Privacy Policy

This is the binding document. If you would rather read the short, plain-language version first, that lives at fred.family/privacy.

01. Introduction

Fred (“Fred”, “we”, “us”) is a family coordination assistant that helps parents stay organised. We also run the website fred.family. This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and your choices.

Data controller: Product Impact Consulting BV Terschellingstraat 33, 1025 RA Amsterdam KVK: 90557840 Contact: mail@fred.family

02. What We Collect

We collect the information you share with Fred, technical service data, and optional website analytics with your consent as described below. We do not scrape, buy, or infer data about you from third-party sources.

Account information

When you sign up via fred.family, we collect the following for both parents in the household:

• Name and email address: to create and manage your account.
• Home address: to provide location-based features such as finding locally provided services such as waste collection dates.
• Children’s names and dates of birth: provided by you during onboarding to personalise Fred’s coordination features. You confirm that you are the legal parent or guardian of each child whose information you provide.

Information about the other parent

When the first parent sets up Fred, they provide the name and email address of the second parent so we can send an invitation. We use this only to send the invitation and set up the shared household account. The second parent’s account only becomes active once they have accepted the Terms of Service.

Shared visibility within your household

Fred is a shared household tool. Calendar entries, messages sent to Fred in the shared group, and coordination information are visible to both parents in the household. Do not share information with Fred that you do not want the other parent to see.

Messages and content

Fred receives and processes:

• Chat messages you send to Fred.
• Voice messages, which are transcribed; the audio file is not retained after transcription.
• Images you share with Fred, which are processed to extract relevant information. Images are kept for 30 days and then deleted; the text and information Fred extracted from them stays with your other account data.
• Emails you forward to your personal Fred email address (body, sender, subject line, and attachments relevant to family scheduling).

Things Fred remembers

To save you repeating yourself, Fred keeps short notes about lasting things parents tell it in the chat. For example: who dislikes swimming, a child’s allergy, the grandparent who helps on Wednesdays, or how you like Fred to reply.

• Notes come only from messages and voice notes that you and the other parent send Fred yourselves. Forwarded emails, and messages Fred writes, are never used to make notes.
• Fred doesn’t make notes about things it already keeps elsewhere, like appointments, reminders or your family profile. It never keeps passwords, ID numbers, bank details or links.
• Notes belong to your household. Something one parent tells Fred may come up when Fred answers the other parent.
• Notes are written by an AI model, so occasionally one may be wrong or out of date. Tell us and we’ll correct or delete it.

Calendar data

If you delegate your Google Calendar to Fred, we receive read access via calendar sharing; Fred schedules by creating events in its own calendar and inviting you.

If you connect a Microsoft calendar (Outlook.com, Hotmail or Microsoft 365), you sign in with your Microsoft account and allow Fred to read your calendars; Fred keeps a copy of the events in the calendars you choose (see Section 04).

Children’s information

You provide your children’s names and dates of birth during onboarding. In the course of using Fred, you may share additional information about your children — such as school name and extracurricular activities — via forwarded emails, calendar entries, or direct messages to Fred. We do not collect any of this information from children directly.

Usage data

We collect basic technical data about how Fred is used — such as message timestamps, feature interactions, and error reports — to keep the service running and improve it. This data is not used for advertising or profiling.

Waitlist

When you join the waitlist on fred.family or in the Fred app, we collect your name, email address, country, phone type (iOS or Android) and the language you want our emails in. We use this to keep your place in line, invite you when a spot opens up, and send you a small number of emails about your place on the waitlist. You can unsubscribe from these emails at any time. Customer.io stores the waitlist and sends these emails from its EU data centre.

Email and the Fred app

Customer.io is also the platform we send our product updates and onboarding emails from, and where we keep track of who has unsubscribed. When you sign in to the Fred app, the app tells Customer.io your account ID, your email address and your app language, and reports a few milestones — joining the waitlist, creating your family and finishing onboarding — and which screens you open. Once a night, Fred also gives Customer.io a summary of how your household uses it: when you last wrote to Fred, how many messages, events and open to-dos there were in the past weeks, whether your calendar is connected, whether the second parent has joined, whether notifications are on, and how far onboarding has come. We use this to send the right email at the right moment, for example not inviting you again once you have created your family, offering help where setup has stalled, and to stop emailing you once you unsubscribe. If your partner invites you to their family in Fred and you have not opened the app yet, Fred also gives Customer.io your email address, the name of the parent who invited you and your family’s language, so it can remind you of the invitation. We keep that for 30 days from the invitation; if you join, it becomes part of your own profile. Customer.io never receives your messages to Fred, your calendar entries, your notes or anything about your children. Emails about your account itself, such as the invitation to the second parent, are sent from your household’s Fred address through Google.

Website analytics and your choice

When optional website analytics is enabled, we use PostHog EU only after you choose Accept analytics. We count public page visits, early-access button clicks, and waitlist submission attempts to understand and improve the website. A submission attempt is not a confirmed signup. The legal basis is your consent (GDPR Article 6(1)(a)). Ignoring the choice or selecting Decline sends no website analytics to PostHog; you can still use the website and forms.

