Privacy policy

The short version: we store what you type into your calendar so we can show it back to your screens, and that is all we do with it. There is no advertising and no analytics or tracking in the calendar, and nothing is sold or shared with anybody who wants to profile your family. The one exception is this website, which counts visits with Google Analytics, but only if you accept it (section 10).

1. Who is responsible

Auralar.co (KvK 93982690) is the data controller for the personal data described here, at Schalk Burgerstraat 24, Tilburg, Netherlands. Questions, requests and complaints all go to support@auralar.co and are answered by a person.

2. What we store

Everything below is something the service actually holds. Nothing is collected “just in case”.

The account

• the email address the household registered with;
• the password, stored as a one-way hash — we cannot read it and neither can anybody who steals the database;
• the household’s name and its time zone;
• whether the address has been confirmed, and whether two-step sign-in is on (and if it is, the secret that makes the codes work);
• recovery codes, hashed the same way as the password.

The people in the household

• a first name and a colour for each person;
• a PIN if one has been set, stored as a hash;
• the chores and one-offs they have done, when, and what those were worth.

The calendar itself

• appointments, chores and one-offs: their titles, notes, times, repeats, the room they belong to and who they are for;
• what has been ticked off and by whom;
• the monthly goal, the reward the house is playing for together, and the record of months that have finished;
• achievements earned.

The screens you use it on

So that Settings can show you a list of your own screens and you can tell one from another: a random name the browser gives itself, a label if you set one, the browser and platform, the screen and window size, the time zone, the language, and when it was last seen.

The app never stores your IP address — not against your account, not with an error, not anywhere — and we do not store location of any kind.

The web server itself keeps an ordinary access log, as every web server does, for security and for finding faults. In it the address your request came from is shortened: the last part is removed before it is written down, so it points at a neighbourhood of the internet rather than at your home. These logs are deleted after about 14 days.

Email we have sent you

A record that a message was sent, to which address, of what kind and when — so that “I never got the reset link” can be answered. Not the contents.

If something goes wrong

When the service errors, we record what failed, the household’s email address if one was signed in, and the error message — no IP address, no request contents. If you use Report a problem in Settings, we store what you wrote and the version you were on, because you asked us to look at it.

If you subscribe

Paddle’s identifiers for you and for the subscription, its status, the renewal date, and the amount and currency of payments that have completed — the last of those so that the loyalty price can be worked out and so a support question about a charge can be answered. We never receive or store card details.

The first month of Premium is free once per person. To keep it that way we keep a one-way fingerprint (a hash) of the email address a subscription was started with. It cannot be turned back into the address; it can only tell us, when the same address subscribes again, that the free month has been used.

If you delete your account, we keep one more fingerprint of this kind — a hash of the address, never the address itself — with the date it was deleted. It lets us recognise the address if it registers again, and holds nothing else about you.

3. Why, and on what legal basis

• To give you the service you asked for — the account, the calendar, the people, the screens. Legal basis: performance of a contract (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)).
• To take payment and apply the right price — the subscription and payment records. Contract, again.
• To keep the service working and secure — error records, the mail log, rate limits. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running a service that works (Article 6(1)(f)), balanced by keeping the records minimal and short-lived.
• To meet our legal obligations — tax and accounting records relating to a sale. Article 6(1)(c).

• To count visits to this website — Google Analytics, only if you accept it. Legal basis: your consent (Article 6(1)(a)), which you can withdraw at any time with Cookie choices at the foot of every page.

We do not rely on consent for anything else above, because none of it is optional extra collection, and nothing is analysed or measured unless you accept it.

4. Children

Auralar is not sold to or signed up for by children. An account is created by an adult, and the children in a household are added by that adult.

What is stored about a child is a first name, a colour, possibly a PIN, and the chores they have ticked off. There is nowhere in the app to put a surname, a date of birth, a photograph, a school or an address, and we do not want them.

A parent or guardian can change or delete any of it from Settings › People at any time, and deleting a person removes their record.

5. Who else sees it

These are the companies involved in running Auralar, and each one only touches what it needs:

• Paddle.com Market Limited — payments. They are the merchant of record, so they hold your name, email and payment details for the purchase. We do not. See the terms of sale and Paddle’s own privacy notice.
• Hostinger — our hosting provider: the server in Germany that the service and this website run on. They do not use your data and act only on our instructions.
• Hostinger’s email service — sends the handful of emails Auralar itself sends: confirming your address, resetting your password, moving the calendar to another address. They come from noreply@auralar.co. Hostinger sees the address and the message in order to deliver it, and acts only on our instructions.
• Paddle, for billing email — receipts, invoices, renewal reminders and anything else about a payment are sent by Paddle directly, from Paddle, as the seller of record. We do not send them and do not see their contents.

