Security

Effective 30 September 2026.

People By Heart holds private notes about the people in your life. This page says how they are protected, in plain terms. It summarises our internal Information Security Policy, which is reviewed at least once a year.

What is protected, and how much

We treat everything you put into the Service as confidential, and your notes, voice, photos, contacts and calendar data as highly confidential: the class that gets the strictest handling. Nothing about you is public.

How it is protected

Encryption: every connection between the app, the website and our servers is encrypted. The database and the photo store are encrypted where the data rests.
Isolation: every query our code makes to the database is scoped to a single book. One account cannot reach another's rows, and a request with no book behind it is refused rather than answered.
Photos: kept photos live in a private bucket that has no public access; the app fetches them through short-lived links.
Passwords and sessions: passwords are hashed and never stored; a sign-in lasts 30 days and can be ended from any device. Sign in with Apple never gives us a password at all.
Secrets: the keys that let our servers talk to the database, the photo store and OpenAI are held only in the hosting platform's protected configuration, never in code, and are rotated if there is any doubt about them.
Logs: our servers log identifiers, timings and error codes. The text of a note is never written to a log.
Least privilege: access to production systems is limited to the people who run the Service, and nobody reads your notes except to help with a request you make.
Providers: we use a small number of providers (OpenAI, Vercel, Neon, Amazon Web Services, Apple, Resend), each under terms that limit them to the job we hired them for. OpenAI's API terms bar it from training on your data.

On your phone

Your sign-in token is kept in the phone's secure storage. Notes you capture while offline wait in a local store on the phone until they can be sent, then leave it. Your contact list is read on the phone and never uploaded; only the contacts you tick reach us. Calendars you switch on send a lean copy of the next month (each event's title, time, place and the people on file who are on it); event notes and attendee emails never leave the phone.

If something goes wrong

We keep an incident response plan. If we learn of a breach affecting your data, we will tell you without unreasonable delay and within the time the law requires, say what happened and what we did, and report to the authorities where the law requires it.

Reporting a vulnerability

If you find a security problem, email support@peoplebyheart.com with “Security” in the subject line. Tell us what you found and how to reproduce it; please do not access anyone else's data or disrupt the Service while you look. A person will reply, and we will not take action against good-faith research that follows these rules.