My Family Matters, Inc. ("Family Matters," "we," "us," or "our") built Family Matters to help families coordinate the practical work of caring for one another — organizing a household, keeping records of family loans and gifts, funding a child's education, watching over a home, and giving a professional a window into the pieces you choose to share. Doing that well means we hold sensitive information, much of it about your family and about people other than you. This Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why, who can see it, and the choices you have.
The short version. We are not a bank, a credit bureau, or your advisor — we are a place to coordinate and keep records. When you connect a financial account, we never receive your bank login. Family Matters is shared by design: the point of a household is that the people in it can see the records you keep together, so read Sections 2 and 6 carefully before you add information about other people. We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we will never sell your financial data. This summary is not a substitute for the full policy below.
1. Scope, roles, and who we are
This Privacy Policy applies to all of the Services, which means, collectively: the marketing websites at myfamilymatters.com (the "Site") and housematters.app; the applications at app.myfamilymatters.com, advisors.myfamilymatters.com, app.housematters.app, and homewatch.myfamilymatters.com; and the Family Matters and House Matters iOS applications (together, the "App"). House Matters is the Family Matters product for Operators and for homeowners who use it to run their own home; references in this Policy to Family Matters or the Services include House Matters. It replaces the August 26, 2026 version.
Depending on how you use the Services, you may be one or more of the following, and we use these terms throughout:
- Member — a person who belongs to a household.
- Principal — the person who organizes and stewards a household.
- Operator — an independent home-watch or property-care business that uses Family Matters to serve its own clients.
- Advisor — a financial or legal professional whom a household grants access to specific parts of its records ("modules").
- Homeowner — an Operator's customer (sometimes called a client) whose home the Operator watches.
We also refer to Content, which means the information, records, documents, photos, and notes you create, upload, or record in the Services — including information about other people.
This Privacy Policy applies to your information whether or not you finish creating an account or ever become a registered user. Because of how the Services work, we may collect and hold information about a person before that person signs in for the first time, or even if they never do (see Sections 2 and 6).
Who we are and how to reach us. Family Matters is operated by My Family Matters, Inc., 1010 Dale Street North, St. Paul, MN 55117. For privacy questions or to exercise your rights, contact help@myfamilymatters.com. For text-message help, contact help@myfamilymatters.com.
2. Information you provide
Almost everything in Family Matters is information you (or another Member of your household, or an Operator, or an Advisor) type in, upload, or connect. The categories below reflect what the Services actually store.
Identity and profile
Your name (full, first), email address, mobile phone number, and — if you choose to add them to your profile — your date of birth, sex, and a display color for your avatar. Your email and phone number are the identifiers you use to sign in. Date of birth and sex are optional profile facts collected inside the app, not at sign-up.
Your family relationship graph
Family Matters lets you describe how the people in your family are related — for example that two people are spouses or domestic partners, that one is the parent or guardian of another, or that a relationship has since ended. These records can include marital and union status, whether a relationship is active or ended, the date a relationship began, and dates of birth. We use this graph to derive extended kin (siblings, grandparents, in-laws, step-relations, and so on) and to compute tax-related positions such as gift-splitting between spouses.
Please note: relationships are a property of people, not of a single household. Because of this, information you record about a person — including how they are related to others, their date of birth, and their contact details — can be visible in every household that person is linked to, not only the one you are working in. Section 6 explains this cross-household visibility in more detail.
Household and account details
The name of your household, whether the household is married for tax purposes, tax-planning figures you set (such as annual-exclusion and lifetime-exemption amounts), the modules your family signed up to work on, each Member's role and status, and household billing/entitlement state maintained by our payments provider.
Financial records you create
Family Matters is, in large part, a place to keep organized records of intra-family financial arrangements. Depending on which features you use, this can include:
- Private family loans and promissory notes — principal, interest rate, the applicable-federal-rate snapshot, any gift component of a below-market loan, term, payment amount and schedule, maturity, governing-law state, free-text notes, the lender/borrower/guarantor parties, uploaded loan documents, and, where a note is secured by real property, the legal description of that property, its county, and state. For these interest-bearing arrangements, we also keep the tax-form records we derive from them — for example interest reported on Form 1099-INT or Form 1098.
