Circles keeps what people tell you in trust: the names of their kids, ages, anniversaries. So the app is built to keep that on your phone. We don’t run a server that stores your people, there is no account, and we never sell or share your information.
Who we are
Circles is an app for iPhone and Android made by an independent developer (“we”, “us”). Questions about this policy: support@circlesbirthdays.com.
What stays on your phone
Everything you put into Circles: people, their circles and how they are connected, birthdays and other dates, notes, message languages and your settings. It is stored in the app’s private storage on your device. We cannot see it, and nothing in it is sent to us.
Contacts
Only when you choose to pick or import people, Circles asks for access to Contacts and reads names, phone numbers, birthdays and contact photos. It copies only what you choose into the app. Circles never adds, changes or deletes a contact and never uploads your address book.
Dictation (Pro)
- The microphone is used only while you dictate.
- Speech is turned into text by your phone’s speech recognizer. When the offline speech pack for your language is installed, this happens on the phone. Until then, the audio is processed by Google (Android) or Apple (iPhone) under their own privacy policies, and the dictation screen tells you so.
- The text is then sorted into people and dates by a model that runs on your phone. The text is not sent anywhere, and we don’t keep audio or transcripts.
- The model file may be downloaded once from the app store or our download server. That request carries only standard technical data, such as your IP address, and no personal data from the app.
Messages
When you tap to send a greeting, Circles opens the app you pick (Messages, WhatsApp and others) with the text filled in. Circles doesn’t send it, doesn’t see whether it was sent, and that app’s privacy policy applies.
Reminders
Notifications are scheduled on your phone by the system. No server is involved.
Backups
- Backup file. You choose where to save it. It is encrypted on your phone with your password (AES-256-GCM, key derived with PBKDF2).
- Cloud backup (Pro). If you turn it on, Circles saves the same encrypted file to your own Google Drive (a hidden app folder) or your iCloud (the app’s private database). The file is encrypted before it leaves the phone, so Google, Apple and we cannot read it. Your backup password is kept only on this phone, in the Android Keystore or the iOS Keychain.
- If you forget the password, nobody can restore the backup, including us.
Purchases
Payments are handled by the App Store or Google Play; we never see your card or billing details. To check whether you have Pro, we use RevenueCat, which receives a random app user ID, your purchase receipt, the app version, your device and OS type, and your store country. It receives nothing about the people in your circles.
Usage statistics
To learn which parts of the app help, Circles sends counts of actions through Google Analytics for Firebase, for example “onboarding finished”, “person added”, “message sheet opened” or “backup restored”. Some events carry a fixed type, such as the kind of relationship or a rough range like “6–20 contacts imported”.
- Events never include names, dates, notes, phone numbers or message text.
- Firebase also collects an app instance ID, the device model, OS and app version, and an approximate location (country or region) derived from the IP address.
- The advertising ID is not collected and ad personalization is off.
- You can turn statistics off any time in Settings → “Share anonymous usage statistics”.
- Google keeps this data for no longer than 14 months.
What we don’t do
No ads, no advertising ID, no tracking across other apps or websites, no selling or sharing of personal information, and no accounts.
Children
Circles is not directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect information from them. Details about your friends’ children that you add stay on your phone, under your control.
Keeping and deleting your data
- To delete everything on the phone, delete people in the app or uninstall it.
- Cloud backups stay in your account until you remove them:
- Google Drive: Settings → Manage apps → Circles → Delete hidden app data.
- iPhone: Settings → your name → iCloud → Manage Account Storage → Circles.
- To reset the usage statistics ID, reinstall the app.
Depending on where you live, including California and the EU, you may have the right to know, access, correct or delete personal information. Since we hold almost none, write to us and we will help with what we have: in practice, RevenueCat and Firebase records tied to your app’s random IDs.
Changes
If this policy changes, we will update it here and change the date at the top. For important changes we will also say so in the app.