Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Functioning Labs LLC operates Jarmer and Functioning Human™. "We", "us" and "our" mean Functioning Labs LLC. We decide how the information in this policy is used, which makes us its controller.

This policy covers the Jarmer app for iPhone and Apple Watch (with its widgets, Live Activities, notifications, share sheet and Siri shortcuts), the website at jarmer.app, and the account page at jarmer.app/account. When we say "your household", we mean the one to four people who share a Jarmer home.

2. What we keep, and where

Everything below is stored in our database (run by Neon) or, for photos, in private file storage (run by Vercel), both in the United States. Section 8 lists everyone who handles it for us.

Your account

• The name you give Jarmer (people at home see it) and the email address you sign in with. Sign-in is run by Clerk. You can sign in with Apple (which may give us a private relay address instead of your email), with Google, or with your email address and a code. We never see a password.
• If you use Sign in with Google, Google shares your name, email address and profile picture with Clerk. You can choose to use that picture as yours in Jarmer.
• A random member id that links your things to you, your role in the household and when you joined.
• Your settings: time zone, quiet hours, digest and morning times, how many notifications a day, your color, "fewer like this" choices, a rough week if you start one, and how far you are through setup.
• Your house rules answers, kept hidden from everyone else until everyone at home has answered.

Your household's things

• Tasks and chores, lists and what's on them (including links and recipes you save), goals and their steps, routines, rhythms, dates that matter, decisions and polls, challenges, hand-offs and thanks, time blocks, "I'm doing this" when you share it, what's been done and by whom, things you capture, Moments (a date and the setup answers you give), and the house manual.
• Notes on a shared plan (a Moment or a together goal): what you decided, ideas, and a question for someone with its answer. Everyone in the household sees them; never on a goal that's yours alone.
• Photos you add: to the house manual, a task, a capture, a list item, or as your picture. A phone sends each photo once; we keep it in private storage that only our server can read, and phones fetch it through Jarmer after we check it belongs to their household. Text read from a photo on your phone (a recipe card, a flyer) is saved with it.
• Invites: the code, who made it, when it expires and who used it. If someone answers the house rules on your phone before they join, their name and answers are kept with the invite until they use it.
• Household settings: the name, who it's set up for (just me, a couple, roommates), the weekly reset time and the like.

Your journal

Check-ins (mood, motivation and an optional line) and notes, with their tags and any goal they're linked to. They're stored on our servers so they reach your own phones, and that's all: see section 4.

Notifications and your devices

• A push token from Apple for each of your devices, and tokens for Live Activities, so notifications and Live Activities reach you.
• A log of each notification we send you: what it said, the one-sentence reason it went, its kind and when. It's how we keep to your daily cap, and you can read the last seven days in Settings → Recent notifications.

Health and fitness amounts

Only if you link a ladder goal to Apple Health. Your phone reads that day's exercise minutes or step count, and when you reach the goal's amount, it saves that day's total with the goal. That one number a day is stored on our servers, and anyone at home who can see the goal can see it. Nothing else from Apple Health leaves your phone. If you turn on saving your mood to Apple Health, your phone writes each check-in's mood to Health; that doesn't send anything to us. We never use health data for advertising or share it for marketing.

Jarmer Plus

Whether your household has Plus, how (bought in the App Store, or on us), which member pays, the product, and when the current period ends. We also keep a history of purchase events that RevenueCat sends us (the kind of event, the product, the store and the dates). Apple takes the payment; we never see card details.

What happened, never what was written

Usage events: a name for something that happened (such as "first_now" or "limit_hit"), which household and person, when, and one short detail (such as "chores", or a number of seconds). Events from before you sign in carry a random install id the app makes, and are linked to you once you're signed in. We use them to see whether setup works and how Plus is doing, never to advertise.

The AI log and AI reports

For each AI request: the job, the model, whether it worked (or why not), how many tokens it used and what it cost, with the household and who asked. No prompt and no answer is kept. If you tap Report on an AI answer, we keep that answer (up to 2,000 characters), your reason and any note you add, so we can fix it. That's the one place your household's words reach our team, and only because you sent them.

Home Assistant, if you connect it

The events your Home Assistant sends (such as "washer_done"), the rules you set for them, the address you give us for status updates, and a fingerprint (a hash) of your key, never the key itself.