- Covenants you attach to a loan or fund — for example a spending-card limit, a credit-freeze condition, or an emergency-fund floor that is checked against a connected bank balance.
- 529 college-savings plans — the owner, successor owner, and beneficiary; the plan provider; balances, goals, and years-to-college; recurring contributors and their amounts; and contribution records including any five-year "superfunding" election. Where a plan is read through an investment-data connection, we store an opaque linkage handle (see Section 3). Family Matters does not move money into a plan; any contribution you make goes to the plan provider directly.
- Gifts and gift-tax (Form 709) records — recipients, amounts, dates, gift types, whether a gift is split with a spouse, which exclusion applies (annual, direct tuition, direct medical, or support of a minor), and notes. From these we derive annual-exclusion use, lifetime-exemption use, and tuition/medical-exclusion positions.
- Family funds and emergency reserves — fund type, targets, coverage months, monthly contributions, owner, any trust involved, contributors, and withdrawal requests (which can carry a free-text reason and an attached document).
- Stipends, allowances, and spending cards — payer and recipient, amount, cadence, kind (allowance, support, or trust distribution), and funding source. Family Matters does not issue spending cards.
- Giving plans and contemplated transfers — annual giving budgets, long-term-care reserves, per-recipient equalization targets, and the inputs and rationale you record for a contemplated transfer.
- Trusts and other entities — name, type (trust, LLC, estate, or other), agreement date, whether revocable, the settlor, the roster of trustees, beneficiaries, and protectors, and the last four digits of the entity's tax identification number (EIN). We do not store full EINs.
Estate documents and the facts in them. Estate-planning documents you upload — wills, trusts and trust amendments, powers of attorney, healthcare directives, beneficiary designations, deeds, and operating agreements — and the facts we read out of them, such as who is named executor, trustee, agent, or healthcare proxy and what each document provides. Only the household's Principals, the acting trustee of a linked trust (for that trust's own instrument), and an Advisor you specifically grant the estate file can open them. Section 6 describes how uploaded documents are read by automated tools.
We do not pull credit reports from a credit bureau, and identity verification is not active. You may upload your own credit report to prefill a loan; it is read as described in Section 6, and the file itself is not stored.
Home-watch and property information
For homes you or an Operator manage in the Services: the property's address, cover photo, occupancy status, and notes; stays (dates, headcount, and access notes); visit reports (summaries, checklist items, issue counts, and photos); maintenance tickets (photos, vendor name and contact, and cost); utility accounts and uploaded utility statements; and expenses.
The scope of a home-watch arrangement can also include physical-security information about the home — gate and alarm codes, pet and access notes — stored so that an authorized Operator can carry out the watch. Because these homes are often vacant, this is high-sensitivity information; Section 10 describes how we protect it and Section 14 describes a related risk in uploaded photos.
Photos, documents, and notes
Files you upload — home-watch check photos, maintenance photos, property cover photos, receipts, loan and agreement documents, estate documents, Form 709 filings, and uploaded statements — along with any notes you write. These files and notes are part of your Content (Section 1). Files are stored privately; photo and document files are served through short-lived, signed links, and a visit report or invoice may be shared with a homeowner by link as described in Section 6.
Information about other people
This is one of the most important things to understand about Family Matters. When you add a borrower, a 529 contributor, a Homeowner, an invitee, a trustee or beneficiary, or a minor family member, the Services create a record about that person — including their name and, where you provide them, their email address and phone number — at the moment you reference them, before that person has any account and without any direct interaction with us. A minor aged 13 to 17 may later be given a guardian-enabled, read-only sign-in within the guardian's household (see Section 12).
When you provide information about, or contact information for, another person, you are representing to us that you have that person's permission or other lawful authority to do so — including for us to contact them by text or email where you provide a number or address. This "inviter warranty" is set out in our Terms of Service, and it is what allows the Services to hold records about people who have not themselves signed up.
Information collected before you sign in (leads and waitlist)
When you ask us to send a sign-in code, we record the email address or phone number you entered, which door you came through, and any campaign tag in the link you followed — before you enter the code. We keep that record even if you never complete sign-up, until you delete your account or ask us to delete it using Section 11.
