Privacy policy

Effective 10 October 2026.

Family Nearby shares your location only with the people in your Circles, only while your sharing is on. We never sell your data and show no ads.

Not an emergency service. In an emergency, call your local emergency number.

Who we are

Family Nearby is run by Md Jahangir Nabin, an individual developer (not a company). Contact: support.family.nearby@gmail.com. Website: https://familynearby.website. Effective date: 10 October 2026.

Postal address: 1229, Bashundhora R/A, Dhaka, Bangladesh

What we collect and why

• Account: name, email, your Google account id if you sign in with Google, birth month and year, country, time zone and language. To sign you in, check the age rules, and show times correctly.
• Location points: position, accuracy, speed, whether you are still, walking or driving, time, battery and charging, and whether location and battery saver are on. To show your Circle where you are, send arrive and leave alerts, and keep your history.
• Places, check-ins and notes: the places your Circle saves, your check-ins, emoji notes, and the reason you give when you ask to pause.
• Profile photo: one small photo you choose. We re-encode it and remove hidden data such as GPS.
• Device: a random device id, phone model, app and Android version, and a push token, to deliver alerts and refresh requests.
• Settings: units, time format, alert choices and quiet hours.
• Who viewed a location: a record of who looked at your location, and when, to protect you from misuse.

Features being tested

Where these features are enabled, saving a history stop creates a Circle place only after you review and save it. Suggested places use location history you are allowed to see. Your suggestion preference and dismissals are private to your account in that Circle. Dismissals expire after 30 days; turning suggestions off removes the current suggestions.

Expected arrival alerts store the member, saved place, arrival time, repeat days and time zone you choose. They check whether arrival was confirmed using permitted location data. Drive-finished alerts use location and movement data and your alert preferences. Neither alert is a guarantee of someone’s safety or presence.

Computed suggestions expire after 15 minutes and are recomputed when needed. Suggestion records are also removed when the permission to use their source history changes. Saved places and alert settings stay until you delete them or your account. Existing location-history and alert retention limits below still apply.

Who sees your data

• Members of your Circles, while your sharing is on in that Circle. A check-in you send yourself is shared even while you are paused.
• In a Circle with a managed teen, every member (not only admins) can see the teen’s location. Admins see join and pause requests, including the reason.
• Our service providers, below, only to run Family Nearby for us. Authorities only when the law requires it.

Background location

If you choose Allow all the time, the app uses your location while it is closed. We do this to let your Circle see where you are and your recent trips, to send arrive and leave alerts, and to answer when someone in your Circle asks for a fresh location. While your phone moves and the app tracks you, a “Location sharing on” notification shows. When your phone is still, the app only checks about every 30 minutes, and when you start to move. Pause sharing in all your Circles, or sign out, and tracking stops.

How long we keep data

• Location points: 7 days, or 30 days for a person in at least one paid Circle.
• Check-ins, alerts sent and refresh requests: 7 days. Emoji notes: 24 hours.
• Who-viewed records, Circle events, and join and pause requests: 30 days.
• Places, profile photo and settings: until you or your Circle’s admin delete them, or you delete your account.
• After you delete your account: your data leaves our live systems within 30 days, and then disappears from backups within 30 more days.

Backups

Encrypted backups are kept for 30 days. After you delete your account, your data leaves our live systems within 30 days and then disappears from backups within 30 more days.

Teens and children

• Family Nearby is for people 13 and older. Nobody under 13 may use the app.
• A person aged 13 to 17 has an account only with a parent’s consent. A parent or legal guardian adds them from the parent’s own phone, and the teen signs in with a one-time code that works for 24 hours.
• We keep a record of the parent’s consent until the teen’s account is deleted.
• When the teen becomes an adult, the account becomes a normal adult account.

What we never do

• We never sell your data, and never use data brokers.
• No ads and no ad SDKs. No advertising id. No tracking you across other apps.

Service providers

• Contabo GmbH (Germany) hosts our servers. They are in the European Union. Your data is stored there.
• Cloudflare protects our network. All traffic to our website and server passes through Cloudflare, including your IP address and request details. Cloudflare R2 stores profile photos, map data files and encrypted database backups, in the European Union.
• Resend (email service, EU region, Ireland) sends sign-in codes and deletion emails, using your email address.
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers alerts and refresh requests to your phone. We do not use Google Analytics.
• Google sign-in, if you choose it.
• Google Maps (on Android) draws the map. To send the map pictures, Google gets the map area you look at. This can show roughly where your family is. Google’s map software in the app also sends Google, for its own use to run and improve its services: your phone’s model and system version, your IP address, a random Maps id (not your name or account), crash reports from the map software, and how you move and zoom the map. The map never shows or uses your own location dot.
• Apple Maps (on iPhone, once the iPhone app is out) draws the map in the same way, under Apple’s privacy policy.
• Your phone’s address service turns a position into an address, and finds places you search for.

Shop names and bus lines on history come from public OpenStreetMap data stored on our own server. We do not send your location to OpenStreetMap.

Why we may use your data

• To run the service you asked for.
• Your consent, for your location and for a teen’s account. A parent gives the consent for a teen.
• Our interest in keeping the service secure.

Data outside the EU

Some providers may process data outside the European Union, including in the United States. This applies to Google (sign-in, push messages and maps), Apple (maps on iPhone) and Cloudflare. They do this under their standard data-transfer terms.

Security

All traffic uses HTTPS. Sign-in tokens are encrypted on your phone. Our logs never hold positions, addresses, place names, notes or tokens.

Your choices and rights

You can pause sharing, turn off location on your phone, and delete your account. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to see, correct or move your data, or to complain to a data protection authority. Write to us support.family.nearby@gmail.com.

Changes to this policy

When we change this policy, we update the date at the top. For big changes, we also tell you in the app.