Campfire is run by one person — Andrew Nidzieko — as a personal project, not by a company. That individual is the data controller for the information described here, and can be reached at contact@campfirekids.chat.
This policy explains what Campfire collects, why, who else can see it, how long it is kept, and what you can ask for. It forms part of the Terms of Service.
It covers two things: the Campfire app you sign in to, and the public website that describes it. They are treated identically except in one respect — visitor analytics on the public website — and section 10 sets that out in full.
When an adult creates an account:
When a parent creates an account for a child:
Children's accounts have no email address, no phone number, no photograph, no location, no date of birth, and no public profile. A child cannot be searched for or contacted by anyone their parent has not approved.
When anyone uses the service:
If your family uses Jobs (chores and rewards):
Jobs is an optional extra, switched on for a family one at a time rather than available to everyone. A family that doesn't have it stores none of the following.
Chore titles, reward names and the reasons a parent types are stored as ordinary text. They are not encrypted the way message contents are, so keep anything genuinely private out of a chore title.
None of this is real money. The numbers in Jobs are a tally a family keeps for itself. Campfire holds no funds, connects to no bank, takes no card, and moves no money — and it therefore collects no bank details, no card details, and no financial information of any kind. The Terms of Service set this out in full.
If your family uses the Dashboard (the kitchen tablet):
The Dashboard is the other optional extra, and it is also switched on a family at a time. It shows a calendar, the weather, a clock and each child's chores on a tablet in a shared room.
A tablet on a wall is visible to whoever is in the room. Calendar entry titles, the weather and chore names are on screen all day, to family and visitors alike. Messages never appear on it — there is no route from the tablet to a conversation — and no child's tally is shown until that child enters their own PIN.
The Campfire app contains no advertising, no analytics, and no third-party tracking of any kind. There is no tracking pixel, no advertising identifier, and no profiling. Your family, your children, your conversations, your chores and everything you do inside Campfire are never measured, scored, profiled, sold or shared. Nothing you send is used to train any system. That is not a setting and there is no version of Campfire where it is different.
The public marketing website is a separate thing, does not know who you are, and does count its visitors. Section 10 explains exactly what that means and what it does not.
Campfire does not use your information for any purpose beyond these, and does not make automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.
Campfire is designed for family use and children's accounts are created by a parent or legal guardian, never by the child. By creating a child's account, the parent consents to the collection and storage described in section 2.
Only what the service actually needs is collected, and a child is never required to provide more than that in order to take part. A child's information is not disclosed to anyone outside the people their parent has approved, and is never used for marketing.
A child's chore record and their family's tally are a child's information and are treated exactly as the rest of it is. They are visible to the adults in that child's own family and to nobody else — not to their brothers and sisters, and not to connected families.
A parent can at any time ask to review the information held about their child, ask for it to be corrected, ask for it to be deleted, and withdraw consent to any further collection — which means closing the child's account. Email contact@campfirekids.chat and it will be handled within a reasonable time, without charge. You may be asked to confirm that you are the parent on the account before a request is acted on.
Other people on Campfire. Your name and avatar are visible to the people in your family and to members of families you have connected with, subject to what each parent has chosen to share. Your messages are visible to the people you send them to. Parents can see the conversations their own children are part of, including messages the child has deleted.
Anyone in the room with a paired tablet. If your family has set one up, the calendar entries, chore names and weather on it are readable by whoever walks past, exactly as a paper calendar on the fridge would be. That is what it is for. Choose which calendars to show accordingly.
The web host. Campfire runs on shared hosting provided by HostGator, which stores the database and the server's own access logs on our behalf.
Google, and only if a parent chooses to connect a Google account to the Dashboard. Campfire asks Google for that account's calendar entries, so Google necessarily sees that the request was made and when. Nothing about your family, your children, your messages or your chores is sent to Google — the traffic runs one way, and it is a read. Google's handling of your Google account is governed by Google's own privacy policy. Disconnecting the account in Campfire stops the requests and deletes the stored copy; it may still appear in your Google account's own security settings until you remove it there as well.
Open-Meteo, and only if a parent has set a weather location. It receives the approximate coordinates of the place that was typed, and nothing else — no account, no name, no identifier, no cookie, and nothing that says which family is asking.
