Privacy, in plain language.

This page describes the Paww website at heypaww.com and the Paww app. The public website provides information and dog-parenting articles. The app is available for iPhone, iPad and Android and supports accounts and dog-care records. Paww does not currently accept payments.

Website analytics

The production website uses analytics by default to understand how the site is used and how well it performs. The site does not show an analytics consent form or store an analytics preference. You can use your browser's privacy settings and content-blocking tools to limit third-party requests and cookies.

We use Google Analytics 4, Vercel Web Analytics, and PostHog to understand which pages people visit and which features they use. We measure navigation, signup steps, breed filters and comparisons, article engagement, mascot interactions, downloads, and similar actions. Search measurements include a length category and result count, never the search text. We do not send email addresses or form contents as analytics event properties. When a page or one of our servers fails, PostHog receives an error report: the error message, where in our code it happened, and for a page, the address you were on. An error message can occasionally include text from that page. We remove links and email addresses from server error reports before they are sent. We remove query strings and fragments from the page URLs supplied by our integration.

On the website PostHog also records where on a page people click, tap and scroll, so we can see heatmaps of each page. It records the kind of element and its position, never the words on it. This includes the signed-in pages. The website and the app may send PostHog measurements through an address on our own domain, which forwards them to PostHog unchanged. PostHog also records session replays of every website page so we can see where the site is confusing. A replay reconstructs the page, your scrolling, and your clicks. Everything typed into a form field is masked before it leaves your browser. Other words on the page are not masked, so a replay of a signed-in page can show the names, timelines and records of the dogs your account can see. Website measurements record the full address of each page you visit, including the vet directory location you are browsing and the identifier of a dog you open when signed in, but never the part of the address after a question mark. PostHog stores its identifiers in a first-party cookie and browser storage. When you are signed in on the website, your visits are linked in PostHog to your Paww account, with your account's name and email, the same way as in the app. Signing out on the website resets the PostHog identifier in that browser.

We also use Vercel Speed Insights and PostHog to understand page loading, responsiveness, and visual stability. Analytics and performance providers may process technical information such as browser and device details, request information, and approximate location. Google Analytics and PostHog use first-party cookies. Our configuration disables Google signals and advertising personalization. We do not use analytics to serve personalized ads.

The website sends analytics only on the production heypaww.com domain. Local development and preview sites do not send data to these providers. Developer diagnostics, when explicitly enabled, retain a limited buffer of sanitized events in the current browser tab.

Clearing cookies through browser controls removes browser identifiers where the browser permits. It does not erase information already processed by an analytics provider.

Read Google's explanation of data use by partner sites, Vercel Web Analytics privacy information, PostHog's privacy policy, and Vercel Speed Insights privacy information for details about provider processing.

Registering interest in Paww

The launch-interest form asks for your email address. A notice beside the form explains that signing up means agreeing to receive Paww launch updates. A successful production submission records your email address, your Paww subscription preference, and the signup time. Those details are used to register your interest and support the updates you requested. Agreement to launch updates is separate from website analytics.

We use Neon, a hosted Postgres database, to store your registration, subscription preference, consent version, signup source, and relevant timestamps. Resend delivers a welcome email from hello@heypaww.com and the launch updates you requested. To avoid duplicate welcomes, we temporarily store the prepared email while delivery is pending, then retain a delivery identifier and timestamp after Resend accepts it. Read Neon's privacy policy and Resend's privacy policy for details about their processing.

Your registration can be saved even if the welcome email is delayed or cannot be delivered. If the database cannot accept your registration, the form shows an error instead of claiming it succeeded.

A development preview connected to Neon can also save registrations in that database. Without a configured database or alternative signup handler, local test submissions may be saved in a local JSONL file and are labeled as preview submissions. Development does not send email unless a developer explicitly enables live email testing.

You can stop Paww launch updates using the unsubscribe link in an email. This changes your Paww preference without changing subscriptions to other products. We keep an unsubscribe preference and limited signup and delivery records to avoid unwanted repeat emails. To ask about your information or request deletion, email privacy@heypaww.com. For help with the website or emails, see the support contact in our Terms and Conditions.

App accounts and dog-care records

The app supports sign-in using Google or Apple when those services are configured. Better Auth runs on our server and stores account and session records in Neon. For Google or Apple sign-in, we receive the profile information that provider authorizes, such as an account identifier, name, email address, and optional profile image. We do not offer email-and-password sign-in.

We store the dog profiles and care tasks you choose to add, including names, optional breeds and birthdays, task descriptions, dates, and completion times. Dog-care records are shared with people who have accepted an invitation to that dog. Owners manage access, caregivers can edit care information, and viewers can read it. Each person uses their own account. Your account can belong to more than one dog. Creating an app account does not subscribe you to marketing emails. When an owner invites someone, we store the recipient’s email address and use Resend to send a private invitation. For invitations shared through messaging apps, we store the name the owner enters to label the invitation. Owners of that dog can see pending invitation email addresses or names. Invitation emails do not subscribe recipients to marketing.

