Privacy policy

Who we are

PawTabs is the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us at privacy@pawtabs.com about anything on this page.

What we collect

Your account

• Your email address, used to sign in, to send password resets, and to contact you about the app.
• Your password, stored only as a salted hash — we cannot read it.
• A display name, so the other people in your household know who logged what.
• Whether you have chosen to receive news & updates by email. It is off unless you turn it on.

What you record about your pets

• Pet profiles: name, what kind of animal, breed, date of birth, photo, whether they are diabetic, and daycare details if you add them.
• Stays, if you add them: where your pet is boarding or staying, the dates, and that place’s phone number, address and any notes. Everyone who shares that pet can see its stays, view-only members included — which means they can see when your pet, and perhaps you, are away. They are removed when you delete the stay, the pet, or your account.
• Log entries: what happened, when, and any note you add — meals, walks, potty breaks, litter, yard time, medication doses, care and health events.
• Log types you create for a pet, such as “Brushed teeth”: the name, icon and color you choose, whether it is timed, and whether it counts toward the streak. Everyone who shares that pet sees them.
• Health records: medications and supplements and their schedules, weight, and readings such as blood glucose.
• A pet’s care sheet, if you write one: feeding, medications, routine, behavior, vet and emergency contacts, and notes for the people looking after them.
• Documents you upload, such as vaccine certificates, insurance cards and vet records — photos, PDFs or Word files.
• Photos you add to a pet’s journal or profile.
• Reminders you set, and who they should notify.

Chat

Each pet has a chat for the people looking after it. We store the messages you send there, who sent them and when, and how far each person has read, so the app can show what is new. Messages are seen only by that pet’s co-owners and caregivers — not by view-only members.

If you report a message, we keep a copy of it, who sent it and who reported it, and email it to our support team so we can look into it. The sender is not told who reported them. A report is kept even if the message is later deleted, so that it can still be reviewed.

Purchases

PawTabs Premium is bought through Google Play or the App Store, and your card details go to them, never to us. We use RevenueCat to keep track of subscriptions: it and we receive an identifier linked to your PawTabs account, which product you bought, and whether your subscription is active, renewing, cancelled or expired — enough to unlock Premium for you and your household, and nothing more.

Walks and location

A timed walk records only its duration. If you start a GPS walk, the app records the route while that walk is running, so it can draw the map afterwards and show the weather where you are.

• Location is collected only during a walk you started, and stops the moment you end it. PawTabs never collects your location when no walk is running.
• So the map is complete, a walk keeps recording while your phone is in your pocket or the screen is off. The whole time it does, your phone shows a “Walk in progress” notification, so it is never happening without you knowing.
• You are asked for location permission the first time, and can refuse or revoke it — timed walks still work without it.
• While a GPS walk is running, its route so far is shared with that pet’s co-owners and caregivers, who can open the walk and watch it on a map — so the person at home can see where the walk has got to. View-only members cannot. This is part of every GPS walk and there is no separate switch: if you would rather nobody saw where you are, turn off location permission for PawTabs and the walk is timed without a map. The live route is deleted the moment the walk ends.
• The finished route is stored with that walk, where everyone who shares the pet can see it, and deleted when you delete the walk.

Notifications

If you turn notifications on, we store a push token for that device — an identifier issued by Apple or Google that lets a message reach your phone — along with your notification preferences. If you never turn notifications on, no token is stored.

Turning notifications off in Account & settings stops them on every phone you use. The tokens are kept, unused, so turning them back on works without setting anything up again; signing out switches that phone’s token off, and deleting your account deletes them.

Error reports

When something in the app fails — a save that does not go through, a screen that cannot load — the app sends us a short report so we can find and fix it. A report holds the error message, which part of the app it happened in, the app version, whether the phone is Android or iPhone and its system version, and the account and pet it happened to.

Reports never include anything you typed: no notes, no pet names, no email addresses. They are used only to fix problems, and are not analytics — nothing records how you use the app when it is working.

This website

The app contains no analytics, but pawtabs.com counts its visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, so we know which pages people read and how they found us. It uses no cookies, does not identify you, and does not follow you to other sites: it sees the page, the site that linked to it, your browser and device type, and your country.

The launch-list sign-up forms on the site are provided by MailerLite. If you use one, the email address you enter goes to MailerLite so we can tell you when PawTabs launches.

What stays on your phone

Some things never leave your device and never reach our servers: your theme, which pet you had selected, whether you have seen the tutorial, whether Home shows pet facts, and the home-screen widget’s pet and colors. A few things wait on your phone only until they can be sent: logs in the offline queue, the part of a running GPS walk’s route that has not been sent yet, and error reports until there is a connection. The app also keeps a scrambled fingerprint of sign-up and password-reset links it has already used, so the same link is never acted on twice — never the link itself.

What we do not collect

• No analytics, no usage tracking, no advertising identifiers, no third-party trackers — the app contains no such software. The error reports above are the only thing sent that you did not record yourself.
• No contacts, no calendar, no microphone, no browsing history.
• No payment details. Purchases go through Google Play or the App Store, and card details go to them and never to us.

Why we hold it

Who else sees it

The people you share with

Inviting someone to a pet gives them the whole record for that pet — its profile, every log entry, health records, the care sheet, documents and photos — and shows them your display name against the entries you make. Co-owners and caregivers also see the pet’s chat, and the map of a GPS walk while it is still running; view-only members see neither. Removing someone from the household ends that access, the chat and live walks included. Sharing is the point of the app, so it is worth being deliberate about who you invite.

The services we run on

We use a small number of providers to run PawTabs. They process data on our instructions and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.

Nobody else

We do not sell your data, do not share it with advertisers, and do not hand it to anyone else except where the law requires it.

Where it is stored

Data is held on Supabase infrastructure and may be processed in the United States and other countries where our providers operate. Where data leaves the UK or EEA, it is transferred under the standard contractual clauses those providers have in place.

How long we keep it

• Your pet’s record is kept for as long as your account exists — that is the point of a health record.
• Anything you delete in the app — a log, a photo, a document, a chat message, a pet — is removed from our database.
• A log type you create can be archived, which takes it off the Log tab and keeps the entries logged with it, or deleted, which removes it and those entries. It is also removed when the pet is deleted, or with your account.
• The live route of a running walk is deleted when the walk ends. The finished walk keeps its route until you delete the walk.
• Chat messages stay until the sender or a co-owner deletes them, or the pet is deleted. Reports of a message are kept for up to two years.
• When you delete your account, everything you own goes with it. See deleting your account.
• If you bought a subscription, a record of that purchase — which product, when, and its status — is kept after your account is deleted, with your account removed from it, so that we can account for sales.
• Support emails are kept for up to two years.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights over your data. Email privacy@pawtabs.com from the address on your account and we will act on it within 30 days.

• Access — a copy of what we hold about you.
• Correction — most of it you can edit in the app directly.
• Deletion — see deleting your account.
• Portability — your data in a machine-readable file.
• Objection and restriction — ask us to stop or limit a particular use.
• Withdrawing consent — turn off notifications, or revoke location permission in your phone’s settings, at any time.

If you are in the UK or EEA and think we have got this wrong, you can complain to your national data protection authority.

Children

PawTabs is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed, never stored in readable form. Access to a pet’s record is enforced at the database level, so an account that has not been invited to a pet cannot read it even if the app asked. No system is perfect, but this is the standard we hold ourselves to.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and, for anything significant, tell you in the app. The current version always lives at https://pawtabs.com/privacy/.

Contact

privacy@pawtabs.com for anything on this page, or the contact page for everything else.