Before you use any baby tracker: five privacy questions

By the HAL team · Updated August 27, 2026

A baby log is one of the most intimate datasets a family produces: when your child eats and sleeps, what worried you at 3 AM, when your home is on its daily rhythm. Most parents vet a stroller harder than they vet the app that will hold all of that. Regulators have already had to step in against health apps that shared user data with third parties, and app privacy policies vary enormously — so before you commit to any tracker (ours included), ask five questions.

1. What's the business model?

If the product is free forever, ask what pays for the servers. "Free plus ads" usually means the data you enter is feeding an advertising machine somewhere. A straightforward paid product has a straightforward reason to keep your data private: you're the customer, not the inventory.

2. What does the policy say about "sharing with partners"?

Words like "affiliates," "partners," and "for marketing purposes" in a privacy policy are where your baby's data leaves the building. This isn't hypothetical: a 2026 peer-reviewed audit of 14 popular baby-tracking apps found all 14 shared data with third parties — including due dates and pregnancy-loss data. Regulators have acted too: the FTC barred the Premom fertility app from sharing health data for advertising after it sent users' reproductive-health details to third parties against its own promises. Read that paragraph before entering a single feed.

3. Can you delete everything — easily?

Not "email support and wait." One clear, self-service action that permanently removes your family's data. If deletion is hard to find, that tells you how the company thinks about ownership.

4. Can you get your data out?

Your baby's history is yours. There should be a real export — usable, complete, whenever you want it — not screenshots.

5. Who else has to create an account?

Every caregiver who must register is another account, another password, another copy of the access. Grandparents shouldn't need to join a platform to tell you the baby napped.

HAL's answers, on the record

• Business model: HAL is a paid product. No ads, ever. Your family's data is never sold — being the product is the thing we built HAL to avoid.
• What we hold: only what your household chooses to text. HAL's record is the messages you send it — there's no background collection, no location tracking, no contact scraping.
• Deletion: text "forget me" and the household's stored data is permanently deleted. One text, no support ticket.
• Export: text "export" and HAL prepares your full log as a file. Yours to keep, bring to the pediatrician, or take elsewhere.
• Accounts: caregivers need none. No installs, no registrations — the record lives in the group chat your family already uses.
• This website: no third-party trackers, no ad pixels. (Check the network tab — we'll wait.)

Hold us to it

Privacy promises are only as good as your ability to verify them. Ours are testable from your phone: send "export" and see exactly what we hold; send "forget me" and watch it go. If a promise on this page ever stops being true, that's a betrayal of the one job a family assistant has — keeping your family's trust.