If you sign in with Google and your Google account shares a profile picture, the app shows that picture next to your name to the people in your dogs' families until you add your own photo in Paww. It is loaded from Google's image address and we do not copy it. You can optionally add your own profile photo and a separate dog profile photo from your photo library or camera. We resize and re-encode uploaded photos and remove embedded metadata, such as location information, before storing them in Vercel Blob. The app serves them through a heypaww.com image URL. Personal and dog profile photos are public to anyone who has that image link; your other dog-care records require an authorized account with access to that dog. Only upload photos you are comfortable sharing this way.

Replacing or removing a photo queues the old image for deletion. Account deletion also queues your personal and dog photos for deletion. We attempt cleanup immediately and retry pending deletions each day. Cached copies may remain briefly after removal, and we cannot remove copies someone has already downloaded.

Session records may include your IP address, device or browser information, and sign-in timestamps for account security and rate limiting. The app stores its session credentials in the device's secure storage. Signing out clears the app's session.

Starting with version 0.0.3, the app uses PostHog to understand how the app is used. It records which screens you open, app opens and updates, and actions such as signing in, finishing setup, adding a dog, completing a care task, publishing a post, saving or deleting a record, opening a notification, sending or accepting an invitation, and exporting records. An event may include a general category, such as the kind of record or task, and counts such as how many dogs an account has. Events never include captions, notes, record contents, photos, files, contacts, or precise location. Starting with version 0.0.4, the app also records where on the screen you tap, by component and position and never the words on a button, and it sends your account's name and email address to PostHog along with your Paww account ID, so we can see which accounts are active and help them. Your profile photo is never sent. PostHog also processes technical details such as device model, operating system, app version, language, time zone, and an approximate location derived from your IP address.

Starting with version 0.0.4, the app records session replays on all of its screens, so we can see where people get stuck. A replay reconstructs the screen, your scrolling, and your taps. Photos, videos, text you type, and embedded web content are masked on the device before anything is sent. Other words on the screen are not masked, so a replay can show names, captions, and the titles of health records for the dogs in your account, including what family members have shared there. Replays never include sound, and the app does not capture logs or network traffic for them. Version 0.0.3 recorded replays only on setup and help screens. Starting with version 0.0.6, the app sends PostHog an error report when something fails: the error message and where in our code it happened. An error message can occasionally include text from the screen, such as a name or a record title. Starting with version 0.0.8, the app also measures its own speed: how long the home screen and its feed, the health screen and record screens take to show, and which kinds of requests take longer than two seconds. These measurements carry the name of the screen or the general kind of request, never a dog, record or other identifier. Google Analytics and Vercel analytics are not installed in the app. Signing out resets the PostHog identifier on that device. To ask us to delete analytics or replays linked to your account, contact us using the details below.

You can delete your app account from Your profile. You may need to sign in again before confirming deletion. If you are the primary owner of a dog shared with other people, you must first transfer primary ownership. Deleting an account removes its account, sessions, private preferences and notifications, and any unshared dogs it still owns. Shared dogs and their care records remain available to their other members. Routine hosting or provider logs and backups may follow those providers' retention schedules. An app-account deletion does not change a separately requested email subscription; use the email unsubscribe link or contact us for help with that information.

For step-by-step account deletion instructions, including requests without the app, see Delete your Paww account. For other requests about your Paww information, email privacy@heypaww.com.

Using Paww on the web

You can sign in at heypaww.com to set up your dog, and to see, read only, the dogs and family timelines your account can already see in the app. If you own a dog, you can also send a family invitation by email from there, which works the same way as inviting someone from the app. These pages use the same account and the same data as the app: nothing new is collected to offer them. They are not indexed by search engines. They are measured and recorded by session replay like every other website page, as described above. Photos and videos are delivered only after checking your sign-in and family membership, exactly as in the app. If you use a shared or public computer, sign out when you are done.

Private health records and attachments

Development versions of Paww let you add a dog's vaccinations, vet visits, medication notes, allergies, conditions, test results, weight entries and optional insurance details. We store the dates, source/provider, notes and other details you enter in Neon. The dog's initial primary owner receives health access. Owners can explicitly grant or remove health read/edit access for accepted family members; ordinary family membership does not automatically grant access to medical records.

Photos, PDFs and short videos attached to these records use a separate private Vercel Blob store. The app checks your signed-in account, dog membership and health access before delivering a file. Uploads are staged while we validate and process them, including image normalization and video conversion. Medical attachments do not use the public URLs used for profile photos. File names, sizes, processing states and limited failure codes are stored to manage delivery and cleanup. Record contents are not sent to website analytics or used to target product announcements.

