Porch privacy policy
Porch is a private app for sharing weekly moments with small groups you choose. This policy describes what Porch stores and where.
What stays on your phone
Everything you capture, meaning photos, voice notes and text notes, is saved on your device first. Moments you keep private ("Just me") or leave out of your week never leave your phone.
What is uploaded
When you tap "My week is ready," the moments you chose to share (and only those) are uploaded to our server (run on a cloud hosting provider) so your groups can see them at the weekly drop: the media file, caption, transcript, capture date, and which groups may see it. Notes, stamps, and porch messages you write in a group are stored on the server and visible to that group's members only.
Account data
Porch works without a sign-up: your device gets an anonymous account. If you link an email address, we store it to let you recover your account and sign in on other devices; the one-time sign-in codes we email you are sent through an email delivery service. Your profile is a display name and a color. There are no public profiles, no discovery, and no advertising.
Notifications
If you allow notifications, Porch stores a push token for your device so it can tell you when a group's drop opens. Notifications are delivered through a push notification service and contain the group's name and nothing you or anyone else captured. Turning notifications off in your phone's settings stops them, and deleting your account removes the token.
Camera, microphone, and photos
Porch asks for the camera, microphone, and photo library only when you use them to capture a moment. Nothing is recorded or read without you starting it.
Voice transcription
Voice transcription is currently disabled. If enabled in a future version, voice notes would be transcribed by sending the audio clip to a speech-to-text service, used only to produce the transcript, and this policy will be updated first.
Blocking, reporting, deletion
You can block any member (hides content in both directions), report any moment or message (reports go to the operator for review), and delete your account from inside the app, under Settings. Deletion permanently removes your account and everything you shared from all groups. Nothing that stayed on your phone is affected by deletion on the server; delete the app to remove it.
What we don't do
No ads, no analytics SDKs, no selling or sharing data with third parties beyond the service providers that run the app on our behalf (cloud hosting, email delivery, push notifications, and speech-to-text if transcription is ever enabled), each of which processes data only to provide that service, no tracking across apps.
Changes
If this policy changes, the effective date above changes with it, and material changes are noted in the app before they take effect.