Keeping Jarmer running

• Counters of requests per person, or per IP address before sign-in, in short time windows, to stop abuse. They're deleted after two days.
• Short-lived technical logs kept by our hosting provider: IP address, time, the address requested and errors.
• A log of what our team does in our support tools (such as giving a household Plus, or deleting one on request). Those tools show names, email addresses, the plan and counts (how many chores, when something was last done), never what you've written.

When you write to us

Your email and our reply, so we can help.

3. What stays on your phone

• Places and location. Saved places (home, stores) and your location stay on your phone, and location reminders run there. A task's place tag ("home", or the place's name) syncs; coordinates and where you are never do.
• Your calendar. If you turn on sizing tomorrow's plan, your phone reads your calendar and sends us one number: how many minutes of tomorrow are busy. Event titles and times stay on your phone (it may use them there, as in "40 minutes before Dentist"). If you also choose a calendar for date night and the dates that matter, your phone adds those events to it, and anyone who shares that calendar sees them.
• Apple Health. Only the day's total for a goal you link, as above.
• Dictation and photo text. Turning speech into text and reading the text in a photo happen on your phone. Only the resulting text is saved.
• On-device suggestions. Where your iPhone supports Apple's on-device model, quick sorting and titles happen on the phone and nothing is sent anywhere for them.

4. Who at home sees what

• Shared things (chores, lists, the house manual, Moments, together goals, decisions, dates that matter) are seen by everyone in your household, including anyone who joins later.
• Private tasks, personal goals and personal routines are never sent to anyone else's phone, unless you choose to show one.
• Your journal is yours alone, always. It's never sent to anyone else's phone or included in their export, and nothing that faces another person reads it: not reminders to others, the digest, fairness, or anything that says how you're doing.
• Things you capture and haven't sorted yet are stored with the household and reach the other phones in it, where Jarmer shows them only to you unless you marked one for everyone. If something's private, make it a private task.
• About you, people at home see your name, your color, your picture if you add one, whether you've said yes to AI help, that you're going easy this week if you start a rough week, what you're doing when you share it, what you've done of the shared things, and your house rules answers once everyone has answered.
• An invite link shows anyone who has it your first name, who the household is set up for, and a task you're handing them if you picked one. Nothing else about the household.

5. Questions on guides

On jarmer.app, anyone with a Jarmer account can ask about a guide or answer someone. What you post there is public: anyone can read it.

• What's shown: what you wrote, the day you posted it, and your first name with your last initial ("Sam R."). Never your email, your household or anything in it.
• What we keep with it: which account posted it, so you can delete it and we can act on reports. A report says who sent it, and only we see it.
• Checked before it shows: our own filters look for links, contact details and selling first. What they let through is read by Anthropic's Claude, the way section 6 describes, to catch spam and abuse, and a post someone reports may get a second read. Only the post, the question it answers and the guide's title are sent. These checks are separate from AI help: they run whether or not anyone at home has turned AI help on, and they aren't counted against your household.
• Anything the check flags or couldn't check, and anyone's first post, waits for one of us to read it before it shows. We may hide or remove a post that breaks the terms, and stop an account from posting.
• Deleting: delete any post of yours on the guide. Deleting your account deletes them all, and they're in your export.

6. AI help

Off until everyone says yes

Jarmer asks each person. Some jobs mix everyone's words (sorting shared things, the evening digest), so AI help is on for a household only while everyone in it has said yes. Change your answer any time in the app (Me → Settings → AI help) or at jarmer.app/account. Saying no stops new AI requests for the whole household straight away; everything else keeps working as usual.

Where it goes

Through Vercel's AI Gateway to Anthropic's Claude models, on Anthropic's own service only: every request tells the Gateway not to send it anywhere else, and not to allow it to be used for training. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, what's sent this way isn't used to train their models, and we don't use it for that either. Anthropic may keep a request for a short time to run the service and check for abuse, as its terms set out.

What's sent

• The words you type for a job (a capture to sort, a task to break down, a goal to plan, a question to look up, a letter to draft, a list to fill, a recipe to import), and a photo only if you choose one for it, such as your fridge for dinner ideas.
• With it, only the context that job needs: for example, the titles of open tasks it's sorting against, the first names of people at home so it can suggest who, or the five house manual pages most likely to answer a How do I…? question. Never someone else's private things, and never a journal but your own.
• For Plus households, a few jobs run on their own while AI help is on: wording the first line of your evening digest (from tomorrow's plan), guessing how long and how much energy new tasks take (from their titles), and up to three goal ideas a week for you, from your own goals and your own journal notes from the last 90 days. Your notes only ever shape your own ideas.
• When you look something up, Claude may search the web, using search terms taken from your question.

