Privacy

Chlann is operated by Solaisoft, a registered business name of Macdara Ó Murchú, ABN 24 379 197 237. That person is the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR. Write to hi@chlann.com about anything on this page, including a request to see or delete your data.

Chlann is in closed testing. This page describes the service as it works today, not as it is planned to work.

If you join the waitlist

Your email address, the name you type, the optional note about your family, and which language you were reading the site in. We also store a shortened one-way hash of your IP address, which lets us see that two sign-ups came from the same place without storing the address itself. We use this to send you an invite code and for nothing else. We do not add you to a mailing list. Ask us at hi@chlann.com and we will delete the entry.

If you have an account

Your email address, your display name, your password stored as an argon2id hash rather than as text, the family and conversations you belong to, the invite code you joined with, and your settings such as language, theme and Comfort Mode.

What you send

Messages, photos, videos, files, captions and calendar entries you create in the app, along with who sent them, when, and who has received or read them.

Technical records

Sign-in and device records for your sessions, and server logs kept for a limited period so faults and abuse can be investigated. We do not read your address book. If you sign up with a phone number instead of an email address, we store that number and use it only to sign you in.

Data protection law requires us to name a legal basis for each thing we do with your data, not only the purpose. Ours are:

Running your account, your family space and your messages

Performance of a contract (GDPR Article 6(1)(b)). You asked us to provide the service, and this is what providing it requires.

Sending you an invite code or a sign-in code

Performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b)).

Your waitlist entry

Consent (Article 6(1)(a)). You gave us an address so we could send you an invite. You can withdraw it at any time and we will delete the entry.

Security, abuse investigation and server logs

Our legitimate interests in keeping the service working and safe (Article 6(1)(f)), balanced against your interest in not being monitored - which is why the logs are short-lived and are not used for anything else.

Message content is encrypted while it travels (TLS) and encrypted where it is stored (AES-256-GCM). Chlann is not end-to-end encrypted. We hold the keys, so we are able to read message content. We say that plainly because the alternative is a padlock icon that means less than it looks like it means.

The encryption does protect you against these:

• Someone intercepting traffic between your device and our servers.
• Someone stealing a copy of the database, which holds ciphertext, not your messages.
• Advertising, profiling and behavioural tracking. There is none, and we sell nothing.
• Anyone with access to the raw tables reading them casually.

It does not protect you against these:

• Us reading content where we are legally compelled to, or to act on a credible child-safety or abuse report. Only the operator can do this, it requires a specific manual step rather than any part of the ordinary app, and every instance is written down before it happens. An automatic, tamper-evident record of such access is not built yet.
• Someone who fully compromises a running server while the key is in memory.

Two further limits worth stating. Message metadata - who is in a conversation, who sent what and when, and delivery and read state - is not encrypted, because the service needs it to work. Photos, videos and files are stored on the servers we operate under the same access controls, and we can access them; end-to-end encryption for photos is on the roadmap and is not in place today.

We count page views using analytics software we run on our own server. It sets no cookies, collects no personal data, and nothing leaves our infrastructure. There is no third-party analytics, no advertising network and no cross-site tracking on this site or in the app. We do not analyse the content of your photos.

Vultr

Runs the servers the application and your content sit on, in Sydney, Australia.

Vercel

Serves this website.

Resend

Delivers the emails we send you, such as an invite code or a sign-in code.

Stripe

Handles payment if you take a paid plan. Card details go to Stripe, not to us, and we never see the full number.

We do not share your content or your email address with anyone else, and we do not sell data to anyone under any circumstances.

Your data is stored in Australia. If you live in Ireland, the EU or the UK, that means it leaves that area, and Australia is not covered by a European Commission adequacy decision. We state this rather than leaving it to be inferred, so that you can decide whether it suits you before you sign up.

Your content stays until you delete it or close your account. Waitlist entries stay until we invite you or you ask us to remove them. Database backups are taken daily. We keep the last seven daily backups and the last four weekly ones, so something you delete can still exist in a backup for up to four weeks before it is gone for good. Server logs are kept for a limited period and then discarded.

If Chlann ever closes, you would get notice in advance and a way to export your photos, videos and messages. Your data would not be sold as part of a shutdown.

Under the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask for it in a portable form, object to or restrict what we do with it, and withdraw consent you have given. Write to hi@chlann.com and we will answer within one month.

If you are not satisfied with how we handle a request, you can complain to your national data protection authority. In Ireland that is the Data Protection Commission.

Chlann is built for families. Accounts are for adults: we ask that children take part through a parent or guardian's account rather than their own, and every account is created by invitation from an adult family member. We do not verify age at sign-up. The ability to read content where there is a credible child-safety report exists because of that, and it is described in the section above rather than hidden.

When this changes we update the date at the top. If a change affects what we can see or who else handles your data, we will tell account holders directly rather than relying on you to re-read the page.

This page is published in English. An Irish version will follow once a native speaker has reviewed it, because a machine-translated privacy policy is worse than none.