member "on the way," "15 minutes away," and "5 minutes away" notifications. Pickup records are transient: they expire automatically within about 90 minutes, are overwritten by any new pickup for the same person, and are deleted with your family data.

Carpool information

• Carpools you create or join — the event/schedule details (title, destination, times, recurrence), which families are members, and which adult is coordinating for your family
• For each carpool, the children you choose to send as riders (first names) and their pickup addresses, and which adults have volunteered to drive which legs
• Carpool chat messages you send, and their timestamps

How carpool information is shared with other families — and the consent required first — is described in the "Carpools and cross-family sharing" section below.

Device and notification information

• A push notification token (Firebase Cloud Messaging token) used to deliver real-time notifications to your device
• Crash diagnostics and basic device metadata (operating system version, app version) collected via Firebase services
• Motion and activity information from your device's low-power motion sensor (whether you are stationary, walking, running, cycling, or in a vehicle). We use this only to keep your location updates accurate and battery-efficient — for example, to know when to refresh your position more or less often. This is processed on your device; we do not build a fitness or behavioral profile from it.

We do not collect contacts, browsing history, advertising identifiers, microphone or camera access (other than when you choose to take or upload a profile photo), or social media account information.

How we use this information

• To show your family where each member currently is, on a live map
• To notify family members when ride requests are made, claimed, or completed
• To notify family members when someone arrives at or leaves a saved Place (when you've enabled this)
• To deliver SOS alerts to other family members during emergencies
• To compute estimated arrival times between guardians and a pickup point
• To let a guardian announce they are on the way to pick up a family member, and to time the "15 minutes away" / "5 minutes away" notifications to that member
• To keep your account secure (authentication, abuse prevention)
• To diagnose crashes and improve the app
• To refresh a family member's location on demand — when you open the map on someone who is allowed to see and your last reading of them is stale, to ask their device for a single fresh reading so the map is current
• To send the family's account owner occasional product reminders — for example, if you created a family but haven't added anyone yet, a reminder of what Kinly can do once you do. These are sent only to the adult who created the family, never to a child, and you can turn them off with the notification toggle in your profile.

We do not use your information for advertising, to build behavioral or marketing profiles, or to sell or promote anything other than your own use of Kinly. The only non-transactional messages we send are the in-app product reminders described above, to the adult account owner.

How information is shared

Inside your family. Other members of your family can see your name, profile photo, current location (when sharing is on), battery level, ride requests you've made or claimed, and any SOS alerts you've raised. This is the core function of the app and is required for it to work.

With our infrastructure providers. We use the following services to operate Kinly. Each is bound by their own privacy practices:

• Google Firebase (Authentication, Firestore database, Cloud Messaging, Cloud Functions, Cloud Storage, and Crashlytics for crash diagnostics) — hosts user accounts, family data, push notifications, and crash reports. We do not use Google Analytics for Firebase or any behavioral-analytics product; the only usage data we keep is aggregate, first-party counts we compute ourselves (e.g. how many families are active), which contain no personal information and are never shared. See Google's privacy policy at https://policies.google.com/privacy.
• Google Maps Platform — renders the in-app map, geocodes addresses, and computes driving distances/ETAs (including carpool pickup routing).
• Resend — sends transactional email on our behalf, specifically the parental-consent confirmation emails described in the "Children's privacy" section. These emails are addressed to the parent's email and may contain a child's first name and a consent link; they never contain location data. Resend is an email-delivery processor only.
• Map-matching for the road-aligned trip view described above is performed on Kinly's own servers (hosted on Google's cloud infrastructure), not by any outside mapping company. A child's location trail is never sent to a third party to align it to roads.

With no one else. We do not sell, rent, share, or otherwise disclose your information to advertisers, data brokers, marketing affiliates, or any other third party. We do not have any third-party advertising SDKs in the app.

Legal requests. We may disclose information if required by law, valid legal process, or to protect the safety of users.

Carpools and cross-family sharing

Kinly lets families coordinate carpools — for example, parents from different families taking turns driving kids to the same activity. A carpool is the only way information moves between families, and it happens only when an adult in your family affirmatively joins a specific carpool and accepts its sharing terms. Joining is an explicit, opt-in action; nothing about your family is visible to another family until you take it.

