Privacy policy
Your words are for your group.
The short version. Highlie collects what it needs to run a group newsletter: your name and email from Apple or Google, what you share, and a token to send you notifications. Your updates are private to you until the issue goes out, then visible to your group. Photos are automatically checked against known child sexual abuse material. No ads, no tracking, no selling your data. You can delete your account in the app.
Highlie is an app for iPhone (and the web) that turns updates from a group of family or friends into a newsletter. It’s run by Garrett Halls (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what we collect, how we use it, who can see it, and the choices you have. Questions go to support@highlie.com.
- What we collect
- How we use it
- Who can see what
- Services we rely on
- How long we keep it, and deleting it
- Your choices and rights
- Children
- Security and where data lives
- Google user data
- Changes and contact
1. What we collect
When you sign in
You sign in with Apple or Google. They tell us an account identifier, your name and your email address. If you choose Apple’s “Hide My Email”, we get a private relay address instead of your real one. We never see or store a password.
What you share
- Updates you write or dictate, and the photos you attach. Before a photo leaves your phone, the app resizes it and saves it as a JPEG, which also removes its location and other hidden details (metadata).
- Comments, reactions and the stories you save.
- Groups you start or join, and their names, schedules and looks.
- People you block, and anything you report to us.
Talking instead of typing
When you dictate an update, your phone’s own speech recognition (Apple’s on iPhone, Google’s on Android) turns your voice into text. Depending on your device and settings, Apple or Google may process the audio on their servers under their own privacy policies. Highlie never receives your audio, only the text you choose to share.
Tidy up, which fixes grammar and punctuation in what you said, runs entirely on your phone using its built-in model. Nothing from it is sent to us or to any AI service.
From your device
If you allow notifications, we store your device’s push notification token and its platform (iOS, Android or web) so we can tell you when a new issue is out. Our servers also keep short-lived technical logs (such as the time of a request and any errors) to keep the service working and secure. When you upload a photo, we record the time and your IP address with it, for the safety checks described below.
What we don’t collect
No advertising identifiers, no location (including from your photos), no contacts, and no analytics or tracking tools in the app. Photos and the microphone are only used when you choose to add a photo or dictate.
2. How we use it
- To run Highlie: collect each person’s updates, put out each issue on the group’s schedule, and show it to the group.
- To notify you when an issue is out, by push notification and (once it’s turned on) by email.
- To keep Highlie safe: look into reports, enforce blocks, and prevent abuse.
- To answer you when you contact us.
Checking photos for child sexual abuse material
Every photo is automatically checked against lists of known child sexual abuse material (CSAM) kept by child-safety organizations such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). Cloudflare, our content network, does the check by comparing a digital fingerprint of each photo with fingerprints of known material, right after the photo is uploaded and whenever it’s shown. Nobody looks at your photos to do this, and ordinary photos, including everyday family photos of kids, don’t match.
If a photo matches, it’s blocked. As U.S. law requires, we report it to NCMEC, which works with law enforcement, and keep the photo and the related account details (name, email, the upload’s time and IP address, and where it was shared) for at least a year. We also suspend the account.
We don’t sell your information, share it for advertising, or use it to build profiles of you. Your words are never rewritten by us: an issue’s headlines come from the first sentence of what you wrote.
3. Who can see what
- Before an issue goes out, your updates are visible only to you. Not even the group’s owner can see them.
- Once it goes out, your stories, photos, name, comments and reactions are visible to everyone in that group, including people who join later.
- Saved stories and people you’ve blocked are visible only to you. Blocked people aren’t told.
- Reports go to us, with the reported text, so we can review them.
Photos aren’t public. They’re only served through signed links that Highlie gives to people in the photo’s group after they sign in, and each link stops working within two days. Links to photos in issue emails last up to 30 days, so anyone you forward an issue email to could see its photos until then.
4. Services we rely on
We use a few companies to run Highlie. They process data only on our behalf and only to provide their service:
- Amazon Web Services hosts everything: our servers, database, photo storage, sign-in accounts (Amazon Cognito) and email (Amazon SES).
- Cloudflare delivers photos to your group and checks them against known child sexual abuse material. It handles the photos and the IP address of whoever is viewing them.
- Expo delivers push notifications to Apple’s and Google’s notification services. It receives your device’s push token and the notification text (the newsletter’s name and the issue’s lead headline).
- Apple and Google handle sign-in, deliver notifications, and provide speech recognition on your phone.
We may disclose information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or as part of a sale or transfer of Highlie, in which case this policy would continue to apply to your information.
5. How long we keep it, and deleting it
We keep your information while you have an account. You can delete your account in the app under Account → Delete account. When you do, we delete:
- your profile, sign-in account, devices, saved stories and blocks;
- your memberships, and every update you wrote, including ones not yet published;
- your comments, reactions and every photo you uploaded.
Stories of yours that were already published stay in those past issues for the rest of the group, credited to “Former member” and without your photos, so other people’s newsletters don’t develop holes. If you’d rather those be removed too, email us and we’ll do it. If you signed in with Apple, deleting your account also removes Highlie from your Apple ID.
A few things take a little longer to disappear: copies of photos cached by our content network expire within a day, deleted photos are fully erased within 30 days, server logs within 90 days, and database backups within 35 days. Reports are kept, with the reported text, so we can deal with abuse even after an account is gone.
The record of each photo upload (who uploaded it, when, and from what IP address) is kept for 90 days, even if you delete your account sooner, so that we can still report abuse that comes to light. Material reported to NCMEC, and the records that go with it, are kept for as long as the law requires, at least a year.
Leaving a group deletes anything you’d shared for its next issue; stories already published stay. If you’re the last person to leave, the group and all its issues are deleted.
6. Your choices and rights
- Turn notifications, photo access or microphone access on or off at any time in your phone’s settings.
- Leave any group, block anyone, or delete your account in the app.
- Ask us for a copy of your information, or to correct or delete it, by emailing support@highlie.com. We’ll respond within 30 days.
Depending on where you live (for example California, the EU or the UK), you may have rights to access, correct, delete or port your data, and to object to or restrict how it’s used. We honor these requests for everyone, wherever you live. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
7. Children
Highlie isn’t meant for children under 13, and they shouldn’t create accounts. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and we’ll delete it. Family newsletters naturally mention kids; please share about them thoughtfully, knowing everyone in the group will see it.
8. Security and where data lives
Everything is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS) and stored encrypted at rest. Access is limited to what’s needed to run Highlie. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your information and will tell you if a breach affects it, as the law requires. Highlie’s data is stored in the United States (Amazon Web Services, Oregon).
9. Google user data
If you sign in with Google, Highlie asks only for your basic profile (name and email address) and uses it only to create and sign in to your account and to show your name to your groups. Highlie’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. We don’t use Google user data for advertising, and we don’t sell it or let people read it except as described here.
10. Changes and contact
If we change this policy, we’ll update the date at the top, and for significant changes we’ll tell you in the app before they take effect.
Garrett Halls
Email: support@highlie.com