Privacy

What Playly stores

• Your account: email address, first name, family name, username, and a phone number if you add one. You sign in with a link or code emailed to you, a password if you choose one, or Apple on an iPhone. A password is kept by our sign-in provider only as a one-way scramble that can be checked but not read back; nobody at Playly can see it. If you choose Hide My Email, Apple gives us a private relay address instead of your own.
• Your phone, if you allow notifications: the address Apple gives it for delivering them, and its time zone, so times in a notification read the way your phone shows them. Signing out removes it.
• Your kids: first name, an emoji, the days and times they are usually free, and a photo if you choose to add one. No surnames, no birthdays, no school.
• Your household: which parents share the family, and — where there is more than one — a short note of who changed what, so the other parent can be told.
• Your settings: how much breathing room to leave around your calendar, and which notifications you want.
• Families you connect with, and how you connected — in person, by username or phone, from your contacts, or from a playdate you were both on.
• Playdates: the times, who was invited, who said yes, an optional note, a location (with its map position when it was picked from the search), and the messages in the group chat, including the note someone writes when they have to cancel.
• Busy times from your calendar as start and end times only — see below.

Your calendar

If you turn on calendar sync, Playly reads your calendars on your phone to work out when you are busy, so it never suggests a time that does not work.

Only the start and end times of busy periods are sent to our server, along with whether that time belongs to a parent, the whole household, or one child — which is how one child's club night avoids blocking their sibling.

Event titles, descriptions, locations, attendees and notes never leave your phone. Nobody at Playly and no other family can see what you are busy with, only that you are.

What Playly writes to your calendar

When a playdate is confirmed, the app adds it to the calendar you choose, on your phone. The event is titled "Playdate:" followed by the children's first names, with the location if one was set and the other family's name in the notes.

Messages in the group chat are never written to a calendar.

What other families can see

A family you have connected with can see:

• Your family name, and the first names and usernames of the parents in it.
• Your children's first names and emoji, and their photo if you added one.
• The times that would work for a playdate.
• Your phone number, if you added one. Families you have not connected with never see it, including families you share a playdate with.
• Playdates you are both part of, including notes, locations and messages in that chat.

Families you share a playdate with

On a group playdate you may be alongside a family you have not connected with. They see what everyone on that playdate sees: your family name, the first names of the parents, the first names and emoji of the children who are coming, and the playdate itself — its time, note, location and chat. They do not see your free times, your other children, your phone number, or your children's photos.

Being on a playdate together does let either family send the other a connection request, from the playdate's list of who is coming. Nothing is shared until it is accepted.

What nobody else can see

• What is actually in your calendar.
• Your email address.
• Children's details, or a child's photo, from any family you are not connected to.
• Your contacts. They are read on your phone and stay there.

What Playly does not do

• No advertising, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing.
• No analytics or tracking software, and no third-party trackers.
• No location tracking. Playly never asks for your device’s location and never records where you are.
• No reading of your contacts or photos in the background. Each happens only when you ask for it — tapping "Invite from your contacts", or choosing a picture for a child — needs your permission, and is described in its own section below. The camera is used only when you choose to scan another parent’s QR code, and the microphone never.

Children

Playly is for parents and caregivers. Children do not have accounts and cannot sign in.

What the app knows about a child is entered by their own parent: a first name, an emoji, when they are usually free, and — only if the parent chooses — a photo. A parent can change or delete any of it at any time in the app.

Your children's photos

You can add a picture for each child, from your phone's photo library. This is optional; a child without one is shown by their emoji.

Before it is saved, the picture is cropped and shrunk on your phone to a small square, and saved again as a new file. That drops the information phones record inside photos, including where a picture was taken. What is stored is the small picture and nothing else.

It is stored privately. The families you have connected with can see it, in place of the emoji, wherever your child appears to them. Nobody else can: not families you merely share a playdate with, not anyone looking your family up, and not the public. The rule is enforced where the file is kept, not only in the app.

Remove it any time under My kids. It is also deleted when you remove the child, and when you delete your account.

Your contacts

"Invite from your contacts" on the Friends screen reads your phone's address book, with your permission, to show you two lists: contacts who already use Playly, and contacts you could invite. Names and numbers are read on your phone and shown to you; they are not sent anywhere as a list.

To work out who already uses Playly, the phone numbers — digits only, no names — are sent to Playly and checked against the numbers parents gave at sign-up. They are looked up and dropped, never stored. A match tells you only the family's name, the same as looking one number up by hand.

An invite is a text message from your own phone, written by Playly and sent by you, with a link that connects the two of you once they have signed up. Playly never sends messages to your contacts itself.

Where a playdate is

When the organizer of a playdate types where it will be, what they type is sent to Mapbox, our maps provider, to offer matching places. Only the words typed into that box are sent — never your device's location, and never anything else about you or your family. Like any website, Mapbox does see the internet address the request comes from, and uses it to prefer places nearby.

You do not have to use the suggestions. Whatever you type is saved as you wrote it, which is what most people do, since a playdate is often at someone's house. If a place is picked from the suggestions, its map position is saved with the playdate too, so directions go to the right spot.

Getting directions opens the map app you choose — Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze — with the playdate's location. From there you are in that app, under its own privacy terms; Playly sends it the place and nothing else.

Who else is involved

• Supabase hosts the database, handles sign-in, and keeps children's photos in private storage.
• Resend delivers the emails that sign you in.
• Apple signs you in, only if you tap Sign in with Apple. Apple tells us your email (or a relay address) and, the first time, your first name; we never see your Apple ID password.
• Mapbox suggests places when someone types where a playdate will be.
• Expo Application Services hosts the web version and passes notifications to Apple, which delivers them to your phone. A notification carries what it tells you about: the family, the time, the place, or the message. Cloudflare serves the playlyapp.com pages and links.
• Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze, only when you tap Directions and only with the place.

Keeping and deleting things

Busy times are replaced each time your calendar syncs, and only cover the coming months. Turning calendar sync off deletes the busy times already shared.

A child's photo is deleted when you remove it, when you remove the child, and when you delete your account. Phone numbers checked from your contacts are never kept at all.

You can delete your account in Settings. If you are the last parent in your family, that also removes your family, your children's details and photos, your connections and the playdates you organized; families you had playdates with are told they are off. This cannot be undone.

Security

Every request is checked against database rules that only let you read your own family's information and what connected families have chosen to share. The same kind of rule guards children's photos where they are stored. Sign-in is handled by Supabase: each link or code emailed to you works once and expires within the hour, so only someone who can open your email can sign in as you.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything significant will be mentioned in the app.

Contact

Questions about any of this: hello@playlyapp.com.