This page covers the Avísame app for iPhone and Android, and the pages at getavisame.com. Avísame is made by Avisame LLC, a Kentucky company, and where this page says "we", that is who it means. Where it says "your Circle", it means the people you added to it and the people whose invitation you accepted: once two people are connected, each one can see the other. That is the only group that ever hears anything about you.

No government agency or police department has an account that can see your family.

Your email address, the name you want to be called, the language you chose, your time zone, and a phone number if you give one. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and is stored as a hash, which means it is not readable by us or by anyone else. A profile photo if you add one, kept in private storage that only your own Circle can read.

For each person you add: the name you typed, how they are related to you, the role you gave them, and the email address or phone number you entered so that an invitation can reach them. Nothing is read from your contact list unless you allow it. If you allow access to your contacts while finding your people, the app sends the phone numbers in your contacts to our server only to check which of them already belong to someone on Avísame. The numbers are compared and dropped at once: we never store them, never use them for anything else, and nobody is told that you looked. When you tap Add someone, your phone opens your own contacts for you to pick from, and only the one person you pick is saved.

Whether they accepted, how much detail they agreed to receive, which language they read, their quiet hours, and the time zone those hours are in. Both halves of that agreement are kept separate on purpose: what is disclosed about you is yours to set, and how much reaches them is theirs.

A place is a name you chose, a point on a map, a radius, and how long you have to stay inside it for the arrival to count. A check-in is the time you asked to be asked, what you answered, any words you typed with it, and, if nothing was answered, each step the plan took and who it reached.

The plan itself is sealed on your phone before it is sent. We hold the sealed bytes, the short summary line you chose to leave readable, and which people are allowed to open which section. See "What we cannot read" below.

Only a type, a label you typed, and an expiry date, so the app can remind you before something runs out. We never ask you to upload a document and we do not store one. Nothing here can be handed to anyone because nothing here exists.

The messages as written, and any photo, location or live location share sent in them, readable by the people in that chat. If someone reports a message, a copy of it goes to the people at Avísame who review reports, who may read it to decide what to do; that copy stays after the message is deleted. Unlike your Emergency Plan, chat is not sealed on your phone, so in principle anyone who could reach the database could read it. That is precisely why the Plan exists, and why anything that must never be readable belongs there and not in a message.

A push token, which is the address a notification travels to and says nothing about you, the battery level and the time it was read, which the people in your Circle see, whether the phone is charging, and the last time the app was open, which they see too. While a request for help is open, whether your phone is on a call (idle, ringing or connected, never who with and never what is said), so the person you are helping or who is helping you can see that you are talking; it is kept for 15 minutes. Your phone also checks us for app updates, which tells our update service the app version and platform it is asking about.

Voice calls. When you call someone in your Circle from a Buzz, the app uses your microphone only during that call. The sound goes straight between the two phones, or through a relay run by Cloudflare when the phones cannot reach each other directly. It is encrypted, never recorded, and never kept by us or by Cloudflare.

If you subscribe, the card is handled entirely by Stripe and never touches our servers. We keep the plan, the status, the renewal date, and the identifiers Stripe gives us so the app knows what you are entitled to.

Which message went to which person, on which channel, at what time, and whether it arrived. This is the record a family needs when someone asks "did anyone actually hear about this", and it is the reason the app can answer that question honestly.

While sharing is on, your phone reports where you are, which way you are heading, and whether you are walking or driving, to the people in your Circle who share with you too: about once a minute while you are moving, and about every 30 minutes while you are still. While someone in your Circle has the map open, your phone reports every few seconds for up to 5 minutes; nobody is told who looked. We keep the points of the last 30 days so they can see where you went, and where you stopped and since when, so the app can say "here for 2 hours". When you arrive at or leave a place you saved, the people in your Circle who turned on alerts for that place are told, at the level you set for it. Turning sharing off deletes the positions we were holding and the 30-day trail at once. Separately, Avísame may keep derived routine times learned from those positions: which of your saved places or places you often go you reached, the local day and time you arrived, and how long you stayed. They hold no coordinates and no addresses, are not shown to your Circle or to anyone at Avísame through the app, and are used only to learn your usual times. They are kept until you reset or delete them, or delete your account, while the detailed location history keeps its 30-day life.

