Privacy-First & Zero-Cost Infrastructure: Kinship is built with an absolute commitment to privacy. We do not run background telemetry tracking servers, do not monetize your household communications, and utilize decentralized Local Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Wi-Fi synchronization by default. Your data belongs to your family.
Welcome to Kinship, a zero-cost, privacy-first digital living infrastructure designed to facilitate secure and collaborative household coordination. We respect your family's right to privacy. This Privacy Policy details exactly how we collect, use, process, and protect your information.
1. Information We Collect
To provide local household coordination, chore tracking, grocery management, safety statuses, and shared voice messaging, Kinship utilizes local on-device capabilities:
Household Data: List of grocery items, chore checklists, custom family safety guidelines, and active household member profiles (such as child profiles created locally).
Audio and Media: Short-form family voice broadcasts (voice notes) recorded through your device's microphone. These are stored locally and broadcasted directly to paired family devices.
Real-Time Family Statuses: Safety check-ins, custom location descriptions (e.g., "At School", "Heading Home"), and mood emojis updated manually by users.
Local Connection & Mesh Data: Non-personally identifiable IP addresses and connection metadata used strictly to discover and securely synchronize household state across other devices on your local home network (local P2P mesh).
2. How We Store Your Data
Kinship values extreme data minimization. Your personal, family, and coordination data is stored using safe, offline-first mechanisms:
Local Room Database: All grocery lists, household profiles, and chore assignments are stored securely on your local Android device using an encrypted and isolated SQLite Room database.
No Cloud Centralization: We do not operate generic central servers or databases to harvest, aggregate, or store your private household history.
Google Authenticated Cloud Database (Optional): For optional remote cloud synchronization outside your home, data is gated exclusively behind Google Sign-In via the Jetpack Credential Manager. Reads and writes run strictly through a secure, non-anonymous Firebase Firestore implementation.
3. Peer-to-Peer (P2P) Synchronization
Kinship features an integrated Local Wi-Fi Mesh Sync engine. This allows family members to sync databases directly between local devices:
Synchronization is direct (Peer-to-Peer) over your local Wi-Fi router.
No household data or messages are routed through external cloud relay servers during a local sync.
Connection handshakes are executed strictly between authorized devices within your immediate home environment.
4. Device Permissions
To offer comprehensive and rich living utility, Kinship may request access to the following hardware capabilities:
Microphone / Record Audio: Required to capture local voice notes for family broadcasts. Voice recordings are saved locally and are never processed for advertising or machine learning profiling.
Local Network Access: Required to establish Peer-to-Peer database synchronization over your local Wi-Fi network.
Internet Access: Required for optional Google Authenticated synchronization features.
5. Child Safety & Safe Mode
Kinship includes a specialized Kid-Safe Mode engineered with extra guards for minors:
No personal identification data of children is collected, requested, or compiled.
All child profile details are set manually by parent administrators and persisted locally on-device.
No external sharing, third-party analytics, SDK tracking, or behavioral profiling is active within the application.
6. Third-Party Services
Kinship operates without ad networks or telemetry trackers. The only third-party SDK utilized is:
Google Sign-In & Google Identity Services: Used solely to authenticate household owners and establish secure access keys when using optional cloud database backups. Your Google profile details are never shared or sold.
7. Data Deletion and Control
Because your household data is completely under your own stewardship:
You can purge all local grocery lists, chore sheets, and connection history instantly by clearing the app's cache and data within your Android system settings.
Uninstalling the app deletes all local Room databases permanently.
8. Contact Us
If you have any questions or feedback regarding our privacy practices, please contact us at: