Privacy

Last updated 23 October 2026.

Short version: your pets live on your Mac. They can't read your messages, your calendar never leaves your computer, and there are no ads or advertising trackers. We don't sell or share personal information. Optional usage counts are described below; they're off unless you turn them on. Offline mode (Settings › Privacy) stops everything on the "leaves your Mac" list.

Who we are

Frimpong Studios runs SI Pets and decides what is done with the small amount of data described here. Questions, requests and complaints: hello@sipets.app.

What stays on your Mac

Your pets, their memories and relationships, helper settings and history, reminders you create, your school planner, who a flight you track or a parcel you follow is for, calendar details used by helpers, names and anniversary dates from Contacts (only if you turn on Anniversaries), whether a Focus is on (only if you ask the pets to go quiet for it, and never which one), time per app (only if you turn on Time recap, kept 30 days), what you tap when your comfort pet asks how today is going (one of five words a day, kept 30 days, and you can clear it any time), and any on-device AI prompts. We never receive any of it. You can export all of it as JSON from Settings › Backups. A backup copy is kept on your Mac every day (the last 7).

What SI Pets never touches

• Your files: pets never create, move, rename or delete anything. Downloads finished only shows you new files.
• Messages, email, other apps' notifications, screen contents, window titles, browser history or keystrokes.
• The microphone and camera.
• Screen Recording, Accessibility, Input Monitoring or Full Disk Access permissions. It never asks for them.

Usage counts (off unless you turn them on)

If you turn them on, once a day the app tells our server it was used: a random number that changes every month, the app and macOS versions, the current plan (Free, Full household or Plus), the app's language, and whether it's the very first time. Our server notes the country the request came from and never stores the IP address. That's how we know how many people use it. Nothing about you, your pets, your calendar or your apps. Change it in Settings › Privacy; Offline mode stops it too. Rows older than 90 days are deleted, and because the number changes monthly we can't find "your" rows afterwards.

What leaves your Mac, and only when you turn it on

• Friends: your display name; a random household id and a public key made on your Mac; your pets' names, kinds, coats, moods and outfits; your household mood and number of beefs; friendships, blocks and invite codes; visits (the visiting pet's name, kind, coat, traits and outfit) and the relationship labels they create; the special deliveries you send (who to, when, and the script: a mood, moves, props and up to 240 characters of your words), which wait for your friend's Mac and are erased as soon as it collects them, and a 7-day sender pass that says your household may send; and any report you file (your reason, up to 200 characters; for a special delivery, the delivery as it arrived). Never memories, trust, your calendar, helpers or anything about your day. Leave Friends in the Friends app to delete it all. When you share an invite link, anyone who opens it sees your display name and your pets' names and kinds.
• LAN Mode (off unless you turn it on, and off again after two hours): your Mac finds your friends and your room on the same local network and exchanges your display name, your pet's look and the waves, notes, treats, invite codes and special deliveries you send, encrypted, only with them and only on that network. None of it reaches us. If you report someone you met there, we get their household's key, whether they were a friend or from a room, and your reason.
• Laggy connection: a ping to our server with no data in it.
• Site down: checks to the addresses you entered, sent straight to those sites.
• Weather heads-up: a rough location. The Mac App Store version asks Apple Weather directly; the website version sends a location rounded to about 10 km to our server, which asks Apple Weather and does not store or log it.
• Headlines: the news feeds you pick are read straight from those sites, which see your IP address like any website you visit. Nothing is sent to us.
• Live scores: the app asks our server for whole leagues' scores, their games for the next two weeks and the league table after a game, and picks your teams and games on your Mac, so what you follow never reaches us.
• Exchange rates: the currencies you pick go to our server, which gets the day's rates from ExchangeRate-API. Nothing else is sent.
• Flight tracker (coming soon; nothing is sent until it launches): the flight numbers and dates you add go to our server, which asks AeroDataBox for their status. Who's flying (the names you type) stays on your Mac.
• Parcel tracker (SI Pets Plus; coming soon, and nothing is sent until it launches): the tracking numbers and carriers you add go to our server, with proof that you have SI Pets Plus, and our server asks 17TRACK (or Ship24 if 17TRACK can't answer) for each parcel's status. Those providers receive the tracking number and keep it under their own privacy policies. Who the parcel is for (the names you type) stays on your Mac.
• Service status (SI Pets Plus, and only if you turn it on): the app asks our server how a fixed list of services (GitHub, Slack, Zoom and so on) are doing, and our server reads their public status pages. The request is the same for every Mac and carries nothing about you: the services you pick stay on your Mac.
• iCloud Drive backups: if you turn it on, a copy of your daily backup goes to your own iCloud Drive. It goes to Apple under your account, not to us.
• New pets, outfits and animations: content packs from our server, checked on your Mac before they're used. Packs for Full households are sent only with proof of the purchase: website copies send their license token, App Store copies send Apple's signed record of the purchase, which our server checks against Apple's signature. We don't keep either.
• Purchases and updates: Apple handles App Store purchases. For website purchases, our payment provider, Polar, sells the license as merchant of record and holds your payment and receipt details under its own privacy policy; its name is on your receipt. You pay on Polar's checkout page, not ours, so we never see your card details. Website copies send their license key to our server, which asks that provider whether it is valid. To recover a repeated first activation, our server keeps its random request number, request hash, state and signed answer. These recovery records expire after 72 hours and are deleted by the next daily retention job. The signed answer includes an activation ID and a hash of the license key; we never retain the raw key. Website copies also look for updates and once a day download a small version-status file. No calendar details, app usage or household memories are included in these checks.