What is shared with the other families in a carpool you join

• Your family's display name and profile photo, and the name of the adult member coordinating for your family.
• The first names of the children you choose to send on that carpool (you pick which of your kids ride; you are not required to send any).
• The pickup address(es) you set for those children for that carpool.
• Live location of the participating driver and riders around the carpool's event window — from shortly before it starts until shortly after it ends (so a driver who is en route or running a little late still works) — so the driver can see who's where for pickup. Sharing turns on as the carpool becomes active and turns off automatically once the event has ended; it is never on outside that window.
• Messages you send in that carpool's chat (see below).

Only the families who are members of that specific carpool can see this, and only for that carpool. Members of one carpool cannot see your other carpools, your family's general location outside the event window, or anything about family members who aren't part of the carpool.

Who can join, drive, and host

• Only an adult (18 or older) may join a carpool as a member, host one, or volunteer to drive. Children and teens (under 18) are never carpool drivers or hosts.
• A child or teen can still be a rider — but only because an adult guardian in their family added them to the carpool and accepted the sharing terms on their behalf. A child's data flows to another family only through that guardian's explicit choice.

Carpool chat

Each carpool has a group chat so participants can coordinate (e.g. "running 5 minutes late"). Messages you send are visible to the other members of that carpool and are retained as part of the carpool's record. Do not share sensitive personal information in carpool chat. We do not use chat content for any purpose other than operating the carpool, and we do not use it for advertising or profiling.

Leaving a carpool

You can leave a carpool at any time, and a carpool admin can remove a family. When your family leaves or is removed, your cross-family sharing for that carpool stops. Joining a carpool never changes what your own family can see — that is always governed by the rest of this policy.

Trusted drivers

Kinly does not currently let a non-family adult drive your child. If we add such a feature in the future, it will require its own separate, explicit guardian consent, and we will update this policy before it launches.

Children's privacy

Kinly is designed for families that include children. We comply with the U.S. Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA, 16 CFR Part 312) and apply the California Age Appropriate Design Code Act (AADC) defaults for teens under 18. This section explains what that means for your child.

How a child's account is created

Children never create their own Kinly account. Instead:

• A parent (or legal guardian, age 18+) creates the family in Kinly first.
• The parent taps "Add a Child" inside Kinly, enters the child's first name and date of birth on the parent's own device, and generates a one-time, single-use device-claim link.
• The child opens that link on their own phone, which signs them in anonymously and binds them to the pre-created child profile. The child is never asked for an email address, password, or any other personal information directly.

What we collect from children under 13

• First name — set by the parent at "Add a Child" time.
• Date of birth — set by the parent, used to determine age tier.
• Device location — coordinates and a small movement-history footprint, so the family can see the child on the map and detect arrivals.
• Device battery level — paired with each location ping.
• Push-notification device identifiers — so we can deliver family-coordination alerts to the child's phone.
• Pickup alerts — if a guardian announces they are coming to pick the child up, we store a one-time snapshot of the child's location at that moment and the guardian's estimated arrival time, so we can send the child "on the way" and "almost here" notifications. These records expire automatically.
• Crash and diagnostic data — if the app crashes on the child's device, a crash report (app version, operating-system version, and the technical error) is sent to Google Crashlytics so we can fix the problem. It is never used to build a profile of the child or for advertising.

We do not collect from children: email addresses, phone numbers, passwords, photos uploaded by the child, social-graph data, precise schooling data, biometric data, or behavioral profiles.

How we obtain verifiable parental consent

Kinly does not collect any location or movement data from a child until the parent has completed and verified the two-step consent below. Until consent is verified, the child's profile exists but the app does not transmit the child's location to our servers.

To obtain verifiable parental consent, we run a two-step email confirmation with the parent's email on file:

1. Immediately after the parent creates the child's profile, we email the parent a consent-request link. The parent taps the link, reads what we collect and how it's used, and confirms.
2. Approximately 24 hours later, we send a second email asking the parent to finalize the consent. The parent taps that link and confirms again.

The second, time-separated confirmation requires the parent's attention to be sustained across time, which a child intercepting one email cannot easily fake. The verified consent record is logged immutably with the parent's email address, the date and time of each confirmation, the child's age tier, and the consent method used.

Sharing your child's information with other companies and families

Some features require us to disclose a limited part of your child's information to third parties, separately from the data we use to run Kinly internally:

• Mapping & routing — we send the child's location, and for carpools a pickup address, to Google Maps Platform to draw the live map and calculate routes and arrival times. We do not send a child's location trail to any outside company to align it to roads — that processing is done on Kinly's own servers.
• Parental-consent email — to obtain your consent, we send confirmation emails through our email provider, Resend. Those emails go to your email and may include the child's first name and a consent link; they never include the child's location.
• Carpools — only if you join a carpool, we share the child's first name, pickup address, and live location with the other families in that carpool, and only during the carpool's scheduled window.

