Privacy policy

We separate data by sensitivity and treat each category accordingly:

• Sensitive health data: symptoms a parent reports (e.g. fever, cough, flu, RSV, strep, stomach bug, pinkeye), the approximate onset date, and the school or ZIP the report is attached to. This is the most sensitive data we handle and is treated as such.
• Location data: ZIP code and, optionally, the school a child attends. We never collect or store precise GPS, street address, or device-level location.
• Account data: email (required for an account), optional display name, and the schools or ZIPs you choose to follow.
• Child-related data: symptom reports are about a child in your household but we do not store the child's name, date of birth, exact age, photo, gender, medical record, or any other identifying detail. A report is "a household in ZIP X had symptom Y around date Z", nothing more.
• Device and usage data: standard server logs (IP, user agent, pages visited) used to operate the service, prevent abuse, and improve the product.

Health and location data is used only to generate aggregated community health trends and to deliver the alerts you opt into. Specifically:

• Show what's going around in your school, neighborhood, ZIP, and surrounding ZIPs.
• Send the digests, follow notifications, and outbreak alerts you've opted into.
• Improve detection quality, reduce noise, and prevent spam or abuse.

We explicitly prohibit, and do not engage in, any of the following:

• Selling personal data, health data, or location data to any third party. Ever.
• Advertising targeting or building advertising profiles.
• Sharing data with health insurers for underwriting, pricing, or eligibility.
• Sharing individual reports with schools, daycares, or employers.
• Scoring, ranking, or grading individual schools, neighborhoods, or households for any non-public-health purpose.
• Predictive scoring or behavioral profiling of individuals or families.

Reports are submitted without names, addresses, photos, or child identifiers. The raw row we store is the symptom, the date, and a ZIP or school, optionally linked to the submitting account so you can edit or delete it. Anything shown publicly, on the map, in school pages, in trend charts, or in digest emails, is aggregated. We do not display individual reports publicly and we do not expose the submitter to anyone, including the school.

To prevent any chance of identifying a specific family in a small area, public counts are bucketed into ranges (for example under 5, 5 to 10, 10+) rather than exact numbers. Where report volume in a ZIP or school is too low to be meaningful, we suppress the figure entirely instead of showing it. The same threshold rules apply to outbreak alerts: we will not fire an alert that would effectively single out one household.

• Raw symptom reports: retained while they're relevant to current trend windows (typically the trailing rolling window we display, plus a short operational buffer), then aged out of the live dataset. After that, only the aggregated, non-identifying counts remain.
• Aggregated trend data: retained indefinitely. By design it cannot identify a person, household, or child.
• Account data: retained while your account is active. You can delete your account from inside the app at any time. Deletion removes your profile, your follows, your email, and unlinks your historical reports from your identity. Aggregated counts that already shipped in past digests or maps remain (they have no personal data attached).
• Server logs: kept for a short operational window for security and abuse prevention, then rotated out.

Ickly is designed for parents and caregivers, not children. Accounts are for adults (13+). We do not knowingly create accounts for children under 13, and we do not collect a child's name, date of birth, exact age, photo, contact info, location, or any direct identifier. A "report about my kid" is stored as a household in ZIP X reported symptom Y, with no child profile attached. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account or submitted identifying information, email us and we will delete it.

We use a small number of vendors strictly to operate the service. They process data on our behalf under contract and may not use it for their own purposes:

• Cloud hosting and database: for app hosting, the database that stores reports, and authentication.
• Transactional email: to send the digests, alerts, and account emails you've opted into.
• Payments: for school and organization subscriptions (handled by a PCI-compliant processor; we never see card numbers).
• Maps: to render the neighborhood map tiles.
• Product analytics and error monitoring: aggregate page-view and crash telemetry (Google Analytics 4) used only to keep the app working and improve it. Google Signals and ad personalization are turned off, ad storage and ad user data consent are denied, IPs are anonymized, and no user identifiers, email addresses, symptom content, or report data are sent to Google or used for advertising.

We do not sell data, and we do not share data with advertisers, insurers, employers, or schools beyond the aggregated public views every visitor can see.

We will not attempt to re-identify the family behind a report, combine our data with outside datasets to infer identity, or track at the household level beyond the ZIP and school granularity shown in the app. We design features and review feature requests against this rule, and we apply it to ourselves, our partners, and any research collaborator.

Some uses are off-limits regardless of who asks:

• No sale or commercial resale of personal or health data.
• No advertising targeting and no behavioral profiling.
• No predictive scoring of individuals, households, or specific children.
• No proactive sharing with law enforcement. We will only disclose data when we are legally required to (e.g. a valid subpoena), and we will narrow the response to what the law requires.

Data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest. Access to raw data is limited to a small number of people who need it to operate the service, and is audit-logged. If we ever discover a security incident that affects your personal data, we will notify affected users without undue delay, target a 72-hour notification window where feasible, describe what happened and what we're doing about it, and tell you what (if anything) you should do.

Regardless of where you live, you can:

• Access the data on your account.
• Correct account information at any time.
• Delete your account and disassociate your historical reports from your identity, from inside the app.
• Export your data, on request, by emailing us.
• Opt out of any non-essential email from the unsubscribe link in every message, or by editing your preferences.

Ickly surfaces what other parents in your area are reporting. It is not a diagnosis, a clinical decision tool, or a medical device. Individual reports are unverified, may be inaccurate, and should not be relied on for medical decisions. For care, talk to a clinician.

If we make a material change, we'll update the "Last updated" date above and, for significant changes that affect what we collect or how we use it, we'll let you know by email or in-app before the change takes effect.