3. Bank and investment account data (Plaid and Akoya)
When you connect a financial account to Family Matters, you do so through our data-connection providers. At no point will we receive your login information to any of your financial accounts. Bank connections are made through Plaid Inc. ("Plaid"); certain investment and 529 accounts (including some Fidelity accounts) are connected through Akoya. You can review Plaid's practices in the Plaid End User Privacy Policy and Akoya's in Akoya's privacy policy.
Through these connections we receive information such as the financial institution name, account names and types, the account "mask" (last four digits), and balances. Where you enable transaction tracking on an account, we also receive that account's transaction history.
How we use transaction data. When you designate an account for gift detection or loan-payment tracking, Family Matters retrieves that account's transaction feed and runs a matcher that looks for money going to, or coming from, someone in your family relationship graph. The matcher normalizes the transaction description, ignores common payment-service words (such as the names of peer-to-peer apps), and looks for a whole-name match, scoring how confident the match is. When it finds a likely gift or loan repayment, it surfaces a suggestion for you to review — it never records anything automatically. Nothing becomes a gift or a payment in your records until you accept it. When you designate an account to a home, we also scan its outgoing transactions for likely running costs (such as utilities, insurance, property tax, and lawn or snow service), repairs and improvements, and payments of a caretaker's invoice, and suggest them for you to file; we keep the lines we flag as pending suggestions. You can also search the outgoing transactions of accounts you have connected to find a specific payment; those results are shown only to you and are not stored. We do not show your accounts back to you as a general spending view.
Depending on the institution and connection, Plaid can also make available the account owner's name, email, phone, and address. Because Family Matters connects read-only and does not move money, we do not request or store your bank routing or account numbers.
By connecting an account, you authorize us and our providers to access it on your behalf to retrieve this information, and you may revoke that authorization at any time by disconnecting the account or contacting us. The mechanics of that authorization are set out in our Terms of Service.
4. Information collected automatically
When you use the Services, some information is collected automatically:
- Usage, log, and device information — such as the pages or screens you use, the actions you take, your device and browser type, and general technical logs needed to operate and secure the Services.
- Audit records — for sensitive actions, our append-only audit log records who did what and when for events such as money-related changes, permission and access-grant changes, approvals, invitations, electronic signatures, and support-staff impersonation sessions (see Section 8).
- Web analytics (Google Analytics 4). Our marketing websites (myfamilymatters.com and housematters.app) load Google Analytics 4, which collects information such as page views, device and browser details, an approximate location derived from IP address, and an analytics identifier; today we do not present a cookie-consent banner there. The signed-in application and our iOS App do not currently load a third-party analytics tool; if we add one, we will update this section. Section 11 explains how to opt out.
- Message records. We keep a record of the emails and texts we send you, including whether an email was delivered or opened, and of texts you send to our number, including STOP, HELP, and any reply.
- iOS push tokens. When you sign in on an iOS device, the App registers a push-notification token so we can deliver notifications through Apple's Push Notification service; the token is removed when you sign out and disabled if Apple reports it as no longer valid. Push delivery is enabled only when configured.
- Device permissions (iOS). With your permission, the App accesses your camera and photo library (to attach home-watch, maintenance, and visit photos), Face ID (to confirm sensitive or high-value actions), and your contacts (to help you add family from your address book when sharing a home). You can grant or revoke each of these permissions in your device settings. Face ID is performed entirely on your device by Apple; Family Matters does not collect, receive, or store any biometric identifier or biometric information, and receives only confirmation that authentication succeeded or failed. The App does not include any third-party analytics or telemetry SDK.
Cookies and similar technologies. On the web, we use a small number of cookies and similar technologies. Essential cookies keep you signed in and help secure the Services; we cannot operate the signed-in experience without them. Analytics cookies and identifiers are set by Google Analytics 4 (web only) to help us understand how the Services are used, as described above. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not present a cookie-consent banner today. You can control cookies through your browser settings and opt out of Google Analytics as described in Section 11. Our iOS App does not use cookies or any third-party analytics or telemetry SDK.