Your phone decides on its own whether you reached a place you saved. The comparison happens on the device, and what reaches us is the arrival or the departure. These arrivals and departures are part of your family’s record and are kept until you delete your account. This is one of the reasons the app asks for location while it is closed, along with live sharing above: without it, reaching home at eleven at night cannot answer the check-in you set.

From your 30-day trail the app notices places where you spend time on several days, such as where you are at night or on weekday afternoons, so it can offer to save them for you, and so your Circle can see "at a place visited on 12 days" instead of a bare street. These are kept for 30 days after your last visit, and deleted at once when you turn sharing or the trail off.

When you start one yourself, your phone shares where you are while it runs, at the level you chose. We keep one row for you holding your latest position and the one before it, which is what lets the app say "moving" rather than only "here". The Got your back also keeps the points you asked it to send: a single one if you chose to share only at the start, or one each time if you chose to repeat every few hours. Those sit in order, so while a repeating one is running there is a short trail of where you have been, and we would rather tell you that than claim there is none. All of it is deleted the moment you turn sharing off, when the Got your back ends, or when an alert it opened is resolved, whichever comes first. Nothing older is kept anywhere, and nothing at all is kept while sharing is off.

On Android the map is Google Maps, and on an iPhone it is Apple Maps. Each company receives the part of the world being drawn and your device’s network address, under its own privacy policy. To name the street where someone in your Circle stopped, your phone asks its own address lookup (Apple on iPhone, Google on Android) about that point. In a browser the map picture comes from CARTO and OpenStreetMap, assembled on your device by MapLibre. If you tap Directions, the app you pick (Apple Maps, Google Maps or Waze) receives the destination.

The words you type while searching for a place are sent to Photon, a public address search run by Komoot, which turns them into a point on a map. We send the text you typed and nothing that identifies you.

The people in your Circle, and nobody else. During a request for help or a Cover me, they can see where you are even if sharing is paused. A person added in a lawyer role is told nothing about your location unless you allow it in Location sharing, and that choice starts at Never. We do not have a screen that shows us a map of our users, and we do not want one.

Your Emergency Plan sections and any private instruction you leave for one person are encrypted on your phone before they are sent. The content is sealed with XChaCha20-Poly1305. The key that opens it is wrapped separately for each person you allowed to read it, using their X25519 public key, so adding or removing a reader never means decrypting anything on a server.

Your private key stays in your phone’s keychain. We hold one copy of it sealed under a recovery code the app shows you once, derived with scrypt, and we never store that code. So we cannot open your plan. The honest other half of that sentence: if you lose your phone and the recovery code, neither can you, and we cannot get it back for you. Write the code down somewhere a fire would not reach.

Case Tracker and Case Wallet keep your USCIS receipt numbers and your immigration court A-number on your phone only, in its secure storage. They are not saved on our servers.

When you check a USCIS case status in the app, the receipt number goes from your phone to our server and from there to USCIS, and the answer comes back the same way. Our server does not keep the number or the answer, and does not write either one in its logs.

When you share a case or your Case Wallet with someone in your Circle, it is sealed on your phone for that one person, so only their phone can open it. Our server holds the sealed copy until their phone takes it, then deletes it, and never longer than 30 days. We cannot read it.

To remove a case, open it in Case Tracker and tap Remove. Signing out or deleting your account removes every case and your Case Wallet from that phone.

Avísame is not part of USCIS or of any government agency. Status comes from USCIS’s own system.

If you join the Avísame Tags waitlist, we keep the email address you give us only to tell you once when Tags are ready, and then we delete it. We never use it for anything else.

