Privacy Policy
Steading is a private, invite-only app used by a single family. This policy describes what it collects, where that information goes, and what it does not do.
The short version. Steading collects what a family deliberately puts into it: messages, photographs, and the contact details needed to reach each other. None of it is sold, shared for advertising, or used to build a profile. Message text and photo contents are sent to Anthropic to power search and photo descriptions. The photo archive is designed to be permanent, so deleting a message hides it rather than erasing it — the section on retention explains exactly what that means.
Who operates Steading
Steading is operated by Zachariah Parry, an individual, in Nevada, United States. It is offered to the members of one family by invitation and is not available to the public. Contact: privacy@steading.family.
What Steading collects
Information you give when you join
- Your name as you want it displayed
- A mobile phone number, an email address, or both — used to sign you in
- Your date of birth. This drives birthday reminders and determines whether an account is a minor’s account
- Optionally, entries in the family directory: mailing address, phone number, clothing sizes, and allergies. These are shared with the family, and are optional
What you create in the app
- Messages, including voice and video messages, and their edit history
- Photographs and videos, together with the album, caption, comment, and tag information attached to them
- Reactions, pinned messages, and read state
Information attached to your photographs
Photographs normally carry metadata recorded by the camera. Steading keeps the capture date, camera, and lens, because the date is what makes the archive sortable. Location coordinates are treated separately:
- Each person chooses whether their uploads include location. Adult accounts default to including it; accounts belonging to children default to removing it
- You can override that choice for any individual upload
- When location is removed, it is removed as the photograph is received. The coordinates are never written to storage, so there is nothing to leak later
- Photographs sent to a digital picture frame always have location removed, regardless of the setting
Technical information
- A device token, so notifications can reach your phone
- The device type and app version
- A one-way hash of the network address that requested a sign-in code, kept briefly to limit abuse. The address itself is not stored
- Error reports when the app fails, which may include the technical context of the failure
What Steading does not do
- No facial recognition and no biometric identifiers. People are tagged in photographs only when a person chooses to tag them. Steading does not compute, derive, or store face templates or any other biometric identifier for anyone, adult or child
- No advertising, and no analytics collected for advertising purposes
- No sale of personal information, and no sharing of it for cross-context behavioural advertising
- No passwords. Sign-in uses a one-time code or link, so there is no password to store or to lose
- No tracking across other apps or websites
Artificial intelligence
Steading uses Anthropic’s Claude API for two features: describing uploaded photographs so they can be found later, and answering plain-language questions about the family’s own history.
To do this, the text of messages and the contents of photographs are sent to Anthropic. Anthropic processes this material to return a result and, under its commercial terms, does not use it to train its models.
The AI can only reach content the person asking is already allowed to see. A parent’s ability to read a child’s messages does not widen what the AI returns to that parent; asking the AI a question returns only that person’s own view.
Who else processes this information
Steading relies on a small number of service providers, each of which handles information only to provide its service:
- Neon — database hosting (messages, accounts, metadata)
- Cloudflare R2 — storage of photographs and videos
- Vercel — application hosting
- Anthropic — photo descriptions and question answering, as described above
- Resend — email, including sign-in links and delivery of photographs to picture frames
- Twilio — text messages carrying sign-in codes and invitations
- Expo, and through it Apple and Google — delivery of push notifications
- Sentry — error reporting
Sending a photograph to a digital picture frame necessarily transmits that photograph, by email, to the frame’s manufacturer, which displays it on the device. Location data is removed from those copies first.
Retention, and what deleting actually does
Steading is built to be a permanent family archive, and this shapes how deletion works. Please read this section rather than assuming.
- Deleting a message removes it from view and replaces it with a marker showing that a message was deleted. The original text is retained on the server and is not shown to anyone in ordinary use
- Editing a message keeps every earlier version. Any member who can see the message can see that it was edited and read the previous versions
- Uploaded photographs and videos are never destroyed. The original file as uploaded is kept unchanged and permanently. Removing a photo from the archive hides it from the app; it does not erase the stored file
- Leaving or being removed from the family ends your access. Messages and photographs you contributed remain part of the family’s archive
If you want your own content actually erased rather than hidden, contact the address below and it will be handled manually. Because the archive is shared, a request that would remove a conversation other members took part in is considered case by case.
Children and parental controls
Steading is not directed to the general public and is not offered to children outside the family that operates it. A child’s account is created by the family’s administrator at the request of that child’s parent, and is linked to that parent or guardian.
A linked parent or guardian can, for their own child only:
- Turn direct messaging on or off
- Allow or prevent the creation of private channels
- See which channels the child belongs to
- Set quiet hours
- Turn the account off
- Turn their own ability to read the child’s direct messages on or off
The child is always told. Where a parent can read a child’s direct messages, the app says so plainly on the screen where those messages appear, and notifies the child if the setting changes. Steading never allows a child to believe a conversation is private when it is not.
A child does not gain the features of an older age group merely by having a birthday. When a child turns thirteen, their parents are asked to decide, and the change takes effect only when they agree to it.
A parent may ask, at the address below, to review or delete the information associated with their child’s account.
What the administrator can and cannot see
The family administrator manages invitations, removals, and the register of picture frames. The administrator cannot read private channels or direct messages they are not part of. They can see that such conversations exist and who belongs to them, and they can remove a person from the family. That is the limit of the role.
Security
Sign-in is by one-time code or link, so no passwords are stored. Access rules are enforced centrally, so a feature cannot accidentally widen what someone can see. Information is encrypted in transit and at rest by the providers listed above. No system is perfect, and Steading makes no guarantee that it cannot be breached.
Your choices
- Set whether your uploads include location, and override it per upload
- Choose notification levels for each channel, and set quiet hours
- Export the content you have contributed, in an open format
- Ask for a copy of the information held about you, or ask that it be corrected
- Leave the family, which ends your access
Depending on where you live, you may have further rights over your personal information. Write to the address below and Steading will honour them.
Where information is held
Information is stored on servers in the United States. If you use Steading from outside the United States, you are sending your information to be processed there.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that materially affects members, they will be told in the app before the change takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.