By completing the consent steps above, and — for carpools — by separately accepting each carpool's sharing terms when you join, you consent to these specific disclosures. You can refuse any of them by not enabling the feature; declining carpool sharing does not affect your family's own use of Kinly.

Parental rights

At any time, a parent may exercise the following rights from inside the Kinly app (Profile → child's profile → Privacy & data):

• Review the data Kinly holds on the child, including profile fields, activity-segment history, and the consent record.
• Export a complete JSON copy of the child's data, sent as an email attachment to the parent's email on file.
• Delete the child from the family. Deletion removes the child's profile, activity-segment history, push-notification tokens, and all other data we hold on them. We retain a minimal parental-consent record — the parent's email, the dates of consent, the child's first name and age tier at the time, and the consent method — as a permanent legal record required under COPPA, even after the child is deleted. This record is not used to operate the app or to contact the child.
• Withdraw consent at any time by deleting the child — this immediately stops all further data collection from the child's device.

For any of these rights, a parent may also contact us at privacy@gokinly.com and we will action verified requests within 30 days.

Teens (13–17)

For users aged 13 to 17, Kinly applies high-privacy defaults consistent with the California AADC: parental visibility on by default, no behavioral profiling, no third-party marketing. Teens manage their own settings and may adjust visibility within Kinly, but cannot disable parental visibility entirely while they remain in a family.

Restrictions on under-13 users

Children under 13 in Kinly are restricted in the following ways, to prevent them from extending the data-collection surface beyond what their parent has consented to:

• Cannot see or share the family invite code.
• Cannot leave the family on their own — a parent must remove them.
• Cannot disable their own location sharing — it remains on so the parent can locate them.
• Cannot create their own Kinly account or join a family without a parent-issued device-claim link.

If a child uses Kinly without parental involvement

If we learn that a child under 13 has used Kinly without verifiable parental consent, we will delete the child's account and all associated data, and we will revisit our parental-consent flow to close whatever gap allowed it.

How long we keep your data

• Active accounts: retained for as long as you remain a member of a family.
• After you leave a family or delete your account: your member record (name, profile photo, location history, battery readings) is deleted. Ride history and SOS records may be retained by other family members in their own family's history.
• Backups and logs: technical backups of our database may retain data for up to 90 days after account deletion before being purged.

Your rights

Regardless of where you live, you can:

• Access the data we hold about you — email privacy@gokinly.com to request an export.
• Correct your name, email, or profile photo at any time in the Kinly profile screen.
• Delete your account and all associated data — email privacy@gokinly.com or use the in-app "Delete my account" button on the profile screen.
• Stop sharing your location at any time using the toggle in the profile screen — Kinly will stop writing location data to our database immediately.
• Withdraw consent for any optional processing — including, for guardians, withdrawing consent for a child's account.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or California, you have additional rights under GDPR / UK GDPR / CCPA respectively, including the right to data portability, the right to object to processing, and the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority.

Security

We use industry-standard security practices to protect your data:

• All data in transit is encrypted via TLS (HTTPS).
• Authentication credentials are managed by Firebase Authentication; we never see plaintext passwords.
• Database access is restricted by Firestore security rules so that family data can only be read or written by authenticated members of that family.
• The geofence presence field used for arrival/departure detection can only be written by our backend (a Cloud Function) and is read-only to clients to prevent spoofed events.

No system is perfectly secure. If we discover a data breach affecting your information, we will notify you and any required regulators in line with applicable laws.

Website waitlist

If you join the Kinly waitlist on gokinly.com, we collect the information you submit — your name, email address, device type, and optionally a co-parent's email and the number of kids' devices in your household — solely to manage beta access and contact you about Kinly. We never use it for marketing beyond Kinly updates, never share it, and delete it when the waitlist no longer needs it or on request to privacy@gokinly.com. If you provide a co-parent's email, only do so with their permission; we use it only to send their beta invitation.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as Kinly evolves. When we do, we'll change the "Last updated" date at the top. Material changes — for example, collecting a new category of data or sharing data with a new third party — will be communicated to active users in-app or by email.

Contact

We typically respond within 7 business days and will action verified requests within 30 days.