5. How we use your information
We use the information described above to:
- provide, operate, maintain, and secure the Services, and create and manage your account and household;
- keep the records you and your household create, and power features such as loan and gift tracking, 529 and fund planning, covenant monitoring, giving plans, and home-watch coordination;
- detect and suggest — never auto-record — gifts and loan repayments from connected-account activity you enable (Section 3);
- share information among the people you authorize, as described in Section 6;
- communicate with you by in-app notification, email, phone, or SMS — including sign-in codes, invitations, activity notifications you have enabled, service and security messages, and responses to your requests (see Section 7 for text messages);
- process payments and, for Operators, facilitate invoicing to their clients (Section 6);
- maintain audit, safety, fraud-prevention, and compliance records;
- understand and improve how the Services are used, including through the web analytics described in Section 4; and
- comply with law and enforce our agreements.
We may also create de-identified or aggregated information that does not identify you and use it for our lawful business purposes, including to analyze and improve the Services. We will not attempt to re-identify such information or disclose it in a way that identifies you.
6. How we share your information
Sharing among the people you invite — this is how Family Matters works
Family Matters is built to be shared. The whole purpose of a household, a home-watch arrangement, or an advisor grant is that the right people can see the right records. As a result, the most significant "sharing" of your information is not to outside companies — it is to the other people you and your family bring into the Services:
- Within your household, other Members may — depending on their role and the sharing choices in effect — see the household's activity feed (including amounts), the financial account information you bring into the household, and the loan, gift, fund, giving, and property records the household keeps together. A Principal may have broader access than other Members.
- Parties to a specific arrangement can see that arrangement. The lender and borrower on a loan, the parties to a gift, and the owner, contributors, and approvers of a fund can see the records for what they are part of.
- Operators you (or the Principal) authorize to watch a home can see that home's address, photos, occupancy, schedules and stays, and the access information in the watch scope — including gate and alarm codes and pet and access notes.
- Homeowners can see their Operator's business information, service records, and invoices. An Operator can also send a homeowner a link to a single visit report or invoice that opens without an account; anyone holding that link can view it, including photos and charges, until it expires 60 days after it was last sent or the Operator turns it off. An Operator may bring you in as a client by importing their customer list from Wave or QuickBooks.
- Keyholders — people a homeowner gives access to a home on a Shared Home plan — can see that home's stays and away dates, upkeep tasks, bills, and their own share of expenses, but not the household's other records.
- Advisors a household grants access to can see the specific modules the household grants them, and can act within the scope of that grant. An Advisor may also set up a household for a client before the client signs in; until a family member claims it, the Advisor's firm can see and edit the records it entered, and the family can change or revoke that access once it claims the household. We do not control how an Advisor independently uses information you authorize us to disclose to them; if you have questions about an Advisor's own practices, contact the Advisor directly.
Across households. Because relationships and identities are properties of people rather than of a single household (Section 2), a person who belongs to more than one household carries their identity, contact details, date of birth, and relationship graph with them. Information one household records about a person can therefore be visible to that person, and in the other households that person is linked to. Consider this before recording sensitive details about someone who participates in more than one family group.
We also receive information about you from other users. For example, when an Operator adds you as a Homeowner, or a family member invites you to a household, we receive your name and the contact details and home or household information they provide — before you have your own account.
Service providers (subprocessors)
We share information with companies that help us run the Services. They may use it only to perform services for us. The current providers, grouped by what they do and what they receive, are:
Infrastructure and hosting
- Supabase — our primary database, authentication, and private file storage. Because it is the database, Supabase processes effectively all of the personal and financial data described in this policy, stores uploaded photos and documents, and generates sign-in codes and links. Sign-in and account emails are sent through Resend (below); sign-in codes sent by text are delivered by Twilio's Verify service.
- Vercel — hosting and server-side runtime for the application and for our separate webhooks service; it processes request traffic in the course of running the Services.
- Netlify — hosting for the marketing Site, including the form on our free gift-ledger tool. Messages you send through our contact form are stored in our support records.