Hostinger and Paddle are the companies involved in the service itself. The one other recipient is Google, and only for visitors to this website who accept analytics (section 10). Nobody else, ever, unless a court orders it — in which case we will tell you unless we are forbidden to.

6. Where it is kept

Your data is stored on a server in Düsseldorf, Germany — inside the European Union, and therefore covered by the GDPR without any transfer arrangement being needed. It does not leave.

The one exception is the payment. Paddle process subscriptions under their own arrangements, which may involve transfers outside the EU under the safeguards set out in their privacy notice. We never hold your card details, so what crosses a border there is the purchase, not your calendar.

Google Analytics, if you accept it on this website, sends usage data to Google, which may process it outside the EU, including in the United States, under the safeguards Google describes in its own privacy information. We use it only if you say yes, and what is sent is website usage data, not your calendar.

7. How long we keep it

• Your calendar and your household — until you delete it. You can delete one household, or your whole account under Settings › Your account › Delete my account. Deleting the account deletes every household on it, their people, items, completions and achievements, the screens signed in, the problem reports you sent, the error records and the mail log for your address.
• Error records — deleted automatically after 30 days.
• Web server logs — with the shortened address described above, deleted after about 14 days.
• Paddle’s notifications to us about a subscription (that it started, renewed or ended) — deleted after 45 days. What is kept from them is the subscription record described above.
• Problem reports you send us — until we have dealt with them and cleared them, and never longer than your household.
• The mail log — which address an email went to, what kind it was and when, never the contents. It is kept for 90 days so that a delivery question can be answered, and we delete it sooner on request.
• Payment records — kept as long as tax law requires, which in the Netherlands is seven years. This is the one thing deleting your account does not remove, and we are not allowed to.
• The free-month fingerprint described above — kept after an account is deleted, because its only job is to stop a second free month on the same address. It holds nothing else about you.
• After an account is deleted — a one-way fingerprint (hash) of the address and the date, kept so a returning address can be recognised; it holds nothing else.
• Backups — a deleted household disappears from the live database at once and rolls out of the backups as those are replaced.

8. What you can ask us to do

Under the GDPR you can ask us to:

• show you what we hold about you;
• correct anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in Settings;
• delete it — you can do this yourself in Settings (a household, or the whole account), or write to us and we will do it for you;
• give you a copy — write to us and we will email a complete copy (a file you can keep or import elsewhere, with a plain summary) to the address the account is registered to;
• restrict or object to what we do with it.

Write to support@auralar.co. We will answer within 30 days and there is no charge. We may need to check you are the account holder before handing anything over — which is protection for you, not an obstacle.

9. How it is protected

• Everything travels over HTTPS.
• Passwords and PINs are stored as one-way hashes, never as text.
• The Wi-Fi password, if you store one for the guest code, is encrypted.
• Signing in gives your screen a signed token, not a copy of your password.
• The database account the app uses cannot create or drop tables.
• Two-step sign-in is available and we recommend turning it on.

If a breach ever happens that puts your data at risk, we will tell the Dutch Data Protection Authority within 72 hours and tell you directly where the rules require it — and plainly, not in a paragraph designed to be skipped.

10. Website analytics (only if you accept)

This website (not the calendar) uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages are opened, so we can improve it. It is off unless you accept. On your first visit a bar asks you; “No thanks” or no answer means nothing is loaded from Google. You can change your mind at any time with Cookie choices at the foot of every page.

• Who is responsible: we are responsible for using the tool and for the statistics; Google provides it and receives the data. Google’s own privacy information, linked from the cookies page, describes what it does with it.
• What is collected: pages opened, approximate location, browser and device type, how you arrived, and a random identifier stored in the _ga cookies. Google Analytics 4 does not keep full IP addresses. We have turned off Google signals and ad personalisation, and we do not send your name, email address or anything from your calendar.
• Legal basis: your consent. Withdrawing it is as easy as giving it.
• Outside the EU: Google may process the data outside the EU, including in the United States. See the cookies page for the cookies and how long they last.
• The calendar: the Auralar app and the administration panel contain no analytics at all, whatever you choose here.

11. What we do not do

• No advertising, anywhere, ever.
• No analytics or tracking in the calendar, and on this website only the analytics you have accepted. The cookies page describes everything kept on your device and what each part is for.
• No selling, renting or sharing of personal data.
• No profiling and no automated decisions about you.
• No font services. The typefaces on this site and in the calendar are files on our own server, so a page never asks anybody else for them and nobody else learns that you opened it.
• No reading your calendar. Support cannot see what your household has written down unless you send it to us in a problem report.

12. Changes, and how to complain

When this policy changes materially we will say so here and email the address on the account. The date at the top always says when it last changed.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, please tell us first — we would like the chance to fix it. You also have the right to complain to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, or to the authority in your own EU country.

Fonts: Source Serif 4 and Source Sans 3 by Adobe, and IBM Plex Mono by IBM, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (the licences).