Home AwayLegal
Privacy Policy
In short: Home Away has no account and no server. Your plants, pets, house notes, mail notes, photos, trips, walks and check-ins are stored on your phone. Door, alarm and garage codes are kept in your phone’s secure storage and stay on the device. Nothing leaves it unless you share a file yourself, buy the unlock through your app store, or (only in builds that include it) send an anonymous crash report.
1. What the app stores, and where
Plants, rooms and watering rules; pet profiles, feeding and medicine notes, and vet details; house notes and emergency contacts; mailbox notes and expected packages; routines, trip templates, kept sitter notes and the med log; the names, phone numbers and emails of sitters you save; photos, trips, sitter packets and check-ins are saved in the app’s private storage on your phone. We (Swift AppGen Solutions) do not receive them. Your phone’s own backup (iCloud or Google) may include this data, depending on your phone settings.
2. Door, alarm and garage codes
Codes you enter are kept in your phone’s secure storage (the iOS Keychain, set to this device only and not synced to iCloud Keychain, or Android’s Keystore-backed storage, which the app excludes from Android backups). They are not in the app’s regular data file and are never sent to us.
Codes are never printed on the Home Away Card PDF and never included in the text version. A data export leaves them out unless you tick “Include my codes”. A sitter packet includes a code only if you switch that code on and set a sitter PIN; the code is then encrypted with a key made from the PIN, and the PIN is not stored in the file. A short PIN protects against casual reading, not a determined attacker who has the file. Delete all data removes the codes too.
3. Files you share
When you send a sitter packet, a Home Away Card PDF, a text version or a check-in report, the app opens your phone’s share sheet and you choose where it goes (for example Messages or email). The file contains what you put in it: plant names and rules, pet care and medicine notes, vet and emergency contacts, house and mail notes, your first name and your sitter’s, photos you attached, and any codes you chose to send (PIN-locked). Saved sitters’ phone numbers and emails are never put in a packet. A help request you share lists the dates, what needs looking after, the visits and notes you wrote; it never includes codes, how to get in, the Wi-Fi password or contact details. Only share it with people you trust with that information, such as how to get into your home.
4. Photos, camera and location
The camera and photo library are used only when you add a photo or scan a QR tag. Before a photo is saved or shared, the app re-encodes it, which removes EXIF metadata such as GPS location and camera details. Apart from the optional dog-walk route below, the app does not ask for your location.
Dog-walk routes (optional). A sitter or dog walker can choose to record the route of a walk. It is off by default and has to be switched on for each walk. Location is used only while the walk screen is open (“while using the app” permission); the app never asks for background location and stops listening when you leave the screen. The route is stored on the phone as part of that walk. It leaves the phone only inside the walker’s own check-in report, which they share with the owner themselves; we (Swift AppGen Solutions) never receive it. The app shows a route as a simple drawing with its distance, made on the phone with no map service. Shared texts and PDFs (the card, the report text, care history, the med log and help requests) show only a walk’s time and distance, never coordinates. If location is not allowed, the walk is still logged, just without a route. An owner can delete a single route from the walk, routes are left out of Export my data unless you tick “Include walk routes”, and Delete all data removes them.
5. Reminders
Trip, visit and trash-day reminders are scheduled on your phone. No push server is involved.
6. Purchases
The $4.99 unlock is processed by Apple (App Store) or Google (Google Play). We do not see your payment details. The app stores a record that the unlock was bought (product and transaction id) on your phone so it stays unlocked.
7. Crash reports and usage statistics
Crash reports are sent only if the version you installed was built with crash reporting (the Settings screen says “Not included in this build” otherwise) and you leave “Send crash reports” on. They go to our crash-reporting provider (Sentry), contain technical details about the error and your device model and system version, and are not linked to you. Before sending, the app removes plant and pet names, notes, rooms, house notes, code labels, mail details, names, email addresses, phone numbers and file paths. Photos and screenshots are never attached.
Usage statistics are off unless you switch on “Share anonymous usage”. They are counts such as “a trip was planned”, never names, notes or photos. In the current version these statistics are not sent to any server. We will update this policy before that changes.
8. Links to other sites
The app links to the ASPCA plant lists, the USPS Hold Mail page, this website, and your app store’s purchase pages. Those sites have their own privacy policies.
9. Children
The app is not directed to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal information from them.
10. Export and delete
Settings → Export my data creates a zip of everything the app stores (codes and recorded walk routes only if you tick their boxes). Settings → Delete all data removes it from your phone; because we hold no copy, that is all there is to delete. You can also email us with any privacy question.
11. Changes
If we add accounts, sync or online features, we will update this policy and the app’s privacy labels first, and ask before anything new is collected.