Financial and investment account connections
- Plaid — bank and investment account connection. We send Plaid an internal user identifier and the name "Family Matters"; Plaid returns account balances, the transaction feed (for accounts you enable), and holdings for investment and 529 accounts. See Section 3.
- Akoya — read-only connection for investment and 529 accounts (including certain Fidelity accounts) over OAuth; returns account, balance, holdings, and transaction data. Our access is held as a sealed token (Section 10).
Property data
- RentCast — property valuation. When you add a home, we send RentCast the property address to retrieve an estimated market value; RentCast returns the valuation and related public property data. We do not send RentCast any account, financial, or family information.
- Google (Maps and Places) on the web, and Apple Maps in our iOS App — address suggestions. When you type an address into the Services, the text you have typed so far is sent to Google (web) or Apple (iOS) to suggest matching addresses; they receive no account, financial, or family information.
Document reading
- Anthropic — automated reading of documents you upload. When you upload an estate document, a loan document, a prior Form 709, or a credit report, we send the document (estate documents as the full file; the others as text we extract, with Social Security numbers removed) to Anthropic's model, which returns the facts, names, dates, and figures it finds. We use Anthropic's commercial service, whose terms do not permit it to train its models on your documents.
Payments and invoicing
- Stripe — (1) Stripe Connect, used so an Operator can invoice its clients directly, with the Operator as the merchant of record; through it, the family's name and email and the invoice line items reach the Operator's connected Stripe account, and the family can pay by card or bank debit on Stripe's hosted page; and (2) Stripe Billing, used for household and Shared Home subscriptions, for House Matters Pro bought on the web, and for Advisor firms (a card on file and monthly usage-based billing per active family), which receives the customer's name and email, an internal account reference, and subscription or payment details.
- Apple (App Store) — in-app subscriptions bought in the House Matters iOS App. Apple receives an internal account identifier with the purchase and bills your Apple Account; we receive and keep your subscription status and Apple's notices about it, never your card details.
- Wave — an alternative invoicing tool an Operator may connect over OAuth to bill its clients. Connecting Wave authorizes Family Matters to access the Operator's connected Wave account in order to create and manage invoices to that Operator's clients; depending on the access Wave grants, this authorization can reach the broader customer, invoice, and accounting data in that Operator's Wave account, not only a single family's invoices. We use this access only to provide the invoicing features. The family reaches the Operator's Wave account as a customer (name, email, phone, and the billed home's address) with invoice line items.
- QuickBooks (Intuit) — an invoicing tool an Operator may connect. Connecting QuickBooks authorizes Family Matters to read the Operator's company name, customers, items, and invoice balances, and to create customers, a service item, invoices, invoice emails, and payment records in the Operator's QuickBooks company; we never use Intuit's payment services. The family reaches the Operator's QuickBooks company as a customer (name, email, phone, and the billed home's address) with invoice line items, and an Operator can send the family a link to the invoice PDF that opens without an account. An Operator may also import its existing Wave or QuickBooks customer list into the Services.
Family Matters does not move money and does not hold funds. Our account connections are read-only. Any money that moves does so through external rails you use directly — for example your bank's bill-pay or a peer-to-peer app — and any payment to a home-watch Operator goes directly to that Operator, using the Operator's own payment identifiers (such as a Venmo handle or free-text bank or check instructions) shown on its invoices. Those identifiers are stored and displayed on the Operator's invoices; the funds never pass through Family Matters.
Communications
- Twilio — the texts the Services send (invitations, activation and billing notices, activity and reminder texts, and operator alerts) and, through its Verify service, sign-in codes. Twilio receives the recipient's phone number and the message body; messages identify the sender as Family Matters or House Matters, or name the person or business who caused the message. Notification texts are on for a signed-in account until you turn them off, per Section 7.
- Resend — the email we send: notifications, reminder emails, and the sign-in and account emails we compose for our authentication provider, sent from myfamilymatters.com addresses under the Family Matters or House Matters name. Resend receives the recipient's email address and the message subject, body, and links, and reports delivery and open events. If you sign in but do not finish setting up, Resend also holds your email address and first name for a short series of reminder emails, each with an unsubscribe link.
