Privacy Policy

Become is a small app for families who want to set goals together and check in on them once a month. This page explains exactly what it stores, who can see it, and how to get it back or get rid of it. It covers the app at becoming.family and the same app installed on a phone.

Who is responsible for your data

Become is operated by the person who runs becoming.family. For any question about your data, or to make any of the requests described on this page, write to russelljbundy@gmail.com. A real person reads that address and will answer.

What Become stores

Everything below is either something you typed or something the app needed in order to work. There is no hidden collection, and nothing is inferred about you.

Your account

• Your email address and password, handled by our authentication provider. Passwords are stored only as a secure hash, so they cannot be read back by us or by anyone else.
• Your email address is also stored alongside your family profile, so the app can show who is who without a lookup on every page.

Your profile and your family

• Your first name (or whatever name you enter), your role in the family (admin, parent, member, or child), and an avatar color.
• Your family's name, which month-day your family treats as its check-in anchor, how long the check-in window stays open, which goal categories your family has turned on, and how many goals each person can set per category.
• Your family's join codes, including ones that have been revoked.
• Your notification preferences.

Your goals

• The category and year, and the free text you write: the outcome you are aiming at, your process commitment, your trigger, and why it matters to you.
• Whether the goal is private, and which family members you have chosen to share a private goal with.

Your check-ins

• The month, the year, and which of the four statuses you picked (moving forward, slower than I'd like, paused, or completed).
• Your optional written reflection.
• Who submitted it. When a parent checks in on a child's behalf, the check-in records that it was entered by that parent.

Notifications, if you turn them on

• A push subscription for each device you enable notifications on. This includes an address supplied by your browser or phone that the app uses to reach that device, two encryption keys your browser generates, and the browser and device description your browser sends (its user agent string).
• A record of each notification sent to you, with its type, the time, and its text. This is how the app enforces its own limit of at most five notifications per person per week. For the notification telling a parent that their child has checked in, that record includes the child's first name.

Ordinary server logs

Our hosting provider keeps short-lived request logs, which include IP addresses, as every web host does. These are used to keep the site running and to diagnose errors, and are not combined with anything above to build a profile of you.

What Become does not collect

This list is worth reading, because it is most of what apps usually take:

• No analytics and no third-party trackers of any kind. The app loads no advertising or analytics code.
• No ads and no advertising identifiers.
• No cross-app or cross-site tracking.
• No location, no contacts, no photos, no calendar, no microphone, and no health or fitness data from your device.
• No dates of birth, no phone numbers, and no home addresses.
• No payment information. Become does not charge for anything.

How your information is used

To run the app and to send the check-in reminders you asked for. Nothing else. Your goals and reflections are never used to train machine learning models, are never sold or rented, and are never shared with advertisers or data brokers. Become has no interest in your data beyond showing it to your family.

Who else handles your data

Become is built on a small number of services, and each one only receives what it needs:

• Supabase hosts the database and handles sign-in. Your goals, check-ins, and account live here.
• Vercel hosts and serves the app, and keeps the short-lived request logs described above.
• Your browser or phone's push service(Apple, Google, or Mozilla, depending on the device) delivers notifications. Delivering a notification means that service necessarily sees the notification's text and which device it is going to. This only applies if you turn notifications on.

That is the complete list. No one else receives your family's information.

What your family can see

This is the part worth understanding before you invite anyone, because shared visibility is the whole point of the app rather than an incidental side effect.

• Everyone in your family can see every other member's goal categories and monthly check-in statuses.
• Goal details and written reflections are visible to your whole family unless you mark a goal private.
• For a private goal, your family still sees the category and the monthly status, but the goal text and its reflections are visible only to you, plus anyone you specifically choose to share it with.
• A family admin can see the family roster and change people's roles.
• Parents and admins can create goals and submit check-ins for child profiles, and can see everything recorded for them.
• Anyone who has a valid join code can join your family and will then see the shared information described above. Treat a join code as you would a house key, and revoke it in Settings once everyone has joined.

Outside your family, nothing is visible. There are no public profiles, no discovery, no feeds, and no way to search for another family. Separation between families is enforced by the database itself rather than only by the app, so one family cannot read another family's data even if the app had a bug.

Children's information

Become is designed to be set up and run by adults. A younger child does not get an account: there is no login, no password, and no email address for them, and they cannot sign in even if they wanted to. Instead, a parent creates a profile for them inside the family, and everything recorded for that child is entered by the parent from the parent's own signed-in session.

What is stored for a child profile is their first name, an avatar color, and the goals, check-in statuses, and reflections a parent writes for them. Please keep in mind that the goal and reflection fields are free text, so whatever a parent types there is stored as written. We would encourage using a first name or a nickname, and leaving out anything you would not want recorded.

Because a parent is the one creating the profile and entering the information, that parent is consenting to its collection directly. A parent or family admin can review everything held for a child at any time from the child's page, and can delete a child's profile and all of their goals and check-ins from Settings, under Family members. We do not knowingly let anyone under 13 create their own account, and no child profile is ever used for advertising, analytics, or any purpose other than showing it to their own family.

If you believe a child's information has been entered without the consent of their parent or guardian, write to russelljbundy@gmail.com and we will remove it.

Keeping and deleting your data

Your family's information is kept for as long as your account exists, because a year of check-ins is the thing the app is for. There is no automatic expiry.

Before you do, you may want to take a copy of it. You can delete it yourself, without asking anyone:

• Your own account. Go to Settings, then Delete your account. This removes your profile, your goals, your check-ins, your reflections, and your notification records. It cannot be undone.
• A child's profile. A family admin can go to Settings, then Family members, and remove the profile. This deletes everything recorded for that child.
• Your whole family. If you are the last adult in your family, deleting your account also deletes the family itself, every child profile in it, and everything recorded for anyone. The app tells you clearly when this is what is about to happen.

Deletion takes effect immediately. Backups held by our database provider may retain a copy for a short period before rolling off, and we do not restore deleted data from them.

If you have removed the app and cannot sign in to delete your account, write to russelljbundy@gmail.com from the email address on the account and we will delete it for you.

Getting a copy of your data

You can do this yourself, at any time: go to Settings, then Your data. It shows everything held for you in one file, which you can copy or download. A family admin can switch to the whole-family view, which includes the records for any child profile they manage.

One thing that view deliberately holds back: if another family member has a private goal and did not share it with you, the export lists the goal without its text, the same way the app does. Being a family admin is not the same as being shared with.

If you cannot sign in, write to russelljbundy@gmail.com from the email address on your account and we will send it to you.

Security

• Everything travels over an encrypted connection.
• Passwords are stored only as secure hashes, handled by our authentication provider.
• Your sign-in session is held in a cookie that JavaScript on the page cannot read.
• Access rules are enforced inside the database, per row, so the limits described under "What your family can see" hold even if the app itself has a bug.

No service can promise perfect security, and Become is a small operation rather than a large company. What it can promise is that it holds very little about you to begin with.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the information held about you, correct it, delete it, receive a copy of it, or object to how it is used. Become is built so that you can do most of this yourself from Settings, and the contact address above covers the rest. You will never be charged or treated differently for making a request. Become does not sell personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Your information is stored on servers in the United States. If you are using Become from elsewhere, your information is transferred there.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the date at the top will change and, for anything significant, the app will tell you rather than leaving you to notice.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: russelljbundy@gmail.com. See also the Terms of Service.