Privacy
Last updated: 12 August 2026
Hearth exists because family life doesn’t belong on a platform that sells attention. There are no ads here, no analytics, no behavioural tracking, and nothing about your family is sold or shared. This page explains what is stored, where, and who can reach it.
What Hearth stores
Hearth is a shared, private archive, so unlike a purely on-device app it does hold your family’s content on a server. That content is:
- Your email address — used to send your sign-in code, invitations, and the weekly letter. Nothing else.
- Names — your display name and your family’s name, as you typed them.
- Photos and voice recordings you add, plus captions, the date, and who shared them.
- Whose voice a recording is — recordings store both who pressed record and whose voice it holds, which is what makes it possible to capture an elder’s story on someone else’s phone.
- Hearts — that a family member marked a memory. There are no view counts, no read receipts, no dwell time, and no engagement metrics of any kind.
- Contact details for family members who have no account, added by a family organizer — an email address for someone who receives the weekly letter without ever installing anything.
Hearth does not ask for, and has no way to see, your contacts, your location, your other photos, your calendar, or anything else on your phone. The camera, photo library and microphone are used only when you are adding a memory, and only after your device asks your permission — which you can withdraw at any time in your device settings.
Who can see it
Only the members of your family. Every photo, recording and caption belongs to exactly one family, and every request is checked against your membership in that family before anything is returned. There is no public profile, no discovery, no sharing to anyone outside, and no way for another family to reach yours.
Photos and recordings are never stored in a publicly readable place. When your app or your email client needs to display one, it is given a link that is signed and time-limited, so it works for the person it was made for and stops working afterwards.
The author of Hearth is the operator of the service and can technically access stored data — a single-operator service cannot honestly claim otherwise. Content is not read, browsed, or used for any purpose beyond keeping the service running and fixing faults, and it is never used to train anything.
Where it lives
Hearth runs entirely on Cloudflare: the application on Cloudflare Workers, family data in Cloudflare D1, sign-in sessions in Cloudflare KV, and photos and recordings in Cloudflare R2 object storage. Cloudflare processes this data on Hearth’s behalf as an infrastructure provider.
Email — sign-in codes, invitations and the weekly letter — is delivered through Resend, which necessarily receives the recipient’s address and the contents of that message.
These two are the only third parties involved. There is no analytics service, no advertising network, no crash reporter, no tag manager, and no tracking pixel — in the app, in the emails, or on this website. This site sets no cookies.
Signing in
Hearth uses a one-time code sent to your email instead of a password, because the people this app is for should not have to invent or remember one. The code is single-use, expires shortly after it is sent, and the session it creates is stored so you don’t have to sign in each time. You can sign out whenever you like.
The weekly letter
If your family sends memories during a week, Hearth mails a summary on Sunday to family members who have an address on file — including those who have no account at all. Every letter carries a one-tap unsubscribe link that works immediately and needs no sign-in. A quiet week sends nothing.
Deleting things
A single memory: whoever shared it — or a family organizer — can remove it in the app. It goes for everyone, for good.
Your account, or an entire family archive: email dev@takehearth.com and it will be deleted, including the stored photos and recordings. While Hearth is this early, deletion is done by hand rather than by a button, and it is done properly.
A copy of what’s yours: ask at the same address and you’ll be sent your family’s photos and recordings.
Content you add is kept as long as your family keeps its archive — permanence is the point of the product. It is not deleted on a schedule, and it is not quietly aged out.
Children
Children appear in family photos and recordings, which is the nature of a family archive. Hearth accounts are for adults: a child’s presence in a memory is something a parent or grandparent chose to add, and no child creates an account, receives targeted anything, or is profiled. If you are a parent and want a child’s photos or recordings removed, write to the address above and they will be.
Your rights
Wherever you live, and regardless of what local law requires of a service this size, you can ask for a copy of your data, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be erased — by writing to dev@takehearth.com. There is no ticketing system between you and the person who built this.
Changes
If Hearth ever adds something that changes what is collected — payments, for instance — this page will be updated before that feature goes live, and the date at the top will say so. Ads, behavioural tracking and data sales are not on the roadmap in any form.
Contact
Questions about any of this go to dev@takehearth.com and are answered by a person.