- Apple Push Notification service (APNs) — delivery of iOS push notifications; receives device tokens and notification payloads.
Sign-in and analytics
- Sign in with Google (web and iOS) and Sign in with Apple (iOS) — optional sign-in providers. If you choose one, the provider returns your account email to our authentication provider to create or match your account; Google also returns your basic profile, and Apple may return a private relay address instead of your real email, which then becomes the email we use to reach you. On first sign-in with Apple, Apple also returns your name, which the App uses to pre-fill your profile.
- Google Analytics 4 (Google LLC) — analytics on our marketing websites only, as described in Section 4.
Your financial information
Family Matters collects nonpublic personal financial information — such as the account and balance information you connect through Plaid and Akoya, the last four digits of account, card, and tax identification numbers, and the loan, gift, fund, and giving records you create. We do not disclose this financial information to nonaffiliated third parties except as described in this policy: to the service providers listed above so they can perform services for us, at your direction or to the other people in an arrangement you are part of, to complete a transaction you request, or as required or permitted by law. We do not disclose your financial information to anyone for their own marketing, and we do not sell it. This commitment applies whether or not Family Matters is treated as a financial institution under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.
Legal, safety, and protection of rights
We may collect, use, and disclose your information to government bodies (including law enforcement) or others where we believe it is reasonably necessary to: meet a legal obligation, regulation, court order, or legal process; prevent, detect, and investigate security incidents or potentially illegal or prohibited activity; protect the rights, property, or safety of you, Family Matters, or others; enforce our agreements; respond to claims that Content violates the rights of others; and resolve disputes.
Business transfers
All of your personal information that we collect may be transferred to a third party if we undergo a merger, acquisition, financing, bankruptcy, or other transaction in which that third party assumes control of our business, in whole or in part.
At your direction
We share information with any other party you direct us to, and in the ways this policy otherwise describes.
We do not sell or share your information
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. We will never sell your financial data. Where you have a legally recognized universal opt-out preference (such as the Global Privacy Control), we honor it as an opt-out signal; because we do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are used in state privacy laws, there is nothing further to opt out of. See Section 11.
7. Text messaging
If you provide a mobile phone number, we may send you text messages about your account — sign-in codes, invitations you or your family/service provider initiate, and notifications about activity you have enabled. We will not share your mobile phone number or SMS opt-in consent with third parties or affiliates for their marketing or promotional purposes. Message frequency varies based on your account activity and notification settings. Message and data rates may apply. Reply STOP to any message to opt out of text messages at any time; reply HELP for help, or contact us at help@myfamilymatters.com. Opting out of texts does not affect account emails or in-app notifications.
Your mobile number and your text-messaging consent are carved out of every kind of sharing described in Section 6. All of the categories in that section exclude text messaging originator opt-in data and consent; this information will not be shared with any third parties, other than the messaging aggregators and communications providers that carry the messages for us. We do not sell, rent, trade, or transfer mobile opt-in data or consent to anyone, including affiliates and lead generators. Your consent is given directly to Family Matters, for this program only — it is not transferable or assignable to another business — and we do not send messages to opt-in lists that were bought, rented, or shared with us.
If you sign in with a mobile number, notification texts are on for your account until you turn them off in your notification settings or reply STOP. Before you have an account, you may receive an invitation and one reminder, a resend if the inviter asks for it, and one notice when a service provider sends you a bill — for example, when a home-watch Operator sets up service for you, or a family member invites you; after you sign up with a mobile number, a one-time welcome text. These are sent so that you can access or set up your account, and you can reply STOP to any of them. A number reaches us only from you, or from a family member or service provider who has your permission under our Terms of Service, including when a service provider brings in its own client list from its accounting software.
For a plain-language walkthrough of the whole program — how you opt in, what the sign-in screen looks like, sample messages, and how to stop — see Text Messaging Program.
8. Support and personnel access
Our authorized personnel may access your information to operate, support, secure, and troubleshoot the Services. In limited cases, a designated super-administrator ("founder") can impersonate a user account to reproduce a problem or provide support. These impersonation sessions are recorded in our audit log, including the IP address. We limit such access to what is needed for the purpose.
