Your family's information

Privacy Policy

Last updated [[EFFECTIVE_DATE]]

The short version You tell us your city, your kids' ages, and what your family likes. We use it to build your atlas and nothing else. We have never sold anyone's information and we never will. We don't ask for your street address. We never see your card number. Email us and we'll delete everything, no questions asked.

What we ask you for

Everything below comes from the intake form, in your own words:

A family name — how your atlas is signed, e.g. "the Garcia family." A nickname is completely fine.
Your email address — so your atlas can reach you.
Your home city and state — not your street address. We ask for "Sarasota, FL," not where you live. We geocode the city to measure driving distance.
Your children's ages — as you type them, like "5 and 8." We don't ask for their names, birthdays, photos, or school.
How far you'll drive, what your family enjoys, anything you'd rather avoid, what you're comfortable spending, and whether you've recently moved.

That's the whole list. If a field feels like too much, leave it blank or make it vague — the atlas will still work, it'll just be a little less tailored.

What we don't collect

No card numbers. Stripe handles payment. Your card details never touch our systems — we only ever see that a payment happened.
No street address and no GPS or location tracking.
No accounts or passwords. There's nothing to log into.
No children's names, photos, birthdates, or schools.
No advertising trackers and no third-party ad pixels.

What we do with it

Build your atlas and your trip guides.
Email you your atlas and reply when you write to us.
Fix things when generation fails, and improve the product generally.
Keep the books — a record that a purchase happened, as tax law requires.

We don't use your family's information to build a marketing profile, and we don't send you unrelated email you didn't ask for.

Children's information

Read this one closely Backyard Atlas is a service for parents and caregivers. It is not directed to children, and we don't knowingly collect information directly from a child. Everything we hold about a child — an age, and nothing more — was typed in by an adult about their own family, for the purpose of choosing suitable places.

If you believe a child has submitted information to us directly, email [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] and we'll delete it promptly.

Who else touches it

We're one person, so we rely on a handful of well-known companies to run the service. Each one only receives what it needs to do its job. None of them are permitted to use your information for their own purposes.

Supabase — stores the database your profile and atlas live in.
Netlify — hosts and serves the website.
Stripe — processes payment. They handle your card details directly, under their own privacy policy.
Resend — delivers our email.
Anthropic — the AI service that turns your family profile and our research into the written atlas. Your profile is sent to them to generate your atlas. It is not used to train their models.
Firecrawl — searches the public web for the places we consider. It receives search terms about places, never anything about your family.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with advertisers, data brokers, or anybody else. The only other time we'd hand anything over is if the law genuinely required it, or to protect someone's safety.

If this business is ever sold, your information could transfer to the new owner. We'd email you first, and you'd be able to have your data deleted before it moved.

Analytics

We use privacy-friendly, cookie-free analytics to count page views and see which pages people find useful. It doesn't follow you around the internet, doesn't build a profile of you, and doesn't identify you personally. [[If you add analytics that DOES use cookies, replace this paragraph and add a cookie banner.]]

How long we keep things

Your atlas and profile — kept for as long as you want the atlas to work, since the link stops working without them. Ask us and they're gone.
Unpaid intake submissions — deleted within 12 months if they never become a purchase.
Payment records — kept as long as tax law requires, generally seven years. These live in Stripe and our books, and are only the fact and amount of a purchase.

Your say over your information

Email [[SUPPORT_EMAIL]] and we'll do any of these, free, within 30 days and usually within a couple of days:

See it — we'll send you everything we hold about your family.
Fix it — wrong city, wrong ages, changed email.
Delete it — permanently. Your atlas link stops working, and we'll warn you before we do it. We'll keep only the bare purchase record the tax rules require.
Take it with you — we'll send your profile and atlas in a portable format.

We won't ask why, and we won't treat you differently for asking. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under your state's or country's privacy laws — write to us and we'll honor them.

Keeping it safe

Your atlas lives at a private web address containing a long random token that can't be guessed, and it isn't listed or searchable anywhere. Data is encrypted in transit, access to the database is restricted to the server, and the public website key can only add a form submission — it cannot read anybody's information back out.

That said: anyone who has your atlas link can open it. Treat it like a photo you'd share with family rather than a password. And no system is perfectly secure — if anything ever went wrong in a way that affected you, we'd tell you promptly and honestly.

Changes to this policy

If we change this, the date at the top changes too. If the change is significant, we'll email active customers rather than quietly editing the page.

Talk to us

A real person reads this address.

[[BUSINESS_NAME]]
[[MAILING_ADDRESS]]
[[SUPPORT_EMAIL]]