Location has the shortest life. The trail of where you went is kept for 30 days, then deleted. Derived routine times (the day, the arrival time and how long you stayed at a saved place or a place you often go, with no coordinates) are the exception: they are kept until you reset or delete them, or delete your account. Until the controls are in the app, write to support@getavisame.com and we reset them for you. Turning sharing off does not delete them, except those that belong to a place you often go, which go with that place. Places you often go are kept 30 days after your last visit. Whether your phone was on a call is ignored after 15 minutes. Your latest position lives until you turn sharing off, and positions recorded during an alert are deleted when the alert ends. Positions recorded during a Got your back are deleted when that Got your back ends.

Everything else is your family’s own record, so we do not quietly expire it on you. Your check-ins, your plan, your places and what was sent to whom stay until you remove them or delete your account. We would rather tell you that plainly than publish a retention table the app does not actually enforce.

Two small exceptions. We keep a log of account emails that records only the kind of email, whether it went out, and the domain after the @, never the address and never the contents. Stripe keeps its own payment records for as long as tax and accounting law requires it to, which is not something we can shorten.

We use a small number of companies to run the service. Each one receives only what its single job needs, and none of them is allowed to use it for anything else.

There is no advertising network, no data broker, no attribution service, and no analytics company on that list, because there is none in the app. The app’s own usage counts stay in our database and are never shared.

People use Avísame because something in their life could go wrong, and some of them are in situations where a government agency might come asking. We will not pretend that cannot happen, so here is exactly how we handle it.

The strongest protection here is not a promise, it is the design. The location history that exists is short and listed on this page: the last 30 days of points while sharing is on, places you often go for 30 days, the arrivals and departures at places you saved, the derived routine times described above (days and times, no coordinates), and any location someone chose to send in a chat. Turning sharing off deletes the points and the places you often go. Your Emergency Plan is sealed and we hold no key to it. Your documents were never uploaded. What cannot be read cannot be handed over.

You need to be at least 13 to hold an Avísame account, and you confirm that on the screen where you create one. If you are under 18, use Avísame with your parent or guardian’s permission.

A parent or guardian can also add a child to a family group without that child having an account. When they do, they are the one deciding what is shared about that child, and that choice is theirs to make and to revisit.

Avísame is not directed to children under 13. We show no advertising to anyone, and we do not build advertising or marketing profiles of anyone. If we learn that someone under 13 set up an account, we delete it.

Depending on where you live, the law gives you rights over your information. California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia and a growing list of other states, and the GDPR if you are in Europe or the United Kingdom, all use different words for broadly the same set of things. Rather than quote each statute, here is what we will do for anyone who asks, wherever they live.

Most of it you can do yourself in the app, which is faster than writing to us. For anything else, email us and we will answer within 30 days. If you want someone else to make the request for you, they can, and we will check with you first.

Deletion in Avísame is not a hidden account. Your account is removed, and with it your profile, your plan, your places, your check-ins, your routines, your photo, and the push tokens that could reach your phone. Anything still queued to be sent to you is cancelled, and any private link that was opened on your behalf stops working.

One thing deliberately survives, and you should know about it: what another family already sent inside their own Circle stays in that Circle’s record, because it is their record of what happened, not yours. Your name is taken off it. In their history, the person who was there reads as "Someone who left", with no name, no phone number and no email address.

The full steps, including how to ask us to do it for you without opening the app, are on the account deletion page.

No service can promise it will never be broken into, and we are not going to be the first to pretend otherwise. What we can promise is the shape of our answer: if a breach ever reaches your information, we will tell you and the regulators who need to know, we will tell you what was reached and what was not, and we will not wait until we have a comfortable version of the story.

When something here changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change means we would use your information in a way this page did not already allow, we will tell you inside the app before it takes effect, and you will have the chance to delete your account instead.

One address, read by people who work on Avísame. Write in English, Spanish or Kreyòl.