Privacy Policy

Summary

We keep your family's settings, not your family's browsing. To filter DNS and run the VPN we store an account ID, each device's key, and the rules you configure. We don't keep a record of the sites anyone visits, and we don't sell or share any of it.

Who we are

Family Shield is operated by Gosenville LTD, the data controller for the personal data described here, registered in Nicosia, Cyprus. Contact us at info@gosenville.com.

What we collect

• Account — a Firebase user ID, created anonymously or through Sign in with Apple. If you link an Apple ID, your email address and display name.
• Devices — a device identifier, its WireGuard public key, the private tunnel IP assigned to it, and its profile type.
• Settings — the categories you block, schedules like bedtime and school hours, custom blocked domains and numbers, and running totals of items blocked.
• Purchases — subscription status, via RevenueCat and Apple. We never see card details.
• Breach monitoring — email addresses you choose to monitor, stored encrypted and checked against Have I Been Pwned.
• Diagnostics — crash and performance reports, scrubbed of credentials.

Location

When someone triggers an SOS, the app shares their precise location with their own family until the alert ends, so a parent can reach them. That is the only time location is collected — there is no background permission and no continuous tracking. Points are deleted after 7 days.

The scanners

The scam checker, link checker and breach explainer work by sending what you give them — a pasted message, a screenshot, a link — to Anthropic's Claude API in the United States for analysis. It isn't used to train any model. Nothing else you do in the app is sent there.

What we don't keep

Filtering means our resolver sees a domain at the moment it's looked up, to decide whether to answer it. We don't retain that:

• Query logs are never written to disk — a short in-memory buffer of at most an hour, used only to tell whether protection is still working, with client IPs anonymised.
• No browsing histories, profiles or timelines.
• Traffic inside the tunnel is encrypted; we don't inspect or store it.
• We don't read your messages, photos or app activity.

Children

A parent or guardian sets up the family, creates each profile and approves every device that joins — children don't create accounts themselves. A parent can view, change or delete a child's data at any time. A supervised device can't remove itself from the family or delete the account; it can only ask a parent. A child's data is visible to their own family and nobody else.

Who processes your data

Firebase (sign-in), Apple (App Store, payments, push), RevenueCat (subscriptions), Anthropic (the scanners, above), Have I Been Pwned (breach lookups), APIVoid (link reputation), Sentry (crash diagnostics), Hetzner (our servers and database, in Finland), DigitalOcean (VPN servers, in the regions listed on our pricing page) and Cloudflare (this website). AdGuard Home runs on our own servers and sends nothing to anyone.

Some are in the United States; transfers outside the EEA rely on Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision. We don't sell your data or share it for anyone else's purposes, including advertising.

How long we keep it

Account, family and device data last as long as your account. VPN registration is deleted when you remove the device. SOS locations are deleted after 7 days. Deleting your account removes the rest, except anything we must keep by law.

Your rights

You can request access, correction, deletion, restriction, objection or portability, and withdraw consent where we rely on it — email info@gosenville.com. You can also delete your account yourself under Profile → Delete account; on a supervised device that sends a request to a parent instead. You may complain to your local data protection authority.

Security

Traffic runs over WireGuard. Monitored email addresses are encrypted at rest. VPN private keys are generated on your device and never leave it. If you've found a vulnerability, our disclosure policy is at familyshield-vpn.com/security.

Contact

Gosenville LTD — info@gosenville.com. For security vulnerabilities, please follow our disclosure policy instead. We'll update the date above if this policy changes.