Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data Squirrel collects, why, and what (if anything) is shared with anyone else. Squirrel is a small household-management app — it isn't ad-supported, doesn't run analytics or tracking scripts of any kind, and doesn't sell or rent your data to anyone.

"We" means whoever operates the instance of Squirrel your account lives on — typically the person who set it up for you and your household, or the household owner who invited you. Squirrel isn't a large multi-tenant SaaS company with a dedicated privacy team; it's a self-run app, so for anything this policy says to contact "us" about, that means contacting them.

When you create an account, we store:

• Your email address (used to log in and, if you're invited to or invite others to a household, to send invite emails);
• Your password — never in plain text. It's hashed with bcrypt before storage, so we can verify it at login but can't see or recover the original password;
• Your display name;
• Which households you belong to and your role in each (owner or contributor).

Beyond your account, Squirrel stores the content you and your household enter to use its features:

• Household-shared data: inventory items, shopping lists, recipes, meal plans, and the household's shared budget categories and transactions — visible to every member of that household;
• Your personal budget: categories and transactions you track for yourself, visible only to you.

We also set a small number of functional cookies: one to keep you signed in, one to remember which household you last had active, one to remember your sidebar preference, and one to remember your chosen language (English or Swedish). None of these are advertising or tracking cookies, and none are shared with any third party.

When you invite someone to your household by email, we send that email via Resend, a transactional-email provider — see "Third parties" below. The invite's recipient email address is passed to Resend to deliver that one message and isn't otherwise stored in our database; the invite link itself (a random token with an expiry date) is stored so it can be looked up and redeemed when the recipient opens it.

Resend is the only third-party service Squirrel sends any personal data to, and only for delivering household-invite emails (recipient email address, the inviting household's name, and the invite link). Resend processes that data on our behalf as a data processor, under its own privacy policy. If email delivery isn't configured on your instance, invites work purely through the on-screen shareable link and no email — or data — is sent anywhere.

We don't use any analytics, advertising, or crash-reporting service that collects data about you or your usage. There is no tracking pixel, no ad network, and no third party that receives your inventory, shopping list, meal plan, or budget data.

If you're in the EU/EEA (including Sweden), our legal basis for processing your account and household data is performance of the contract formed by these terms — we need it to provide the features you've signed up to use. Rate-limiting login and signup attempts (to slow down password-guessing) relies on our legitimate interest in keeping the service secure; that rate-limit data lives only in server memory, is keyed by the email address being attempted, and clears automatically — it's never written to the database or kept after a restart.

Account and household data is kept for as long as the account or household exists. A household owner can permanently delete their household at any time from that household's settings ("Danger zone") — this immediately and irreversibly deletes all of that household's inventory, shopping lists, recipes, meal plans, and shared budget data for every member. Leaving a household removes your membership and access to its data, but doesn't delete your account.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing — for EU/EEA and Swedish users, these come from the GDPR.

Squirrel doesn't yet have a self-service "export my data" or "delete my account" button built into the app. Until it does, you can exercise any of these rights by contacting the household owner who invited you, or whoever operates your instance of Squirrel — they can look up, correct, export, or delete your account data directly. You can already delete your own content (for example, individual inventory items, shopping lists, or budget entries) yourself at any time through the app.

Squirrel isn't directed at children and isn't knowingly used to collect personal data from anyone below the age required to consent to data processing under their local law (13 in most contexts, 16 under the GDPR unless their country sets it lower). If you believe a child has created an account, contact your instance's operator to have it removed.

Passwords are hashed before storage and are never visible to anyone, including whoever operates your instance. Login and signup attempts are rate-limited to slow down automated guessing. No system is perfectly secure, so we can't guarantee absolute security of information you send us.

If this policy changes, we'll update the "Last updated" date above. Material changes — for example, if a new third-party service is ever added — will be reflected here before they take effect.

For any question about this policy or your data, contact the household owner who invited you, or the person who operates your instance of Squirrel. See also our Terms of Service.