Co-parenting apps hold some of the most sensitive data a person has. Your children’s names and dates of birth. Where they are on any given night. Medical notes. Messages between two people who split up, sometimes badly. And increasingly, an AI feature that reads school letters or drafts replies.
Most apps say they take privacy seriously. Here are five questions that tell you whether they mean it.
1. Does the AI ever see my child’s name?
This is the one to ask first, because the honest answer is usually “yes.” When an app sends a school letter to a language model to pull out the dates, the whole letter goes, name and all. It does not have to. A pseudonymisation firewall can replace names with placeholders before anything leaves the app, so the model works on “child 1 has a trip on Friday” and the real name is put back afterwards, inside the app. Ask whether that happens. If the answer is a pause, you have your answer.
2. Can staff read my data out of the database?
Encryption “in transit” is table stakes and means nothing about what is stored. The question is whether names, messages, notes and documents are encrypted at rest, so that someone with access to the storage sees ciphertext rather than your family. Look for that phrase specifically.
3. Who else in the app can see what?
Two homes is rarely just two people. A new partner, a grandparent who does Thursdays, a childminder. A good app lets you give each of them exactly the access that fits and no more: the schedule but not the messages, this child but not that one. If access is all or nothing, you will either overshare or leave people out.
4. Can I leave with my data?
An app that intends to earn your stay makes leaving easy. One-tap export of your calendar, messages and documents in a normal format is the clearest signal of that. An app that makes it hard is telling you something.
5. What is the business model?
Free apps that charge nobody are paying for themselves somehow. Apps that charge per parent have an incentive to make the second parent’s experience worse until they pay. Look for a model where the price is attached to features, not to people, and where a co-parent can say no to paying without losing access to their own child’s schedule.
Where Homedays stands
We built Homedays around these questions rather than answering them afterwards, and the privacy page goes through each in detail. If you are weighing it against the incumbents, the comparisons ask the same five questions of each. The AI only ever sees placeholders, never a child’s or adult’s real name. Names, message bodies, notes, briefs and documents are encrypted at rest. Access is per person and per child. Export is one tap. Your co-parent and everyone you invite is free, and paid tiers gate features, never people.
Ask the five questions of any app you are considering, including ours. The answers should be quick.