Push notification services. If notifications are turned on, they are delivered through the push service belonging to your browser or device — Apple, Google, or Mozilla, depending on what you use. Notification contents are encrypted so that the push service cannot read them; it does see that a notification was sent to your device and when.
Email delivery. Account emails such as password resets and new-device alerts are sent through the mail service on the web host.
Law enforcement, where there is a valid legal request, or where there is a genuine concern about someone's safety.
Your information is never sold, rented, or shared for advertising, and is never passed to a data broker. There is no commercial party in this arrangement at all.
Connections use HTTPS. Passwords and PINs are stored as bcrypt hashes, which means they cannot be read back. Message contents are encrypted where they are stored, which protects them if the database is ever exposed.
That encryption is not end-to-end: the keys are held by the service, so message content can technically be accessed on the server side. That access is used only to diagnose technical problems, to look into a safety concern, and to respond to a valid legal request. Campfire is designed for family messaging with parental oversight rather than for confidential communication.
No service can promise perfect security, and this one makes no such promise.
Account information and messages are kept for as long as the account exists, because they are the service — a family messaging app that deleted your conversations would not be much use. There is no automatic expiry.
A family's chore and reward record is kept the same way and for the same reason: it is a history, and a child being able to look back at it is the point. Entries are never edited or removed in place — a parent correcting a mistake adds a reversing entry and a new one, so both remain visible.
The copies Campfire keeps of calendar entries and weather readings are caches. Each one is overwritten by the next refresh — calendar entries roughly every ten minutes, weather roughly every fifteen — and the calendar copy is removed when the Google account it came from is disconnected.
When you ask for an account or a family to be removed, the information is deleted from the live service. Some records are kept briefly for specific reasons: sign-in failure counters expire on their own within hours, and the record of accepting these documents is retained afterwards as proof that consent was given.
Backups. The web host takes routine backups of the database on its own schedule and for its own retention period. Information deleted from the live service can therefore persist in those host backups until they are overwritten in the normal course. Those backups are not searched or used for any purpose other than restoring the service after a failure.
You can ask to:
Email contact@campfirekids.chat. There is no charge, and a reply will come as promptly as one person reasonably can — within 30 days at the outside. You may be asked to confirm who you are first, so that someone else cannot request your family's information.
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area and you are unhappy with how a request was handled, you have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.
Campfire's servers are in the United States. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, using Campfire means your information — including your children's — is transferred to and stored in the US, where privacy laws differ from those where you live and where US authorities may in some circumstances be able to compel access to it.
Campfire is a personal project with no corporate structure, and does not have the formal transfer arrangements a company would put in place. The transfer happens on the basis of your explicit consent, given when you create your account. If you are not comfortable with that, please do not create an account — and if you change your mind later, email contact@campfirekids.chat and your account will be removed.
There are two Campfire addresses and they are not the same thing.
The app carries no analytics at all. No analytics script runs in it, no analytics cookie is set by it, and no measurement of any kind is taken of your family, your children, your conversations, your chores or your use of the app. Nothing you do inside Campfire is counted, and nothing identifying you crosses from the app to anywhere else.
The public website uses Google Analytics to count visits — roughly how many people arrive, which sections they read, what sort of device they are on, and the general region they are in. It is there to answer one question: is anybody finding this. It sets cookies in your browser for that purpose and shares that visit information with Google, whose handling of it is governed by Google's own privacy policy.
That measurement is of visits to a web page. It is not linked to any Campfire account, because a visitor to the website does not have one and the website cannot see whether they do. No identifier is passed between the website and the app in either direction.
If you would rather not be counted, any browser tracking blocker will stop it, as will Google's own opt-out browser add-on, or browsing the site in a private window.
"Do Not Track" signals. Campfire does not track you across other websites anywhere, so there is nothing for such a signal to switch off in the app. The website's visitor counting does not respond to those signals, which is why the paragraph above tells you what does.
This policy may be updated. When it changes materially, the version number and effective date at the top of this page will change and account holders will be notified by email or in the app.
Any question about this policy, any request under section 8, or any concern about how your family's information is handled: contact@campfirekids.chat.