HestiePrivacy policy
The short version: Hestie reads your email and calendars only to help your family. It doesn't sell your data, show ads, or share anything with your partner unless you choose to. It never sends, deletes or unsubscribes without your tap. You can download or delete everything at any time.
Who we are
Hestie is a family assistant app run by Hestie Group, based in Massachusetts, USA. Contact: [email protected].
What Hestie reads
- Email in the accounts you connect, read-only. Hestie reads new messages to sort them, and may search older messages to answer your questions or confirm something it has learned.
- Calendars and contacts you connect or allow on your iPhone, read-only.
- Your Apple sign-in: Apple gives Hestie an anonymous identifier for you. Hestie doesn't receive your Apple password.
Hestie connects to email with an app password you create for it. That password is encrypted with a key unique to your account and is never shown again, logged, or shared with anyone, including your partner.
What Hestie keeps, and for how long
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Text of recent emails | To sort them and build your summaries | 30 days |
| Sorted items (title, short summary, sender, subject, links) | Your feed and summaries | 6 months |
| Calendar events | Your Today, Week and Month views | Replaced every hour |
| Things Hestie learns (e.g. "Sam has swim practice on Saturdays") | So Hestie understands your family | Until you ask us to remove them, or delete your account |
| People in your family (name, relationship, birth year only) | To assign tasks and understand email | Until you ask us to remove them, or delete your account |
| Your writing style (a description, not your emails) | To draft replies that sound like you | Until you delete your account |
| Questions you ask Hestie, and its answers | So you can see them again | 90 days |
| Activity log (sign-ins, changes you make) | Security | 1 year |
| Backups | Recovery from failures | Up to 14 days |
Hestie never stores full birth dates, only birth years, and avoids storing account numbers, addresses and similar identifiers in what it learns.
Sharing with your family
Your account is yours. If you link with a partner, nothing is shared until you choose, topic by topic. Your email passwords and connections are never visible to anyone else. Information about your children and home that you choose to share goes to your shared space, which only its members can see. Access is enforced by the database itself, not just the app.
Who processes your data for us
Hestie uses a few companies to run. They process your data only to provide the service:
| Company | What they do |
|---|---|
| Anthropic (Claude) | Reads email content to sort, summarise and answer questions. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, this content isn't used to train their models. |
| TypeSafe (Jev) | Reads email content to label it (for example, recognising promotions) before Claude sorts it. |
| Amazon Web Services | Hosts Hestie's servers and database in the United States. |
| Cloudflare | Protects and delivers connections between the app and our servers. |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple and notifications. |
We don't sell your data, use it for advertising, or share it with anyone else, except where required by law.
Your choices
- Get a copy of your data, or have something Hestie learned removed: email [email protected].
- Delete your account in Settings, Account. This deletes everything your account owns immediately, including your encrypted email passwords, and your email text is removed from our servers within a day. Backups expire within 14 days. Information in a shared space stays with the family unless you delete it first.
- Disconnect an email account at any time; you can also revoke Hestie's app password with your email provider.
Children
Hestie is for adults. Parents may keep information about their children in Hestie (such as names, birth years and activities); children don't use Hestie or have accounts.
Security
Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Email passwords are encrypted with a key unique to each account. Each family's data is isolated in the database. Access to our systems is limited and logged.
Changes
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll tell you in the app before it takes effect.