Privacy Policy

Family Circle. Last updated 4 July 2026.

What Family Circle is

Family Circle is a private community app for a nursery and its families. A nursery creates a circle; parents join it with a code. Members share updates, photos, reactions and comments within that private circle only.

What we collect

• Account — your email, a display name, and a securely hashed password.
• Content you share — posts, comments, reactions, messages, stories and photos you share within your circle.
• Basic technical data — standard logs needed to run and secure the service.

Your child's records

If your nursery uses Family Circle for its day-to-day records, it may keep the following about your child:

• Profile — name, date of birth, room, key person, emergency contacts and pick-up arrangements.
• Health & needs — allergies, dietary requirements, medical notes and SEND notes.
• The day — attendance times, meals, nappies and sleep, observations, and accident or incident records.
• Medication — medicines the nursery is authorised to give, your consent, and a record of each dose (with staff signatures).
• Consents — permission requests (like outings or sun cream) and your signed decisions.

Your nursery creates and controls these records — in data-protection terms the nursery is the data controller and Family Circle processes them on the nursery's behalf, only on its instructions. Health information is held with extra care, used solely for your child's care record, and is never used for advertising or profiling. Records that protect children — like allergy acknowledgements, medication signatures and incident sign-offs — are kept in a tamper-evident audit trail.

Photos and children

Photos are shared only within your private nursery circle — never publicly. Before sharing a photo you must confirm you have permission to do so. Any member can report a photo, and the nursery can remove any post; we also run an automated check to flag potentially inappropriate images for the nursery to review. Please do not post identifiable images of children without the appropriate consent. Photo links are signed, so only members of your circle can open them.

Voice features

When you choose to dictate or talk live with Anna, your audio is processed by Deepgram (a speech service) to turn speech into text or hold the conversation. Audio is used for that purpose only — we don't use it to identify you or build voice profiles. Voice features are always started by you; nothing listens in the background.

Who is responsible for your data

For your account (email, display name, password) and for running the service, Family Circle is the data controller. For your child's records and everything your nursery posts or logs, your nursery is the controller and Family Circle is its processor. Questions about how your nursery uses the records should go to the nursery first; questions about the app itself come to us.

How we use it & who we share it with

We use your data only to run your circle. We do not sell your data and there is no advertising. We use Cloudflare to host the service and store content; data is handled under our agreement with them and not used for their own purposes.

Who helps us run the service

We use a small number of service providers, each under contract and only for the purpose named: Cloudflare (hosting, database and photo storage), Deepgram (voice features, only when you use them), Customer.io (sending account emails such as password resets, from its EU platform), Datadog (security monitoring — it receives only redacted technical events with shortened random IDs, never names, messages, photos or child data), postcodes.io (only the postcode a manager types when setting their regulator), and Apple/Google (delivering push notifications). Push notifications themselves are generic by design — they never contain a child's name, a photo or the content of a message. We do not sell data to anyone.

How long we keep things

Your circle's content is kept while the circle is active. Statutory nursery records (like registers, medication and incident records) are retained for the periods childcare regulation requires — those retention duties belong to your nursery, and we hold the records for it. Stories expire after 48 hours. If you ask us to delete your account we will, except where a nursery must lawfully retain a record (for example an incident log naming your child).

Children

Family Circle is intended for adult nursery staff and parents/carers. Children do not hold accounts and the app is not directed at child users. Because the app processes children's data, it is designed to child-data standards: high-privacy defaults, private circles, permission-scoped access, no advertising, no profiling, no geolocation tracking, and no public sharing of any child's records or photos — aligned with the principles of the UK Children's Code. For US app-store purposes: the service is not directed at children under 13 (COPPA) and collects no data from children.

Your rights

You can request access to or deletion of your data by emailing support@halobenefits.co.uk. We keep data only as long as needed to provide the service. Delete your account & data

Changes to this policy

If we make a material change we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

Family Circle is operated by Halo Benefits Ltd, registered in Scotland (SC861469), ICO registration ZC050335. Data protection contact: privacy@halobenefits.co.uk.