Who we are
Apney is operated by the person you can reach at ranveer.aangan@gmail.com, who is the data controller for the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR, and the business responsible under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act.
What we collect, and why
Because you typed it in
- Your account — email address and a password, held by our authentication provider. We never see the password.
- Your profile — your name, and optionally a photograph, date of birth, gender, phone number, a short bio, and links you choose to add (Instagram, a phone number for WhatsApp, anything else you enter).
- Your family — the people you add, how they are related, and anything you record about them: names, dates, photographs, notes. Much of this is about people who are not Apney users. See People who never joined, below.
- What you post — posts, Highlights, photographs, albums, events, replies, Raws, and the captions on them.
- Who you send things to — the radius you choose for each thing, resolved once into a fixed list of people.
- Reports and blocks — if you report or block somebody, we store that you did, and what reason you gave.
Because the app has to work
- Which devices you use for messages, so end-to-end encrypted chat can reach them, and a push token for each so your phone can be woken.
- When things happened — timestamps on everything above.
- Waves, likes, RSVPs, and what you have read.
What we do not collect
- No advertising identifiers, no ad networks, no third-party analytics, and no tracking across other apps or websites. Apney does not have a behavioural profile of you and is not built to.
- No location. The app never asks for it.
- No contacts. The app never reads your address book.
The website launch waitlist
Joining the launch waitlist is optional. The name you submit and the time you join are stored separately from private family data. Your name appears on the public launch-event page. We do not ask for an email address or phone number for this list.
A cookie on this browser lets you see and remove your own entry with “Leave waitlist”. It lasts up to one year, and the server stores a hash of its random identifier. Your entry stays until you leave or ask us to remove it. If you clear the cookie or use another device, contact ranveer.aangan@gmail.com for removal.
Your messages are end-to-end encrypted
Direct messages are encrypted on your device and decrypted on the recipient's. The keys live on your phones. We cannot read them, and neither can our hosting provider — what the server holds is ciphertext and the routing information needed to deliver it.
Two honest caveats. Encryption protects the contents: we can still see that two accounts exchanged messages, and when. And if you lose every device you have signed in on, those messages cannot be recovered by us or by anybody else.
Posts, photographs, albums, events and Raws are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored so that the family you sent them to can read them, and they are protected by access rules rather than by keys.
Who can see what
The Apney app has no public content. Nothing you put in it is visible on the open internet, and there is no browsing by strangers.
- Your family, meaning people connected to you in the graph, within the radius you chose for each thing.
- Nobody else, including other Apney users who are not connected to you.
- You alone can see who you have blocked, and who reported whom is visible to nobody in the family — including the person reported.
- We can see what is stored unencrypted, when we need to: investigating a report, fixing a fault, or complying with the law. Not routinely, and never for advertising.
People who never joined
Most of a family tree is people who have not installed anything. When you add a relative, you are recording information about somebody else.
We hold that information because a family tree is not possible without it, and because it is the family's shared record rather than any one member's. If you are such a person and want your record changed or removed, write to ranveer.aangan@gmail.com and we will act on it.
Children
Apney is a family app and family trees include children. A child's record is usually created by an adult relative, not by the child.
Accounts are for people aged 13 and over. If a child under 13 has created an account, tell us and we will delete it. A parent or guardian may ask us to remove information about their child from the tree at any time.
How long we keep things
- A Raw goes after 24 hours, unless you keep it — the rule is enforced by the database, not by a clean-up job, so it stops being readable the moment it expires.
- Something you delete is recoverable by you for 30 days, then gone.
- Your account and everything in it goes when you delete it, immediately — see below.
- Reports are kept while they are open, and afterwards as a record of what was decided.
- Backups may hold a copy for up to 30 days after deletion.
Deleting everything
Settings → Delete my account. It is immediate and it is permanent.
What goes: your account, your posts, Highlights, Raws, photographs, messages, message keys, profile, waves, invitations and replies.
What stays, deliberately: your place in the family tree, as a person with no account attached. It is your family's record of who you are as much as it is yours, and removing it would leave a hole in everybody else's tree. The relatives you added pass to your nearest relative who still has an account, so that nobody else's family falls apart because you left. If nobody else here has an account, all of it goes with you.
Where your data goes
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | everything stored, including ciphertext | database, files, sign-in |
| Google Firebase Cloud Messaging | a push token for your phone | waking your phone for a message |
| Our relationship engine (hosted on Render, backed by Neo4j) | your family graph — names and relations | working out how you are related |
That is the whole list. Apney uses no advertising or analytics service.
Your data may be processed outside your country by the providers above. Where the law requires a transfer safeguard, the providers' standard contractual clauses are the mechanism.
Your rights
You may ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how we use it, or complain to your data protection regulator. Deleting your account does most of this in one tap; for anything else, write to ranveer.aangan@gmail.com and we will answer within 30 days.
Security
Access is enforced in the database itself, per row, rather than by the app asking nicely — so a bug in the app cannot hand somebody else's family to you. Files are private and served through links that expire within the hour. Messages are end-to-end encrypted as described above.
No system is perfect. If you find a hole, please tell us before you tell anybody else, at ranveer.aangan@gmail.com.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the app will say so before you go on using it. The date at the top is when it last changed.