Privacy policy

This policy covers the babybub iOS app, the babybub web app, and this website at babybub.app. babybub is beta software distributed by an independent developer in Australia.

None of your records. Your pregnancy details, contractions, feeds, sleeps, nappies, milestones, notes and photos are never sent to us, whether or not you have signed in.

You can use every part of babybub without an account, and that is the default — the app never asks you to sign in to do anything. If you choose to create an account, the only information we receive is what your sign-in provider gives us: your email address, and your name if you let them share it.

Signing in does not upload what you have logged. Syncing between your devices, and sharing with a partner, are not built yet; when they are, this page will say so before the feature ships, not after.

We have no copy of your records to sell, share, transfer, hand over or lose in a breach, and we do not sell or share account information either.

Sign-in is handled by Google Firebase Authentication, which supports signing in with Google or with Apple. Firebase stores your email address, your name if it was shared, and an identifier for your account. We use it only to know that you are you.

You can use the app indefinitely without ever creating one. Signing out returns you to exactly the same local-only app, with your records untouched on your device.

All of it is written to storage that belongs to your device — the app’s private storage on iOS, and your browser’s local database (IndexedDB) on the web. In practice that includes:

• Your pregnancy details, including due date and week.
• Contraction timings and breathing sessions.
• Feeds, sleeps and nappy changes, and who logged each one.
• Milestones, checklists, and anything you tick off.
• Notes you write and photos you choose to add.
• The names you give yourself, your partner and your baby.
• Your own sleep and resting heart rate, if you connect Apple Health.

None of this is transmitted to us. It is not encrypted by us either — it is protected by your device’s own storage protections and whatever passcode, Face ID or Touch ID you have set. If someone can unlock your phone, they can open babybub.

The app contains no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no advertising SDK and no tracking pixels. It does not collect a device identifier, an advertising ID, or any behavioural data, and it does not track you across other apps or websites. The iOS app ships with a privacy manifest declaring no tracking at all. That manifest does declare three things, and only because signing in is possible: your email address, your name if your sign-in provider passes one, and the account identifier that tells us it is you again next time. They are used to run the app and nothing else. If you never sign in, none of them exist.

The watch app can show the carbon dioxide level in your nursery, read from a sensor you have already set up yourself in Apple’s Home app. babybub asks before it reads anything, and you can refuse without losing any other part of the app.

It reads that one measurement and nothing else. It cannot lock a door, switch a light, open a blind or change any setting in your home — babybub asks for read access only, and it has no way to control an accessory even if you wanted it to. It does not list your rooms or accessories anywhere, and the reading is never sent to us or to anyone else.

The number is shown with the time it was taken, and nothing more is done with it. babybub does not tell you a room is unsafe, does not set a threshold and does not raise an alert. Ventilation and infant sleep are a matter for your midwife, GP or child health nurse, and a reading from a consumer sensor is not a basis for advice about either.

The babybub codebase contains a sync server, intended for a future version where two parents can share one set of records across their phones. It is not switched on in the app you can install today. If you sign in, the app asks our server for the latest written guides and sends nothing back but your sign-in token.

If sync is ever enabled it will be opt-in, and this policy will be updated to describe what is transmitted and where it is held before that happens.

The iPhone app can read a small, fixed set of things from Apple Health, and only if you connect it: your sleep (the nights themselves and the stages within them), your overnight resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, your respiratory rate, your wrist temperature and your cardio fitness. It uses them for one purpose — showing your own nights and how your body was during them, beside your baby’s sleep, on the parent sleep screens.

That list is the whole list. babybub does not read your steps, your workouts, your weight, your cycle, your medications or anything else in Apple Health, and the permission sheet iOS shows you will only ever ask for the six above.

babybub only ever reads. It does not write anything back to Apple Health, which is why iOS asks you for read permission and never for permission to update.

• Health data read from Apple Health stays on your device and is never transmitted to us or to anyone else.
• Access is opt-in. Nothing is read unless you explicitly grant permission, and no feature is withheld for refusing.
• You can revoke access at any time in iOS Settings → Privacy & Security → Health. Revoking stops any further reading; you can delete what babybub already holds separately, inside the app.
• Health data is never used for advertising, marketing, or any similar service, and is never sold or shared with a data broker.
• Health data is not used for anything other than showing it back to you inside the app.

None of it is a medical measurement or a screening tool. Broken sleep after a baby is worth raising with your midwife, GP or child health nurse — it is not something to diagnose from a chart in an app.

Delete the app and everything goes with it. On the web, clearing site data for babybub.app has the same effect, and each browser and device holds its own separate copy.

We do not provide a backup, an export or a restore. If you lose or wipe the device, the records are gone and we cannot recover them for you. Your device may include app data in its own backups (for example an encrypted iCloud or computer backup) — those are Apple’s, held under Apple’s terms, and not something we can see or control.

Records about your baby are entered by you, stored on your device, and are treated exactly the same way as everything else here: never collected, never transmitted, never used for anything. babybub is intended for use by adults caring for a child, not by children.

babybub.app is a static marketing site. It sets no cookies, runs no analytics and loads no third-party scripts or fonts — the typefaces are served from this domain.

The site is hosted on Vercel, which as part of serving any website keeps standard technical request logs (such as IP address, user agent and the page requested) for security and operational purposes. That is infrastructure logging, it is not linked to your babybub account if you have one, and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

If the app’s data handling changes, this page is updated before the change ships, and the date at the top changes with it.

Questions, corrections or a data request: ben.ebsworth@icloud.com