TribeSentry is a family/group location-sharing app: members share their live location with people in their groups, define places, set a meeting point, and send/receive safety (SOS), battery, speeding, and place alerts.
1. Information we collect
Account information
Email address (via email/password sign-up or Sign in with Apple; Apple may provide a private relay address).
Password (handled by our authentication provider; stored only as a secure hash — we never see it).
Display name and, optionally, a profile photo (avatar) you provide.
Location information (the core of the App)
Precise location (latitude/longitude), collected while the App is in use and in the background while you have location sharing turned on.
Derived signals sent with your location: speed, whether you are stationary, and your place (geofence) presence (whether you are inside a defined place).
A location history (a trail of your recent locations) so members can view where you have been.
Device information
Battery level (to power low-battery alerts).
A push notification token and your platform (iOS/Android) so we can deliver notifications.
Group and activity information
Groups you create or join, invite codes, places (geofences), meeting points, and alerts (SOS, battery, speeding, place enter/leave) including any message text.
Advertising information
We show ads through Google AdMob, and they are non-personalized. We do not track you across other apps or websites and we do not use your advertising identifier (Apple IDFA) for advertising. AdMob still receives coarse device information and your IP address in order to serve and measure an ad. See Section 6.
We do not intentionally collect special-category data, and we do not sell your personal information.
2. How we use your information
Provide the core service: show your location to members of your groups, render maps, trails, places, and the meeting point.
Generate and deliver alerts (SOS, low battery, speeding, entering/leaving a place).
Authenticate you and keep you signed in.
Send push notifications you have opted into.
Show advertising and keep our ad account compliant.
Maintain security, prevent abuse, and comply with law.
3. How location sharing works
Location is collected only while you have sharing turned on, and you can turn it off at any time in the App. When on, the App collects location in the background so your group sees your live position for safety purposes; on Android this runs as a foreground service with a persistent notification. Your location is visible to the members of the group(s) you belong to.
4. How we share information
With other members of your groups — your location, movement status, battery level, name, avatar, and alerts are shown to people in your groups. This is the purpose of the App.
Service providers that process data on our behalf:
Supabase — hosts our database, authentication, and backend (data storage/processing).
Google AdMob — advertising (see Section 6).
Apple Push Notification service and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging — delivering notifications.
PostHog — product analytics, hosted in the EU. It receives events about how the App is used (screens opened, features tried, subscription events), keyed to your account identifier. It does not receive your location, the names of your tribes, places or members, or the contents of any message or alert. Session recording and screen capture are disabled.
RevenueCat — processes subscription purchases and tells the App whether your subscription is active. It receives your account identifier and the purchase receipt from Apple or Google; it does not receive your location.
IONOS (Germany) — the mail server that sends sign-up confirmations and password resets. It therefore handles your email address.
OpenFreeMap (OpenStreetMap data) and Esri ArcGIS World Imagery — map and satellite tiles. Your device requests tiles for the area it is showing, so these providers see the requests their tiles are fetched for. No account data is sent with them.
Legal / safety — if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, and property of users or the public.
We do not sell your personal data.
5. Data retention
Account, group, and profile data are kept while your account is active.
Location history is retained for 7 days and then deleted. Your latest location is kept until updated or you stop sharing.
When you delete your account, we delete your personal data (account, location, history, group membership, tokens), except where we must retain some records to comply with law. Deletion cascades across related records.
Consent (EEA/UK): where required, we present Google’s User Messaging Platform (UMP) consent form. It is still needed for non-personalized ads, because storing and reading data on your device requires consent regardless of whether the ad is targeted.
No App Tracking Transparency prompt: the app does not ask, because it does not track. It serves non-personalized ads only. This is a deliberate choice for an app that knows where your family is.
Reset/limit ads: you can still reset your advertising identifier or limit ad personalization in your device settings (iOS: Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising; Android: Settings → Google → Ads).
7. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or port your data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can:
Edit your name/avatar in the App.
Turn off location sharing at any time.
Delete your account and associated data from within the App (Profile → Delete Account) or by contacting us at info@tribesentry.cloud.
EEA/UK users may lodge a complaint with their data protection authority. To exercise any right, contact info@tribesentry.cloud.
7a. Our lawful basis for each use
Required by GDPR Article 13, and previously not stated anywhere.
Sharing your position with your tribe — contract. It is the service you asked for, and it stops when you stop sharing.
SOS, crash, arrival and low-battery alerts — contract, and vital interests for an SOS, which is the one case where someone’s safety is the point.
Seven days of history — contract for the feature; the seven-day limit is the safeguard.
Crash and error diagnostics — legitimate interests. An app that silently breaks protects nobody.
Product analytics — consent. Off until you give it, withdrawable in Profile.
Advertising — consent where required, collected through Google’s consent form before any ad loads.
A child’s data, where the child is below the age of digital consent — consent given by the tribe owner as parent or guardian. See section 9.
8. Security
We use encryption in transit (HTTPS/TLS) and access controls (row-level security) to protect your data. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we work to protect your information.
9. Children
TribeSentry is a family locator, so we expect children to be in it. Saying otherwise would be untrue, and this section used to.
A child does not sign themselves up to anything in isolation: an account is created with an email address, and a member only becomes part of a tribe when that tribe’s owner approves them. We treat the adult who owns the tribe as the parent or guardian giving consent on the child’s behalf, which is what GDPR Article 8 expects for a user below the age of digital consent — 16 in the EU, or as low as 13 where a member state has set it lower.
What we hold about a child is what we hold about any member: their display name and avatar, their current position, and up to seven days of location history, which is then deleted automatically. The same rights apply, exercised by the parent or guardian: the account can be deleted from inside the app, and deletion takes the location, the history and the tribe membership with it.
Ads are configured for this. The ad content rating is restricted to “G”, and requests are tagged as potentially coming from a user below the age of consent, which means ads are non-personalised.
If you believe a child’s data is here without a parent or guardian having agreed to it, contact info@tribesentry.cloud and we will delete it.
10. Where your data is, and international transfers
Concretely, rather than “may be processed elsewhere”: the database and API holding your tribe, your positions and your history run on Supabase in AWS us-east-1, in the United States. Analytics, where you have consented to it, goes to PostHog’s EU cloud. Email is sent through IONOS in Germany.
So if you are in the EU or the UK, your personal data is transferred to the United States. That transfer relies on our data processing agreement with Supabase and the safeguards it incorporates. We are established in Israel, which the European Commission recognises as providing an adequate level of protection.
11. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy; we will post the new version here and update the effective date. Material changes will be communicated in the App where appropriate.