What comes back

Answers are suggestions. You choose what to keep, and everything has Undo. AI never decides what's on Now or when you're pinged; the rules do. We keep no prompt or answer, only the AI log in section 2. Every AI answer has Report.

7. How we use it, and why

• To run Jarmer for you and your household: syncing your things to every phone, sending the notifications you've set up, sharing with the people you live with, and Plus. That's the service you asked for (the contract between us).
• To keep it safe and working: abuse limits, security, fixing problems and answering support questions. That's our legitimate interest in a service that works and isn't misused.
• To learn whether Jarmer is working: usage events and the AI log, which hold no content. Also our legitimate interest, and we keep it small.
• AI help, Apple Health and the newsletter: only with your yes (consent), which you can take back any time.
• When the law requires it: for example, answering a valid legal request, or keeping records the law says we must.

We don't use your information for advertising or profiling, and we make no automated decisions about you that have legal or similar effects. We don't send marketing email, apart from the newsletter if you sign up for it (section 17); Clerk sends sign-in codes and links, and otherwise we write to you only about your account or this policy.

8. Who handles it for us

These companies do one job each for us, under contracts that limit what they can do with your information, and their own privacy terms.

If you connect Home Assistant, the status updates go to the address you chose; that system is yours, not one of ours. We may share information if the law requires it, to protect someone's safety, or as part of a sale or merger of our business, in which case this policy keeps applying to it and we'll tell you first.

9. What we never do

• We don't sell or share personal information for advertising (in California's words: we don't "sell" or "share" it, and haven't in the past 12 months).
• No ads, in the app or on this website.
• No tracking: we don't link what you do in Jarmer with other companies' data for advertising, or pass it to data brokers.
• No third-party analytics or advertising code in the app or on this website.

10. How long we keep it

• Your account and your own things: while your account is open, and deleted when you delete it (section 11).
• Your household's shared things: while anyone is still in the household. When the last person leaves, the household and everything in it is deleted.
• Things you delete in the app: gone from every phone. Our copy is marked deleted, so phones that were offline catch up, and is removed with the household. Photos are removed from storage when you delete them.
• The notification log: 90 days. You see the last seven.
• Usage events and the AI log: about 13 months (400 days), then deleted. If you leave, your member id is taken off them.
• AI reports (an answer you chose to report): while the household exists.
• Questions and answers you post on guides: until you delete them or your account, or we take one down. Reports on a post go with it.
• The newsletter list: while you're on it. An address that has left is kept only so it stays off, until you ask us to delete it.
• Loves on guides: while the guide exists. They hold only a scrambled browser id, nothing about you.
• Abuse counters: two days. Hosting logs: a short time, set by our hosting provider.
• Our support log: kept for our records, with no household content in it.
• Backups: our database keeps a rolling restore history for a limited period (no more than 30 days), so anything deleted is gone from it within that time.
• Purchases: Apple and RevenueCat keep their own records of purchases, under their terms and the tax laws that apply to them.

11. Deleting your account

Delete your account in the app (Me → Settings → Delete my account) or at jarmer.app/account, or write to privacy@jarmer.app. Your sign-in with Clerk is deleted too.

If you're the only one, or the last one

The household and everything in it is deleted, photos included.

If others stay

• Deleted with you: your private tasks, personal goals and routines, your journal, your questions and answers on guides, your notification log and devices, and photos that were only yours (your picture, and photos on your private tasks and captures).
• Emptied and removed from every phone: records that were only about you, such as what you completed, your goal logs and your captures.
• Kept for the people who stay: the shared things (chores, lists, the house manual, Moments). Together goals and "for us" captures you made pass to whoever has been in the household longest. Chores that were yours go to whoever's next in turn, or to the one other person, or to anyone. If you set the household up, that role passes the same way.
• AI help is checked again for the people who stay.

Subscriptions and Sign in with Apple

Deleting your account doesn't cancel a subscription. Your subscription is billed by Apple and keeps renewing until you cancel it in your Apple Account settings. The household keeps Plus while it's paid for. When you delete your account in the app, Jarmer also asks Apple to remove its Sign in with Apple access; from the website, you can remove Jarmer yourself in Settings → Apple Account → Sign in with Apple.