9. Data retention and deletion
We retain personal information for as long as necessary to provide the Services and to carry out the purposes described in this policy. When setting a retention period for a particular category of information, we consider who we collected it from, our need for it, why we collected it, and how sensitive it is. In some cases we retain information longer where doing so is necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, enforce our agreements, or collect amounts owed, or where otherwise permitted or required by law. We may retain de-identified or aggregated information indefinitely.
Some information is, by the nature of the Services, entangled with records other people keep:
- You can delete individual records you have permission to delete (your Content), and you can leave a household. Doing so does not necessarily erase information others have already recorded, referenced, or built upon — for example, a loan or gift record kept by another party that names you, or a relationship another household recorded about you.
- Records that reflect history are kept as history rather than erased — for example, a marriage or other relationship you mark as ended is retained with an "ended" status so the family record remains accurate.
- We retain audit-log and activity records, and we retain the raw payloads of provider webhooks (from our payment, subscription, and email providers) for reconciliation, idempotency, and dispute-resolution purposes.
- Message records (Section 4) are kept while your account exists and for a period afterward; records of a STOP or of consent are kept longer so we can show we honored them.
- Leads (Section 2) are retained until you delete your account or ask us to delete them.
Account deletion. You can delete your account yourself from your profile on the web or in the App after signing in again; deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. It removes your logins and contact details and, if you are the sole owner, your household's records and uploaded files, and cancels any plan we bill through Stripe; a plan bought through the App Store is cancelled in your device's Subscriptions settings. Records other people keep, an Operator's client-home history, and a minimal deletion record without contact details remain; billing records held by Stripe and Apple are kept under their own policies. You can also ask us to delete information we hold by contacting help@myfamilymatters.com; we will delete or de-identify what we are able to, subject to the limitations above and to information we must retain by law.
10. Security
We seek to protect your information from unauthorized access, use, and disclosure using physical, technical, organizational, and administrative safeguards appropriate to the type of information and how we process it. We maintain a written information security program of administrative, technical, and physical safeguards designed to protect the personal and financial information we hold. Information is encrypted in transit. Sensitive third-party access tokens — such as our bank-connection and investment-data tokens — are sealed with authenticated encryption using a server-side key, are never stored in plaintext, and are never returned to your device. Uploaded files are kept in private storage and served only through short-lived, signed links.
Home-watch access details, including gate and alarm codes and pet and access notes, are stored within the scope of the specific home-watch arrangement. They are protected by encryption at rest at the database level and by access controls that make them available only to the people authorized for that home.
You also help protect your information by choosing a secure sign-in method, keeping your device and accounts secure, limiting who can access your device, and signing out when you are done. No method of transmitting or storing data is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
If a breach occurs. If information under our control is compromised in a way that requires notice, we will take reasonable steps to investigate and, where appropriate, notify the affected individuals directly and take other steps required by applicable law. We do not rely on an employer or account holder to pass a breach notice along to the people affected.
11. Your rights and choices
We extend the following rights to all users, regardless of the state or country you live in. Subject to applicable law and reasonable verification, you may:
- Access / know — request confirmation of, and access to, the personal information we hold about you, including a portable copy where technically feasible.
- Correct — request that we correct inaccurate personal information.
- Delete — request that we delete personal information we hold about you (see the account-deletion note and entanglement limits in Section 9).
- Port — request a copy of your personal information in a machine-readable format, to the extent technically feasible.
To exercise any of these, contact help@myfamilymatters.com. We will take reasonable steps to verify your identity before acting, and we will acknowledge and respond to your request within the time required by applicable law (generally within 45 days, which we may extend where the law permits and after letting you know). We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights. You may use an authorized agent where the law allows; we may ask the agent to demonstrate authority. If you are a Minnesota or Oregon resident, you may also request a list of the specific third parties (other than natural persons) to which we have disclosed your personal information.
Sensitive personal information. Some of the information we collect is treated as "sensitive" under certain state privacy laws — including financial account information, your tax identification number (we store only the last four digits), health-related content in estate documents you upload (such as a healthcare directive), and location data that may remain in documents you upload (Section 14). We use this information only for the necessary business purposes of providing, securing, and supporting the Services and the records you keep — never to infer characteristics about you and never for advertising. Because we already limit our use of this information to those purposes, a request to limit its use would not change how we process it; you may still ask us to disclose, correct, or delete it as described above.