Events include a random visitor ID, the public page path and language, event time, consent notice version and time, and button placement where applicable. This ID is pseudonymous personal data, not anonymous data. We do not send form answers, names, email addresses, account or family IDs, URL query strings or fragments, or referrers. We do not join these IDs to app accounts, record sessions, or automatically capture interactions or errors. Network requests necessarily expose your connecting IP address to the receiving service.

We store your choice and its date in the necessary localStorage preference fred.website-consent for 180 days. Only after acceptance, the PostHog SDK’s first-party ph_fred_website cookie stores the random ID and browser session state until that grant expires, for at most 180 days. Activity does not extend it. The SDK also uses sessionStorage for temporary session state and a fred.website.sdk-consent cookie to mirror your choice. If browser storage is blocked, a choice and ID may last only for the current document. Expiry or a new notice version requires a new choice.

Open Cookie settings on any instrumented public page and select Decline to withdraw consent in one action. Withdrawal stops new event collection and removes the website visitor ID. SDK requests started before withdrawal may finish or retry, and received events cannot be recalled; withdrawing does not affect the lawfulness of earlier processing. Reaccepting creates a fresh ID. Your rights and our contact details below also apply to this data.

PostHog processes website analytics in its EU cloud. We enable collection only after verifying the processing agreement, IP-discard controls, and retention of no more than 12 months, after which events are deleted or fully anonymised. The cookie choice governs optional website analytics; waitlist signups and the Tally questionnaire are separate and still operate when analytics is declined.

03. How and Why We Use Your Data

We use your data only to run Fred for you. The table below sets out each purpose and its legal basis under GDPR Article 6.

We do not use your data for advertising, to build profiles for third parties, or to train AI models. The notes Fred keeps exist only to help your household and are never shared or used for advertising.

04. Artificial Intelligence, Google and Microsoft Data

How Fred uses AI

Fred uses AI models hosted exclusively in the European Union to generate replies and help coordinate your family’s activities. Your data does not leave the European Union for AI processing and is never used to train AI models.

Voice transcription

Voice messages you send to Fred are transcribed using AI models hosted exclusively in the European Union. The original audio file is deleted immediately after transcription.

Image processing

Images you forward to Fred are processed using AI models hosted exclusively in the European Union to extract relevant text and information. We keep the image itself for 30 days and then delete it. The text and information extracted from it stays with your other account data and follows the same retention rules.

How Fred remembers

After Fred replies, an AI model reads the parents’ recent messages and picks out anything worth remembering. Each note is stored as text, plus a numerical version that lets Fred find relevant notes quickly. Both are created and stored in the EU, on the same infrastructure as the rest of your data, and kept separate for each household. Notes are never used to train AI models.

Google Calendar

Fred works with your calendar through Google Calendar’s built-in sharing feature — you never connect your Google account to Fred or grant Fred any permissions on it. You share your calendar with your household’s Fred address with read access. Fred uses this only to check availability and detect scheduling conflicts.

Fred never creates, edits, or deletes anything in your own calendar. When Fred schedules something, it creates the event in a calendar owned by Fred and shared with you. By subscribing to the shared calendar, you see all events also in your calendar UI.

Fred never accesses your Gmail or any other part of your Google account. Emails you forward to your Fred address are received in a dedicated mailbox that is part of Fred’s own infrastructure — not yours.

Google API Services User Data Policy (Limited Use)

Fred’s use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy , including the Limited Use requirements. In line with those requirements, we apply the following commitments to your calendar data and any other Google user data we receive:

• We use it only to provide and improve the user-facing features described in this policy — checking availability and detecting conflicts.
• We do not transfer it to anyone else, except to the processors listed in Section 05 as necessary to provide these features, to comply with applicable law, or as part of a merger or acquisition — in which case we will notify you in advance.
• We do not use or transfer it for advertising or to build user profiles.
• We do not use it to train generalised AI or machine-learning models.
• We do not allow humans to read it except with your explicit permission, where strictly necessary for security investigations or legal compliance, or in anonymised form for internal operations.
• You can revoke Fred’s access at any time by removing the Fred address from your calendar’s sharing settings (Google Calendar → Settings → Share with specific people).

Storage of Google data: Emails you forward to your Fred address are received and stored in a dedicated Gmail account. Events created by Fred are stored in a Google Calendar. Both are part of Fred’s infrastructure and are subject to the retention periods in Section 06.

Microsoft calendars

To connect a Microsoft calendar, you sign in with your Microsoft account in the Fred app and allow Fred to read your calendars and to keep doing so without asking you to sign in each time, and to see your account’s name and email address. Fred never creates, edits or deletes anything in your Microsoft calendars, and never reads your Outlook mail, contacts or files.