12. Getting a copy

Export your data in the app (Me → Settings → Export my data) or at jarmer.app/account. You get one JSON file of everything Jarmer has that you can see: your profile and settings, the household and the people in it, your notification log, your questions and answers on guides, every shared thing, and your own private things and journal. Other people's private things and journals are left out. Photos are listed rather than included; save them from the app, or ask us for copies.

13. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• See what we have about you, and get a copy you can take elsewhere (export does both).
• Correct it (most of it you can change in the app).
• Delete it (delete your account).
• Limit or object to how we use it, including anything we do for our legitimate interests.
• Take back your consent for AI help or Apple Health at any time, without affecting what was done before.

Most of this you can do yourself in the app or at jarmer.app/account. For anything else, write to privacy@jarmer.app. We answer within 30 days (sooner where the law says so). We may ask you to write from your account's email address or sign in, so we know it's you. Someone you authorize can ask for you, with proof that you did. We'll never treat you differently for using these rights.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland

These rights come from the GDPR, the UK GDPR and Swiss law. Section 7 gives our legal bases. If you're unhappy with how we've handled your information, you can complain to your local data protection authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office), though we'd like the chance to fix it first.

In California and other US states

In the last 12 months we've collected these categories of personal information: identifiers (name, email address, member id, device tokens, IP address); customer records; commercial information (your household's plan and purchase status); internet activity (usage events); sensitive information you choose to give us (health and fitness amounts for a goal you link, and journal check-ins); and the things you write and photos you add. We collect them from you, your devices, and Apple or Google when you sign in with them. We use them only for the purposes in section 7 and share them only with the companies in section 8, for those purposes. We don't sell or share personal information, and we use sensitive information only to provide Jarmer, so there's nothing to opt out of; we honor Global Privacy Control signals all the same. If we turn down a request, you can appeal by replying to our answer.

14. Children

Jarmer isn't directed to children under 13 (or the minimum age where you live), and they shouldn't use it. If we learn that we hold personal information from a child under 13 without a parent's consent, we delete it: their account, and the household too if they're its only member. If you think a child is using Jarmer, write to privacy@jarmer.app.

15. Keeping it safe

• Everything travels encrypted (HTTPS), and our providers encrypt it where it's stored.
• Every request for your household's things has to come from someone signed in, and everything it reads is limited to their own household. Photos are private and only served after that check.
• Sign-in is run by Clerk; we never handle passwords. Home Assistant keys are kept only as a hash.
• Our support tools show counts and settings, not what you've written, and every time a household is opened in them, it's logged.

No system is perfect. If something goes wrong that affects your information, we'll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

16. Where it's processed

We're based in the United States, and so are our servers and the companies in section 8. If you use Jarmer from elsewhere, your information goes to the United States, where the law may protect it differently. Where the law asks for a safeguard for that transfer, we rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses in our providers' data processing terms, or on their certification under the Data Privacy Framework.

17. This website and cookies

jarmer.app has no analytics, no ads and no tracking cookies. Most pages load their fonts from Google Fonts, so Google sees your IP address and browser details when they load. The account page doesn't load them.

The account page uses Clerk's cookies (and similar browser storage) to keep you signed in. They're needed for signing in, aren't used for anything else, and go when you sign out or they expire. During sign-in, Clerk may use Cloudflare's check that you're a person.

"Love this" on a guide

Anyone can love a guide, without an account. To count each browser once, the page keeps a random id in your browser's storage (and a note of which guides you've loved, so the button remembers). We store only a scrambled form of that id, which can't be turned back into it and isn't tied to you or anything else of yours. Clear your browser's storage and it's gone from your side.

The newsletter

If you sign up on a guide for new guides by email, we keep your email address, the page you signed up on and when. We use it to send you new guides and calculators, and for nothing else; it's never sold or shared. Every email has a link that takes you off the list at once, or write to privacy@jarmer.app. An address that's left the list is kept only so it stays off; ask and we'll delete it.

18. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll tell you in the app before it takes effect, and change the date at the top. Earlier versions are available if you ask.

19. Contact us

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@jarmer.app. Anything else: support@jarmer.app.

See also our Terms of Use.