You also have these ongoing choices:
- Notification preferences — choose which notifications you receive and on which channels (in-app, email, push, or SMS) in your settings. Email, push, and text notifications are on by default for a signed-in account, and you can turn each off; for people who have not yet signed in, texts are limited to the notices described in Section 7.
- Text messages — reply STOP to opt out of texts, or HELP for help (Section 7).
- Web analytics — you can opt out of Google Analytics using Google's browser add-on, and you can manage cookies through your browser. Google Analytics runs only on our marketing websites.
- Global Privacy Control — we honor a legally recognized universal opt-out preference signal as an opt-out of any "sale" or "share"; as noted in Section 6, we do not sell or share your personal information.
- Do Not Track — web browsers may send a "Do Not Track" signal; there is no common industry standard for responding to it, and the Services do not respond to Do Not Track signals at this time.
Exercising a data right does not remove information that other people in your family or household legitimately keep about a shared arrangement, as described in Section 9.
12. Children and minors
Family Matters is designed for adults to use, including to keep family records that describe minors. It is important to distinguish two different things:
- **Information about a child, recorded by an adult.** In the ordinary course of family planning, an adult may record information about a minor — for example a child named as a 529 beneficiary, a child's place in the family relationship graph, or a child's date of birth. That is data an adult provides about a child as part of a family record; it is not information we collect from the child.
- **Accounts for a child.** A minor does not create an independent account on their own. A guardian may, within the guardian's own household, enable a limited, read-only sign-in for a minor who is at least 13 years old, where the guardian consents and agrees to our Terms of Service on the minor's behalf.
Children under 13. The Services are not intended for children under 13, and a child under 13 may not register for, use, or be given a sign-in to the Services — even with a guardian's consent. We do not knowingly permit a child under 13 to use the Services and do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13. (An adult may still record information about a child under 13 as part of a family record, as described above.)
Minors 13 to 17. A minor between 13 and 17 may use the Services only through a guardian-enabled, read-only sign-in as described above. When a guardian enables that sign-in, the minor's use will generate the account, sign-in, and usage information described in this policy, and the guardian is responsible for that use.
Our sign-in does not itself verify age before issuing a sign-in code. If you believe a child under 13 has been given a sign-in, or that any child has been added or contacted in a way that concerns you, contact us at help@myfamilymatters.com and we will take appropriate steps, including deleting information we are not permitted to keep.
If you are a parent or guardian and you record information about your minor child in the Services, or enable a sign-in for an eligible minor, you are responsible for that use and for having the authority to do so, as described in Section 2 and in our Terms of Service.
13. Where we operate
The Services are offered from and intended for use in the United States. They are not directed to, or intended for, individuals located in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or other regions with laws that may differ from those of the United States. If you access the Services from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be processed in the United States.
14. Photos and document metadata
When you upload a photo, we re-encode it, which removes embedded metadata including the GPS location, camera, and date; our iOS App also removes location data before upload. This does not apply to PDFs and other documents, to animated or transparent images, or to photos uploaded before August 23, 2026 that were already small enough not to be re-processed; those are stored as you provide them, including any metadata inside them. Because home-watch photos are often taken at homes that are frequently vacant, embedded location data can reveal the location of such a home, and people who can access a given home's records (Section 6) may also be able to access the underlying files. If you are concerned about location data in a document, remove it from the file before uploading it.
15. Changes to this policy and how to contact us
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will alert you by posting a notice in the Services or on our website, by email, and/or by other means. Your continued use of the Services after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy. We will update the effective date at the top of this page each time we make a change.
Contact us
My Family Matters, Inc. 1010 Dale Street North St. Paul, MN 55117
Privacy and general questions: help@myfamilymatters.com Text-message help: help@myfamilymatters.com
The canonical version of this Privacy Policy is published at myfamilymatters.com/privacy. Our Terms of Service are at myfamilymatters.com/terms.