Privacy Policy

In short

Bellnote collects what it needs to turn your family’s school and activity messages into a calendar, keeps raw messages for 30 days at most, never stores your children’s photos or birthdates, never sells your data, shows no ads, and doesn’t use your data to train AI models.

What we collect

Account: your email address, and your name if you choose to give it (or Apple/Google pass it on at sign-in).

Family: your family’s name and time zone, the other parents you invite, and for each child the details you enter (first name; optionally grade, school, activities, colour, emoji avatar).

Messages you send: the text, photos and PDFs you forward, snap, share or paste, and the senders you allow or block.

If you connect Outlook: your Outlook address, and a sign-in token that lets Bellnote read mail from your allowed senders, both encrypted with your family’s key.

Calendar items Bellnote creates, and the changes you make to them.

Your device: a push notification token and your brief times. On your phone (not on our servers), which calendar events Bellnote added.

Product events (for example "added a capture"): counts and types only, never message content.

What we don’t collect

Children’s photos or dates of birth. Your contacts. Your location. Email outside your allowed senders, if you connect your email. WhatsApp chats you haven’t chosen, and no stored copy of WhatsApp messages at all. Your other calendar events.

How we use it

Only to run Bellnote for your family: to read messages and create calendar items, show them to the parents in your family, send your briefs and notifications, send a few family emails to the parents in your family (a welcome with what Bellnote does, and a note when a parent joins or a child is added, with the names involved; each parent can turn these off in Settings), keep Bellnote secure, and fix problems. We do not sell or rent personal information, share it for advertising, or build profiles of you or your children.

AI processing

To read messages, Bellnote sends their text and images to Anthropic’s Claude AI service, which returns the dates and to-dos it finds. Anthropic processes this to provide the service to us and does not use it to train its models. Anthropic may keep inputs for a limited period under its data retention policy for safety and abuse monitoring.

When you ask Bellnote a question (Ask Bellnote), it sends your question, your family’s calendar items, your kids’ first names and the messages it still keeps (at most 30 days old) to the same service, which answers with the items and messages it used. Your question and the answer aren’t stored; we keep only a count of questions asked, to limit use.

Who processes data for us

Amazon Web Services (hosting, database, file storage, sign-in, sending and receiving email, including the email you forward to your Bellnote address, finding where a place is for the map, and drive times between places), Anthropic (AI reading of messages and answering your questions), Meta (delivering the WhatsApp messages you forward to Bellnote’s WhatsApp number, and our replies), Expo (push notifications and app builds), and Apple or Google if you sign in with them. They process data only on our instructions and are bound to protect it. Data is stored in the United States.

Schools

You can pick your child’s school from a list based on the US Department of Education’s public school directory, or add one that isn’t listed (its name and town). Which school your child goes to is stored encrypted with your family’s key. Bellnote doesn’t use your location to find it.

When your child is linked to a school whose bell times or calendar Bellnote doesn’t have yet, Bellnote looks for its bell schedule and its school-year calendar on the school’s own public website and its school district’s (both listed in the directory), and reads them. Only those public websites are visited, and nothing about your family is sent to them. A calendar found this way is shared with other families at the same school, like one a parent adds.

Bell times and school calendars you add (a photo, PDF, pasted text or a calendar link) are the school’s public schedule. They’re shared with other Bellnote families whose children go to the same school, so they don’t have to add them again; nothing about your family is shared with them, and they don’t see who added it. A school’s days off, minimum days and early releases are added to your calendar for each of your children there, and kept up to date. Calendar links are checked from our servers once a day.

Forwarding to Bellnote on WhatsApp

If you link your WhatsApp number in Settings, you can forward messages, photos and PDFs to Bellnote’s WhatsApp number. Bellnote reads only what you forward, to find dates and to-dos, replies with what it added, and does not keep the message: only the resulting calendar items, encrypted with your family’s key, and a record that a WhatsApp message came in (time and how many items, no content). It never sees your groups, contacts or other chats.

Your WhatsApp number is not stored. We keep a keyed fingerprint of it, so a forwarded message reaches your family, and its last 4 digits, so you can see which number is linked. Messages travel through Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform, which may hold them briefly to deliver them under Meta’s terms. You can unlink your number at any time in Settings.

