Legal

Privacy Notice

1. Who this notice covers

This notice applies to Kinsly (“Kinsly”, “we”) and the Kinsly web app, the Kinsly desktop app and kinsly.io. Kinsly is currently offered in Canada and the United States to people who are at least 18 years old.

Kinsly has two roles. A Supported Member receives help. A Trusted Contact gives help. Some information is shared between these two roles by design — that is the point of the product — and this notice explains exactly what.

2. Information we collect

• Account details. Name, email address, phone number, date of birth (used to confirm you are 18+), password credentials, and — if you sign in with Google or Apple — the basic profile that provider returns.
• Relationship data. Your Trusted Contact / Supported Member connections, invitations you send or accept, verification status, and any sponsorship relationship where one person pays for another’s subscription.
• Session data. When a Guided Assistance session runs we store who took part, timestamps, session status, session events (consent, start, end, highlights used), and any notes, summaries or Saved Fixes created for that session.
• Live screen, audio and guidance streams. Screen video, microphone audio and on-screen guidance are transmitted in real time between participants through our real-time infrastructure provider so the session can happen. Live streams are not stored by Kinsly as part of ordinary sessions today.
• Device and app data. App version, platform, update status, and the devices linked to your account.
• Billing data. Subscription status, plan, renewal dates and payment history. Card numbers are entered directly into our payment provider’s hosted fields and are not stored on Kinsly servers.
• Support and communications. Messages you send us, notification delivery logs (whether an email or SMS was accepted by the provider), and waitlist sign-ups you submit voluntarily.
• Technical logs. Server and error logs, including IP address and request metadata, generated when you use the service.

3. Why we use it

• To create and secure your account and verify who is allowed to help you.
• To run Guided Assistance sessions and deliver screen, voice and guidance.
• To notify a Trusted Contact that someone needs help, by email and SMS.
• To keep a record of recent sessions so both people can see what happened.
• To take payment, manage subscriptions and handle sponsorships.
• To detect abuse, debug faults and improve reliability.
• To meet legal and accounting obligations.

4. Screen sharing, microphone and consent

Screen sharing never starts on its own. The Supported Member chooses the window or screen to share, and the operating system also asks for its own permission the first time. Microphone access is requested at the same moment and can be muted at any time. Privacy Mode lets the Supported Member hide the shared screen instantly while the voice call continues. Kinsly does not provide remote control or keyboard/mouse takeover of a Supported Member’s device.

Session Safeguard recording is Coming Soon. It is not a promised feature of the current preview. When recording becomes available it will be introduced with its own consent step, its own storage disclosure and a stated retention period. Until then, do not rely on Kinsly to produce a recording of a session.

5. Kinsly Guardian and artificial intelligence

Kinsly does not use AI to analyse your screen, your audio or your personal data during a Support Session, and Kinsly does not monitor your device, messages or accounts in the background. AI is used only inside a Guardian check, which you start yourself.

A Guardian check processes only what you submit: up to five images, pasted or typed text, up to ten links, and the optional context you add (such as the channel and who the message claimed to be from). Kinsly may send that content to contracted service providers to extract text from images, to analyse the content, and to look up the reputation of the links, and stores the evidence and the result so you can review, share or delete it. Your Guardian allowance is 100 submitted checks per calendar month.

Guardian evidence is stored privately: images are only ever served through short-lived, signed links to you and to people you have explicitly shared a check with. Raw evidence is not written into activity descriptions, analytics or error reports. You can revoke sharing at any time and delete a check and its evidence. We do not sell your content, and we do not permit providers to use it to train their models except as described in their terms; we will update this Notice if that changes.

6. Who can see your information

• Your Trusted Contacts / Supported Members. Approved contacts can see a limited safe profile (such as your display name and verification status) and the sessions you share with them.
• Service providers. We use vendors to run the service. They process data on our instructions. Today these are: our cloud database, authentication and storage provider; our real-time audio/video/screen-sharing provider; our payment provider; our SMS provider; our transactional email provider; our object-storage provider used for application releases; and our content-delivery / edge provider.
• Legal. We may disclose information where required by law or to protect people from harm.

Kinsly does not sell your personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Sharing with the service providers above is processing on our behalf, not a sale.

7. Where data is processed

Our providers operate primarily in the United States, and some real-time and edge infrastructure is global. If you are in Canada, your information may be processed outside Canada and may be accessible to authorities in those countries under their laws. Our per-provider region inventory is still being finalised, and this notice will be updated with those specifics before general availability.

8. Retention

We keep account, relationship, session-record and billing data for as long as your account is active and for as long as we need it for legal, accounting and dispute purposes afterwards. Live screen and audio streams are not retained as ordinary session content. Notification delivery logs are kept for troubleshooting. We are not publishing fixed retention periods in this interim notice because the final schedule has not been finalised. We will publish a retention schedule before general availability.

9. Security

Access to your data is restricted at the database level so that, as a rule, only you and the people you have approved can read it. Traffic is encrypted in transit. Administrative access requires multi-factor authentication and is logged. No service can promise perfect security, and we do not make that claim; if we become aware of a breach affecting you we will notify you as required by law.

10. Your choices and rights

• Access, correct or update your profile from your account settings.
• Remove a Trusted Contact at any time to end their access.
• Cancel your subscription at any time.
• Request a copy of your data, or request deletion of your account, from Account → Privacy & your data, or by emailing privacy@kinsly.io. During the preview these requests are handled manually, and we will confirm before anything is deleted.
• Depending on where you live you may also have rights to withdraw consent, object to certain processing, or complain to a privacy regulator.

11. Communications

Service messages — help requests, session notifications, security alerts, billing notices — are part of the product and cannot be switched off while your account is active, because a Supported Member’s request would otherwise never reach anyone. Marketing and product announcement messages are separate and only sent if you opt in. You can unsubscribe from marketing at any time.

12. Cookies and analytics

Kinsly uses storage in your browser and desktop app to keep you signed in and to remember interface preferences. We do not run third-party advertising trackers on kinsly.io. This describes our product analytics practices as of the effective date above; we will update this notice before introducing materially different analytics tooling.

13. Children

Kinsly is not intended for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. If you believe a minor has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

14. Changes

We will update this notice as the product changes, and we will change the effective date and version above when we do. Material changes will be communicated in-app or by email.

15. Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@kinsly.io. Kinsly's legal operating entity, registered mailing address and named privacy contact are being finalised and will be published in this notice before general availability.