Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Bump Circle is operated by Wellness Support Group Limited, the controller of the personal data described here. Wellness Support Group Limited is registered in England and Wales under company number 16707294. Its registered office is 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London, United Kingdom, WC2H 9JQ.

For privacy questions or rights requests, contact developer@chewybytes.com.

2. Information we handle

• Account and identity: email address, display name, profile image, sign-in provider, provider identifiers, and an anonymous device identifier.
• Journey information: journey type, due date, conception/start date or birth date, whether this is your first baby, whether you ask us to be mindful of a previous pregnancy loss, concerns you select, baby name, viewed weeks, bookmarks and preferences.
• AI chat: messages you choose to send and the journey context used to make an answer relevant, such as pregnancy week, due date, first-baby status, an optional pregnancy-loss language preference, baby name and selected concerns.
• Purchases: product, entitlement, renewal and transaction status supplied by Stripe, Apple, Google and RevenueCat. Stripe processes web billing and card details; Bump Circle does not receive your full card number.
• Communications: newsletter choices, support requests and other messages you send.
• Circle community: display name and username, journey and due-month space membership, posts, comments, private messages, photo uploads, reactions, blocks, reports, moderation decisions, the reason codes recorded when a post or reply is screened automatically, and information needed to investigate safety complaints.
• Technical information: app/browser version, device and operating-system details, IP-derived approximate location, diagnostics, security events and limited service-use events.

Some journey and chat information may reveal health information. We treat it as special-category personal data under UK data-protection law.

3. Why we use it

• Contract: to create and secure an account, calculate your current journey week, show the content you request, synchronise supported account data, and provide or restore paid features.
• Explicit consent: to process health-related journey details and optional AI-chat context, and for optional product analytics. You can withdraw consent, though this may prevent the affected personalised feature from working.
• Legitimate interests: to secure Bump Circle, prevent abuse, diagnose faults and understand aggregate service reliability, and to moderate Circle, including automated screening of posts and replies before they appear, investigate reports and protect members, after balancing those purposes against your rights.
• Legal obligation: to meet applicable tax, accounting, consumer-protection, security and lawful-request requirements.

Newsletter and other direct marketing is sent only when you request it, and every marketing email includes an unsubscribe route.

4. AI chat and automated screening

When you use chat, Bump Circle sends the messages in that conversation and the context described above to Anthropic to generate a response. Chat history is also saved on your device so you can reopen it. Do not include information you do not want processed for this purpose.

AI answers can be incomplete or wrong. They are general information, not diagnosis, treatment, emergency monitoring or a replacement for your own maternity team. Bump Circle does not use AI to make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you.

When you post or reply in Circle, Bump Circle sends the text to Anthropic for automated screening before anything is published: the title, body and any poll choices, and for a reply, the start of the post and reply it answers, so the reply can be read in context. Phone numbers, email addresses, links, postal addresses, card and bank details and NHS numbers that our own checks recognise are removed first. Other details you write, including health information and first names, are sent. Private messages are not sent for screening.

Screening can publish a post or reply, hold it for a person on our safety team, or ask you to edit it before anything is stored, such as to take out contact details. Some posts about urgent symptoms or safety also come back with guidance on where to get help. Screening never suspends or bans anyone: only people on our safety team do that, and people read every report. Photos always wait for a person. If screening is unavailable, the post or reply waits for our team and its text may be sent again, up to six attempts in all, within a day of posting. We keep only closed reason codes from screening, never the screening service's own words.

5. Providers and sharing

We use service providers only where needed to run Bump Circle. They currently include Vercel for hosting, Neon for the account database, Sanity for editorial content, Anthropic for AI chat and for automated screening of Circle posts and replies, Stripe for web purchases, RevenueCat and Apple/Google for mobile purchases, Resend for email, Ably for live Circle updates, Expo and the Apple/Google push services for notifications, and Sentry for diagnostics. Plausible and Vercel provide aggregate web measurement. Expo's EAS Observe receives limited mobile operational telemetry, including app launch, render, navigation and update performance, technical crash and runtime reason strings, a random per-install identifier and limited network-host diagnostics. We filter app-originated JavaScript errors and private route values and do not intentionally attach journey or health details, chat or Circle content, account details or authentication tokens to diagnostics. Native or operating-system-generated diagnostic strings may still be processed when the app crashes. PostHog product analytics is off by default. When you enable it, the same restricted, content-free product events may also be sent to EAS Observe. A small set of subscription reliability events is sent to PostHog and Observe independently of that preference, using no person profile or user-entered content.

Where offered, optional Circle post measurement has a separate opt-in. It records your account identifier, the post identifier and the UTC calendar day after a Circle post in your feed is at least half visible for one continuous second. These records are account-linked, not anonymous. They stay in Bump Circle's database and are not sent as view events to PostHog or advertising providers. Administrators receive aggregate reports on post views and community participation to help us understand how Circle is used and improve it. The measurement does not record message text, an exact viewing time, your IP address or a device fingerprint. A separate account-linked consent record stores whether collection is authorised, a random permission identifier and when that preference last changed. It lets us reject delayed view requests after you clear your history.

Apple, Google and Facebook also process information under their own notices when you choose their sign-in service. If you follow a link to an independent practitioner, that provider processes information under its own privacy notice; Bump Circle does not silently combine private-practice records with app analytics. We do not sell personal data or use third-party advertising in Bump Circle.

6. International transfers

Some providers may process information outside the UK. Where the law requires it, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or contractual and organisational safeguards intended to protect the transferred data. Contact us for more information about safeguards relevant to your information.

7. Storage, retention and security

Journey data, bookmarks and chat history are currently primarily stored on your device. Account and supported synchronisation data is kept while your account is active. Circle posts and comments are kept while they remain part of the community conversation. Deleted or moderated material and reports may be retained for a limited period where needed for member safety, complaints, fraud prevention or legal obligations. Newsletter information is kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to erase it. Diagnostics, security records and provider backups are kept only for the period reasonably needed for their purpose and are then deleted or overwritten on their normal schedules.

Optional Circle post-view records are kept for the UTC calendar day of the view and the following 89 days, then deleted by a scheduled cleanup that runs daily at 00:05 UTC. You can stop collection in the Circle post analytics setting and request deletion of your account's post-view history there, including after Plus expires. Collection stops locally immediately; deleting server records requires a connection. Deleting your account also removes these records. The separate consent preference is kept until you delete your account; it is not a history of posts you viewed.

We use access controls, encrypted transport, provider security controls and monitoring designed to protect information. No online service can guarantee absolute security. Please keep your device and sign-in methods secure.

8. Your choices and rights

Depending on the circumstances, you may have rights to access, correct, erase, restrict or receive a copy of your information, and to object to some processing. You may withdraw consent without affecting processing that was lawful before withdrawal.

Use the in-app deletion control or follow our account-deletion instructions. You can also contact developer@chewybytes.com. You may complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office through ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

9. Children and changes

Bump Circle is not directed at children under 13. If local law says you cannot agree to these terms or consent to this processing by yourself, a parent or legal guardian must do so where appropriate. This does not limit your right to seek confidential healthcare from an appropriate professional.

Circle is separate from the anonymous tracker and is available only to account-linked members who confirm they are 18 or over.

We will update this notice when the product, providers or law changes. Material changes may also be shown in the app or sent to your account email.