Reading your Outlook email (optional)

If you agree to email reading and sign in with Microsoft, Bellnote reads your Outlook mailbox (Outlook.com, Hotmail or Microsoft 365) read-only, through Microsoft’s Graph service. About every 10 minutes it searches only for mail from the senders on your family’s allowed list (an address, or a whole domain you allow, such as a school app’s) and opens only those messages. They’re handled like email you forward: the text is kept for 30 days at most, and the calendar items stay. Nothing else in your mailbox is opened, and Bellnote never sends, changes or deletes email.

Microsoft gives Bellnote a sign-in token. It’s stored encrypted with your family’s key, with your Outlook address so you can see which mailbox is connected. Only you can connect your own mailbox, and the other parents in your family don’t see it. Turning email reading off in Settings, or disconnecting Outlook, stops reading at once and deletes the token. You can also remove Bellnote’s access in your Microsoft account’s app permissions.

Maps and weather

The first time you open an item that has a place, Bellnote sends just that place’s text (for example “Lincoln Park, Field 3”) to Amazon Location Service to find where it is, and stores the position encrypted with your family’s key. Nothing else about the item, your family or your kids is sent. The map on the item is drawn by your phone’s map service (Apple Maps on iPhone, Google Maps on Android), which loads the map around that position. Directions open the map app on your phone, under that app’s own privacy terms.

To spot pickup clashes, Bellnote sends the positions of two of your events’ places (just the two points, and when you’d leave) to Amazon Location Service to find how long the drive takes. Nothing about the events, your family or your kids is sent, and the drive time isn’t stored.

If you pick who’s driving to an event, the other parents in your family see it, and the driver gets a reminder on their own phone before it starts.

For an event Bellnote thinks is outdoors (a game, or a practice at a park), it asks the US National Weather Service for the forecast, sending only the position of the event’s place rounded to about 1 km. Nothing about the event, your family or your kids is sent, and the forecast isn’t stored. It’s shown on the event, and in your morning brief and reminders when the weather matters.

How long we keep it

Raw messages, photos and attachments: deleted 30 days after they arrive. WhatsApp messages: not stored. Calendar items and your family details: until you delete them or your account. When a family is deleted, its data is removed straight away and its files within a day. Records of your agreement: 6 years after you delete your account. Backups expire on their normal cycle (up to 30 days).

Records of your agreement

When you accept these documents or turn an optional consent on or off, we record what you agreed to (the document, its exact version and a fingerprint of its text, and the statements you ticked), when, your account email at the time, your IP address, your device or browser type, and the app version. These records can’t be edited, and they are linked so that any change would be detectable.

We keep them to show what was agreed if there is ever a question or dispute: for as long as you have an account and for 6 years after you delete it, then they are deleted. They are used for nothing else. You can see your own records in Settings.

Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. On top of that, your children’s details (names, grades, schools, activities), your family’s name and the content of your messages and calendar items are encrypted with a key unique to your family before they are stored. Someone with access to the database or its backups sees only scrambled text. That key can only be used by Bellnote’s own servers, for your family, and every use is logged.

Each family’s data is also isolated by database access rules, so one family can never see another’s. On your phone, your sign-in is kept in the iPhone Keychain or Android Keystore. Access by our staff is limited and logged. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you as the law requires.

Children and students

Bellnote is used by parents, not children, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information directly from children under 13 (or 16 where local law sets that age). Information about your children comes from you, their parent or guardian, and you can change or delete it at any time.

Bellnote is not a school service and isn’t acting for any school. School messages you forward are your copies, handled under this policy.

Your choices and rights

You can see and correct your information in the app, export it on request, withdraw any optional consent (email reading, WhatsApp reading, calendar access, notifications) in Settings, and delete your account in Settings.

Depending on where you live (for example California, or the EU and UK), you may have rights to know, access, correct, delete or port your data, and to object to or restrict processing. We don’t sell or share personal information as those laws define it. To use any right, email support@bellnote.app; we won’t treat you differently for doing so. EU/UK users can also complain to their data protection authority.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll show you the new version in the app and ask you to agree again.

Questions about this policy or your data: support@bellnote.app.