Fred keeps a copy of the events in the calendars you choose — their title, time, location and whether you are busy — refreshed about every 15 minutes. It uses the copy only to show your events in the app, check availability and detect scheduling conflicts. An event you marked as private in Outlook is kept as busy time, without its title or location. The sign-in key Fred needs to read your calendars is stored encrypted.

When you stop sharing a Microsoft calendar in the app, Fred deletes its copy of that calendar; when you stop the last calendar of an account, Fred also deletes that account’s sign-in key. You can also remove Fred’s access from your Microsoft account at any time: for a personal account under Privacy → Apps and services at account.microsoft.com, for a work or school account at myapps.microsoft.com or through whoever manages it.

05. Who We Share Data With

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only with the processors listed below, and only so they can perform a specific service on our behalf. Each processor is bound by a Data Processing Agreement.

We may also disclose data where legally required by a court order or regulatory authority, or in connection with a business sale or merger — in which case we will notify you in advance.

06. Storage, Transfers, and Retention

Where your data lives

Fred stores your family’s data on servers located in the EU. We carefully select processors that also store data within the EU whenever possible. Where a processor operates outside the EU, transfers rely on Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) and/or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

How long we keep it

We retain your personal data for as long as your account is active. Upon request, we delete all associated personal data within 30 days and send you written confirmation. Billing and legal records are retained for 7 years as required by Dutch law; this data is not used for any other purpose.

The notes Fred keeps follow the same rules as your other account data. They are kept while your account is active and erased within 30 days if you ask us to delete your data. You can also ask us at any time to show you, correct or delete individual notes, or all of them, without closing your account. Email mail@fred.family.

Waitlist details are kept while you are on the waitlist. Your email profile in Customer.io is kept while you have an account and is deleted with it. The details of a partner who was invited but has not joined are kept for 30 days from the invitation. To be removed earlier, unsubscribe from any of our emails or email mail@fred.family.

Voice audio is deleted immediately after processing and is never stored. Images are deleted 30 days after processing; the text and information Fred extracted from them is kept with your other account data.

Logs and technical data

Usage data, error reports (Sentry), and internal AI-quality logs (Langfuse) are retained for a maximum of 12 months, after which they are deleted or fully anonymised. Pseudonymised logs are treated as personal data until anonymised.

Email attachments

Emails you forward to Fred, including attachments, are retained under the same retention rules as your other account data.

Deleting your data

To delete your data, email mail@fred.family. We will erase your personal data within 30 days and send you written confirmation. Backups are fully purged within 90 days. We retain billing records for 7 years as required by law; this data is not used for any other purpose.

07. Security

We take the security of your family’s data seriously. Our approach is built around EU data residency, closed-by-default infrastructure, and strict isolation between households.

• Encryption of all data in transit (TLS) and at rest.
• Household isolation. Personal data is stored and accessed on a strictly per-household basis. Technical controls at the data storage layer ensure that no household can access the personal data of another household.
• Restricted infrastructure access. Fred’s servers are not directly accessible from the public internet. All external access is routed through a secure, authenticated network tunnel, limiting the attack surface and reducing the risk of unauthorised access.
• Strict internal access controls: only authorised team members with a legitimate need can access personal data.
• Error monitoring via Sentry to detect and respond to issues quickly.

No system is 100% secure. If we become aware of a security incident affecting your personal data, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law, without undue delay.

08. Your Rights

As a resident of the EU, you have the following rights in relation to your personal data. To exercise any of them, contact mail@fred.family. We will respond within 30 days. For complex requests we may extend this by up to two further months; if so, we will tell you within the first month and explain why.

• Access: request a copy of the personal data Fred holds about you.
• Rectification: ask us to correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Erasure: ask us to delete your personal data (see Section 06).
• Restriction: ask us to pause processing of your data in certain circumstances.
• Portability: receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Object: object to processing based on legitimate interest, including for direct marketing.
• Withdraw consent: where processing is based on consent, withdraw it at any time without affecting prior processing.

These rights cover the notes Fred keeps about your household too.

If you believe Fred has not handled your data correctly, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Dutch data protection authority:

Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP) www.autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl Tel: +31 (0)70 888 85 00

09. Children

Fred is for parents and guardians. Children do not use Fred directly and should not interact with it.

When you share information about your children — their name, school, birthday, or activities — you confirm that you are their legal parent or guardian and that you are entitled to share that information with us. We use it solely to deliver the coordination service and apply the same protections as to all personal data in Fred.

This includes notes Fred keeps from what you tell it about your children, such as an allergy or a fear. Those notes are only ever based on what parents say.

We do not knowingly collect personal data directly from children. If you believe a child has shared data with Fred without parental authorisation, please contact mail@fred.family immediately and we will delete it.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the date at the top of this page. For material changes, we will notify you by email before the change takes effect.

Questions?

We’re parents too. Email mail@fred.family and a real person will reply.

Product Impact Consulting BV  ·  Terschellingstraat 33, 1025 RA Amsterdam  ·  KVK 90557840