Privacy notice

Who we are

AskBobbie is run by Locally UK Ltd, the data controller for everything described here. Write to [email protected] for anything to do with your data.

What we collect, and where it comes from

What	From	Why
Your name, email address and password (stored hashed)	You, when you register	To run your account
Your household: its name, the grown-ups in it and what they are called at home, children's first names, year groups and school	You, during set-up and in Settings	To file letters against the right child and say whose thing is whose. We ask for first names and year groups only; no dates of birth, no photos of children are needed.
Emails sent to your household's AskBobbie address, and anything you forward to it	Your school, clubs, school systems such as ParentPay or Arbor, or your own forwarding	To read out the dates, payments and things to bring, which become items for you to confirm
Messages, photos, voice notes and documents you send to Bobbie's WhatsApp number, and the phone number they come from	You, once you have linked your phone by sending a code from it	The same reading, and to answer you. Your phone number is how we know it is you.
Photos and files you share to the app from your phone, or attach in the chat	You	The same reading
Your Google Calendar events (titles, times, locations, attendees' email addresses) and your Google account email	Google, only if you connect it	To show your calendar alongside school life, and, only if you switch it on, to put AskBobbie's calendar into your Google account
What you ask Bobbie and what Bobbie answers, typed or spoken	You	To answer, and to keep the thread of a conversation for the day
Your profile photo, colour and emoji; children's emoji, colour and (if you add one) photo	You	To tell people apart on screen
Usual technical records: IP address, browser, times of requests, errors	Your device	To keep the service running and secure

Why we are allowed to

• Running the service you signed up for (performance of a contract): your account, your household, reading what is sent to your address, answering you.
• Your consent for the optional connections: linking a phone, connecting Google Calendar, sending edits back to Google. Each is a switch you can turn off, and turning it off stops the processing.
• Our legitimate interests in keeping the service secure and working: the technical records, the image check described below, rate limits.

Children's details are entered by their parents or carers, who decide what to share. We keep it to what filing a letter needs.

Who else touches it

We do not sell your data and never use it for advertising. These companies process it on our behalf, under contract, only to provide the service:

Processor	What for	Where
Anthropic	Reading letters and messages into items; answering your questions; checking uploaded images. Nothing you send is used to train their models.	United States
OpenAI	Turning voice notes into text, and Bobbie's spoken replies into audio. Not used to train their models.	United States
Google	Google Calendar, only if you connect it	United States and EU
Meta (WhatsApp Business Platform)	Delivering WhatsApp messages to and from Bobbie's number, only if you link a phone	United States and EU
Cloudflare	Receiving email sent to your AskBobbie address, and serving the site	EU and United States
Resend	Sending the emails we send you (verification, password resets)	United States
Our hosting provider	Running the application and its database	EU

Where data leaves the UK we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses, or the UK–US Data Bridge where the processor is certified.

Google API Services. AskBobbie's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We read your calendar to show it to you and, only when you switch it on, write AskBobbie's calendar into your account. We never use Google data for advertising, never sell it, and no person looks at it except to fix a problem you have asked us to fix.

How long it stays

• Emails, photos, voice notes and documents sent to Bobbie: the files and the raw email are deleted thirty days after they arrive. The items read from them (a trip, a payment, a thing to bring) stay on your calendar until you delete them or your account.
• Things you bin are deleted thirty days later.
• Bobbie's spoken replies are cached as audio for up to fourteen days.
• Your calendar, lists, household and conversations stay while your account exists.
• Google Calendar data is removed from AskBobbie when you disconnect Google; the tokens are revoked with Google at the same time.
• Your account and everything in it is deleted when you delete it (how). Backups follow within thirty days.

Keeping it safe

Everything travels over HTTPS. Uploaded files sit on private storage and are only ever served to people in your household. Google tokens are stored encrypted. Every image uploaded is checked once, automatically, for content that should not be there; if one is flagged it is kept out of sight, our team is told, and it is deleted with everything else at thirty days. Access to the service's back office is limited to named staff.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to take it elsewhere. Most of this you can do yourself in Settings; for the rest, email [email protected] and we will answer within a month. You can withdraw consent for any optional connection at any time by switching it off. If you are unhappy with how we have handled something you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, though we would rather you told us first.

Cookies

AskBobbie sets only the cookies it needs to keep you signed in and to protect forms. No advertising or tracking cookies, so there is no banner.

Changes

If we change this notice in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect. The date at the top is when it last changed.