Who handles data for us

We use a few service providers, each only for the job named here: Cloudflare hosts our website, downloads and servers (it sees your IP address to deliver every request, and runs the bot check described below); Hetzner runs a server of ours that keeps the backup copies of the Friends database and checks that our services are up; Resend sends the emails you ask for; Apple (App Store purchases, Apple Weather, your own iCloud Drive); our payment provider, Polar (website purchases, and the license key it issues); and the data providers behind the live features: football-data.org and API-Sports (scores), AeroDataBox (flights), 17TRACK and Ship24 (parcels, for SI Pets Plus) and ExchangeRate-API (rates), and the public status pages of the services in Service status (our server reads them like any visitor; they never see you). The data providers receive only the public question we ask (a league, a flight number and date, a tracking number, a currency), never who asked; the parcel providers keep the tracking numbers they are asked about under their own privacy policies. Some of these providers are in the United States or elsewhere outside your country; where the law requires it, the transfer is covered by the provider's standard contractual clauses or its participation in the EU–US and UK–US data privacy frameworks.

How long we keep it

• Friends: visits 30 days after they end; invites until they expire (7 days); a special delivery's words until your friend's Mac collects it, 3 days at most, and the record that it was sent (without the words) for 7 days; a household nobody has used for 12 months; everything at once when you leave Friends. Reports, which can mention another household, are kept for a year.
• Usage counts: 90 days.
• Website forms: salted hashes of an email address and of your IP address (used only to limit how many emails one person can trigger) are deleted after 2 days. Sign-ups never confirmed are deleted after 7 days. Platform waitlist addresses are deleted when you unsubscribe or 24 months after you confirm, whichever comes first. The "big updates" list is kept until you unsubscribe.
• License checks: activation recovery records 72 hours.
• Backups of the Friends database: a copy every night, kept 14 days, and one a week, kept 8 weeks, on our Hetzner server and in our private Cloudflare storage. Something deleted from Friends is gone from every copy within 8 weeks.
• Server logs: we turn request logging off for our own code. Cloudflare keeps its own short-lived operational logs.

Why we may use it

• To give you what you asked for (Friends, licenses, packs, updates, the live features you switch on): it's needed to provide the service.
• To keep things safe (rate limits, spam checks, handling reports): our legitimate interest in protecting people and the service.
• With your consent (usage counts, emails about updates or a platform waitlist): you can withdraw it any time in Settings › Privacy or with the unsubscribe link, without affecting what happened before.

Your rights

You can ask to see, correct or delete the data we hold about you, to limit or object to how we use it, to take it elsewhere, and to withdraw consent. Settings › Backups has "Export my data" and the Friends app has "Leave Friends and delete my data", which work without asking us. For anything else email hello@sipets.app; we reply within a month. SI Pets has no accounts, so we may need something from your Mac (such as your display name) to find your household, and we can't look up usage counts at all because their number changes every month. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office; in Ghana, the Data Protection Commission). We don't use your data to make automated decisions about you, and we don't sell or share it for advertising. Our website and app don't follow you across other sites or apps. Our website's visit counter honors Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control anyway.

Children

SI Pets is not aimed at children under 13, and Friends and LAN Mode are for people aged 13 and over. Before you can join Friends or turn on LAN Mode, the app asks for your birth month and year. If the answer says under 13, they stay off and the app asks nothing more on that Mac. The answer is kept only on your Mac and is never sent to us. We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you think a child has joined Friends, email us and we'll delete their household. Everything else, including the school planner, stays on the Mac.

This website

No cookies, no ad pixels, no cookie banner needed. We use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which loads a small script from Cloudflare and counts page views, the site you came from, your country and how fast pages load, without cookies, browser storage or fingerprinting. It does not run if your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, and not on invite or account pages. When one of our email forms is on screen or in use (on phones and Windows when the page opens, otherwise when you start the Mac, iPhone or Android waitlist), Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you are a person, which sends it your IP address and some browser signals. If you ask us to email you the Mac link we send one email through Resend and keep only salted hashes of your address and IP address for rate limiting (2 days), unless you tick "Also email me about big updates" and confirm it from that email. The Mac, Windows, iPhone and Android waitlists send a confirmation email first; once you confirm, they keep your email (and which list you picked) as described above. Emails from lists carry an unsubscribe link. Fonts are served from our own site, not a third party. The pets, dress-up, goal scene and planner on this site run in your browser and send nothing anywhere. When you download SI Pets, the file comes from Cloudflare's servers, which see your IP address like any download.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, we'll say so in the app's release notes and on this page.

Contact

Frimpong Studios · hello@sipets.app