Last updated: 1 October 2026 · Effective date: 1 October 2026
ParenThing is operated by Cyops Limited, a company incorporated in Ireland. Cyops Limited is registered under company number 737339, and its registered office is at Friarstown, Bohernabreena, Tallaght, Dublin, D24 R292. ParenThing is a trading name of Cyops Limited.
The ParenThing iOS app is distributed on the App Store under the developer account of Noel Crabbe. Cyops Limited remains the data controller for the personal data described in this policy, and is the entity you should contact to exercise any of the rights set out in Section 7.
For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Irish Data Protection Acts, ParenThing is the data controller in respect of the personal data we process about you and your family.
Contact us: support@parenthing.ie
If you enable the child wellbeing feature, children may record a daily mood check-in. This data is treated with extra care. It is never used for advertising, profiling, or any purpose beyond the child's own wellbeing experience and the parents' private dashboard. See Section 6 for more detail.
If you choose to check in at a handover, ParenThing records the exact location of your device at that moment, together with the time. This is the only place the app records precise location, it happens only when you tap to check in, and it is never collected in the background or while the app is closed. The record is visible to the parents in your family, so that both of you have the same account of where and when a handover took place. It stays part of the family's shared record if you later close your account, and it is deleted when the family is deleted.
If you email us or contact us through the app, we retain that correspondence to respond to you and to improve our service.
We use your data to run the app: creating your account, syncing the shared calendar, delivering messages between co-parents, storing your documents, and processing expense records. Without this we simply cannot provide the service. Our legal basis is performance of a contract with you.
We use technical data (IP addresses, login events, error logs) to detect fraud, prevent unauthorised access, and protect the safety of families on our platform. Our legal basis is legitimate interests, specifically the security and integrity of the service.
If you turn on usage data in your account settings, we record which parts of the app you use, so we can understand how ParenThing is used and make it better. It is off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off at any time. We do not use the content of your messages, documents or children's wellbeing entries for this purpose. Our legal basis is your consent.
We also look at subscription and trial records, for example how many families move from a free trial to Premium, to understand how ParenThing is doing. Our legal basis is legitimate interests.
We send transactional messages (account notifications, security alerts, service updates). We may also send you product updates or early-access news if you have signed up for those. You can unsubscribe from non-essential communications at any time. Our legal basis is legitimate interests or consent, depending on the type of message.
We may process your data where required by Irish or EU law, for example to respond to a court order or a request from the Data Protection Commission. Our legal basis is legal obligation.
ParenThing is designed for use by adults (parents and professional advisers). A parent can create a login for their child, and accepts our terms on the child's behalf when they do. With that login, and with their parent's knowledge, a child can use the child features: mood check-ins, a private journal, and messages in the family conversations a parent adds them to. We treat any data relating to children with a higher standard of care.
Where you record a child's health information in the family Info Bank, such as allergies, medical notes or a health service number, that information is special category data under GDPR. It is stored so that both parents, and anyone you have asked to care for the child, can see the same accurate details. It is visible only to your family and to any professional you have expressly given access to, and it is never used for advertising, profiling or training. Our legal basis is your explicit consent, given at the point you choose to enter it, and you can delete it at any time.
We never sell your data. We never share your data with advertisers.
We use a small number of carefully selected sub-processors to operate the service. This is the full list:
If you choose to connect Google Calendar, ParenThing asks Google for permission to manage events in your calendar. We use it only to add your family's ParenThing events to your primary Google Calendar and keep them up to date. We do not read, copy or store the other events in your Google Calendar, and we never sell your Google data, use it for advertising or use it to train AI models. We keep the access Google gives us in our database in Ireland, only to keep your calendar up to date. You can disconnect at any time in ParenThing (Account, Calendar sync), which deletes it, or remove ParenThing in your Google Account at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
ParenThing's use and transfer of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Apple and Google also process your payment when you subscribe in their stores, under their own privacy policies.
All sub-processors are bound by data processing agreements and are required to handle data in accordance with GDPR. Where a provider is outside the European Economic Area, we rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified under it, and otherwise on Standard Contractual Clauses.
We may also disclose data to law enforcement or courts where required by Irish or EU law, or to protect the safety of a child or other person.
If you use ParenThing from Australia, New Zealand or Canada: your data is held in the European Union to the GDPR standard described on this page, which means it is stored outside your own country. We apply the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988, the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 and Canada's PIPEDA to how we collect, use and disclose your information, and you have the access, correction and complaint rights those laws give you. Our privacy contact for every country is support@parenthing.ie; you may also complain to your national privacy regulator.
We retain your personal data for as long as your account is active. If you close your account, we delete your personal data within 30 days, except where we are required to retain it longer by law (for example, financial records required under Irish tax law, which we may keep for up to 7 years).
ParenThing is a shared record between parents. Things you contributed to that shared record, such as messages you sent, calendar events, expenses, agreements, tasks and handover check-ins, are kept when you close your account, no longer linked to a login, so that your co-parent keeps the record they rely on. Our legal basis is your co-parent's legitimate interest in that record, including for use in legal proceedings (GDPR Article 17(3)(e)). Your device identifiers and notification history are deleted straight away.
If a family is left with no parent able to sign in to it, we delete the whole family, including its files and any child logins made for it, 30 days later.
We keep a short log that an account or a child's login was deleted, with the date and the reason you chose. Anything you wrote in your own words when leaving is removed after 30 days.
Some records are kept for a set time, whatever else happens:
If you used a free trial and then close your account, we keep a one-way coded fingerprint of your email address, never the address itself, so that the same address cannot start a second free trial. The fingerprint cannot be turned back into your email address. Our legal basis is legitimate interests, specifically preventing misuse of free trials.
Backups are purged on a rolling cycle within 90 days of account closure.
Under GDPR and the Irish Data Protection Acts 2018, you have the following rights in relation to your personal data:
To exercise any of these rights, email us at support@parenthing.ie. We will respond within one month (extendable to three months for complex requests, with notice to you).
We take security seriously because we handle sensitive family information. Our measures include:
No system is completely secure. If you discover a vulnerability, please contact us immediately at support@parenthing.ie.
The ParenThing app uses strictly necessary cookies only, to keep you logged in and to keep your session secure. The app contains no advertising and no tracking cookies. It records which parts of the app you use only if you turn on usage data in your account settings.
This website uses Google Tag Manager to understand how people find and use our pages. Analytics cookies stay switched off until you accept them, and you can decline without losing any functionality. We do not use advertising cookies, and we do not track you across other websites.
We use Microsoft Clarity on this website to understand how visitors use our pages, through heatmaps and session replays that show interactions such as scrolling and clicking. This helps us improve the site. Text is masked, and we do not use Clarity to collect names, email addresses or anything you type into forms. Microsoft processes this data on our behalf; you can read more in the Microsoft Privacy Statement. Like our other website analytics, it is covered by your cookie choices on this site and runs under the same consent.
If you are not satisfied with how we handle a data protection concern, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Data Protection Commission (DPC), Ireland's national supervisory authority.
Data Protection Commission
21 Fitzwilliam Square South
Dublin 2, D02 RD28, Ireland
www.dataprotection.ie
We would, however, always welcome the opportunity to address your concern directly first. Please contact us at support@parenthing.ie.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or in applicable law. When we make changes, we will update this page and the "Last updated" date at the top. Continued use of the service after the effective date of any change constitutes acceptance of the updated policy.