When you add a photo or PDF to a health record, Paww can read the document to suggest a category, title, dates, the clinic or insurer name and a few tags, so you do not have to type them. To do this we send that one file to a language model through OpenRouter. We send only the document: not your name, email, account, or your dog's profile. We ask OpenRouter to route these requests only to model providers that do not retain the content or use it for training, and we instruct the model not to return people's names, addresses, phone numbers, emails or microchip numbers. The result is a suggestion. Nothing is added to the record, and no reminder date is set, until someone with edit access reviews the details and saves them; you can dismiss a suggestion instead. Your original file is stored unchanged. Document reading is limited per person and per dog, and when a limit is reached the file is simply saved without suggestions. Videos are never sent.

Deleting a record hides it and queues its attachment files for deletion. Cleanup runs on a recurring worker and retries failures. We keep limited audit metadata, including the action, revision, actor and time, and a deleted record identifier to prevent an old retry from recreating it. These records remain until the dog is deleted; we do not keep the deleted medical record's contents as a version history. Shared records can remain with a dog after a contributing family member deletes their own account, with that member's identity link removed.

The record export action is available to owners who also have health read access. Opening a PDF or exporting record data temporarily downloads a copy to the app's cache, which the app attempts to remove after the operation. Your device's sharing tools may save copies elsewhere if you choose to share or save them. Access changes cannot remove copies that have already been downloaded or shared outside Paww.

Local storage and pending care changes

The app keeps a local SQLite cache of dog profiles, daily care tasks and personal photo references to load previously viewed information quickly. It also stores pending task creation and completion changes so supported care actions can retry after reconnecting. Pending changes are identified in the app and are checked against current server permissions before saving. Conflicting changes require a choice instead of silently replacing another person's work.

So screens open instantly, the app keeps a copy on your device of some things you have already viewed: your dogs, today's care, family names and roles, achievements, your notification list, your dog's vet clinics, health records and weights you have opened, and from version 0.0.8 the newest page of each dog's family timeline (posts, captions, comment and like counts, and finished care, with links to the photos but not the photos themselves). The copy is tied to your account, expires after 24 hours, and is removed when you sign out, switch accounts, lose access to a dog or its health records, or change anything. It never includes attached photos, PDFs or videos, original documents, unreviewed document suggestions, exports, health-access settings, invitations, or older pages of the timeline, and the notification copy omits links to private photos. Photos and videos are never written to the device; photos you have viewed stay in the app's memory while it is running, so they show again without downloading, and are gone when the app is closed. Sign-out and account switching clear account-scoped local data; losing dog access clears corresponding queued work when the app learns of the change. Cached information already viewed cannot be recalled while the device is offline. Health records and their attachments are not included in this persistent SQLite cache. File selection, preview and export can still create temporary app-cache files; the app attempts to clean up those copies after use. Original files in your photo library are not removed.

Shared achievements

Paww uses care logs and family membership to award badges to a dog's shared profile. We retain a limited record of each task's first completion, including its type, time and contributor, along with earned badges and award dates. Removing a task preserves this progress. Deleting a contributor's account removes the identity link from these completion records. Deleting the dog removes its progress and badges. Current members of that dog can view the collection; new awards can appear in their notification inbox.

App notifications and location

The Notifications tab stores family care updates, their time, and whether you have read them. Creating or completing a care task can add an update for that dog's current members. Removing someone's membership also removes their access to that dog's notifications. This inbox works without enabling push notifications.

If you enable push notifications, we store a device push token linked to your signed-in session and your account preference. We use Expo's push service and Apple or Google's notification services to deliver them. Lock-screen messages contain a general Paww update notice; care details are available in the authenticated app. We keep delivery tickets and limited error information to retry failed delivery and disable invalid tokens. Signing out or losing access prevents new delivery to that session, although a message already handed to a notification service may still arrive. You can turn push notifications off in Your profile under Notifications or in your device settings.

Location is optional. Choosing Use my location asks for foreground location access and takes a single reading. The app rounds coordinates to two decimal places before sending them to Paww and may use the device's geocoding service to find a nearby city, region, or country. We save this approximate area privately for future local recommendations. It is not shared with other dog members. We do not track your movement in the background. You can view, update, or remove the saved area in Your profile under Location, and manage permission in your device settings.

Hosting and external links

The Find a vet page and the “Vets near you” section of the home page use the approximate location your network connection suggests, or a city you type, to list nearby clinics. That location is used to answer the request and is not saved.

Your browser requests website files and images to display the pages. The hosting provider may process routine request information, such as an IP address and browser information, to deliver the site and maintain its security. This operational processing is separate from analytics.

If you follow an external link, the destination website's own privacy practices apply.

As Paww grows

We will update this page as the app develops and before introducing commerce or additional features that change how we handle personal information.