BugNetDRAFT — pending legal reviewThis is a plain-language draft so you can see our intentions. It is not final and is not legal advice. Parts marked “to be confirmed” depend on questions we have put to a lawyer. The final policy will replace this page before BugNet’s public launch.
Privacy policy
Draft of November 2026 · Publisher: Apsinthion
The short version
- BugNet is a health journal for your household. Your logs sync to our server so you, other families and we can see what illness is going around, by 3-digit ZIP area.
- We never ask for your full ZIP code or your location. Family names, birth dates and photos stay on your phone.
- No tracking ad SDKs and no selling of data. This website has no trackers at all.
- Messages are end-to-end encrypted. We can’t read them.
What we keep, and where
| Information | Where it lives | Tied to you by |
|---|---|---|
| Health events: symptoms, temperatures, remedies and how they went, notes, illness episodes, weekly check-ins | Our server | A random household ID (and your email, if you add one) |
| For each family member: age band (0–4, 5–11, 12–17, 18–49, 50–64, 65+), sex, and your 3-digit ZIP | Our server | The same household ID |
| Family names, birth year and month, photos | Your phone only | Never sent |
| Email address (optional) | Our server, stored separately, with a record of your consent | Your account |
| Push-notification token, phone platform, app version | Our server | Household ID |
| Messages | Our server, encrypted so only the people in the conversation can read them | Not readable by us |
Names you tap in a note are replaced with a member token on your phone before the note is sent. The server works with tokens, never names.
How the information is used
- Your own journal and insights, on your phone and synced so you can restore them.
- Community trends: counts and rates by 3-digit ZIP, age band, sex and week, shown in the app and on the operator’s dashboard. Every figure shows how many households it is based on.
- “What helped”: the share of families who said an item helped, shown as shared experiences, never as medical advice.
- Area alerts and short questions (“Anyone sick this week?”) sent by push notification. You choose which alert levels you get, except the most serious.
- Keeping the service honest: rate limits and checks for fake or flooded reports before any area alert goes out.
Things you should know
- Small numbers are shown. We do not hide figures from small groups; we show the number of households behind them instead. In an area with few BugNet families, a figure can be based on very few households. How we describe this is to be confirmed with our lawyer.
- The operator can see the synced data (the household ID, age bands, sex, ZIP3 and health logs) to run the service and the community dashboard. The operator cannot see names, photos or messages.
- Children. Children don’t have accounts. Parents and guardians log information about their children. Any age requirement for account holders is to be confirmed.
What we don’t do
- No tracking advertising SDKs, no data brokers, no selling or renting your information.
- No analytics or tracking scripts on this website.
- BugNet doesn’t diagnose or prescribe treatment.
Your choices
- Export your data from the app at any time.
- Delete your account from the app. It stops being used right away, and synced data is erased after a short grace period during which you can change your mind. The exact period is to be confirmed.
- Email is optional and can be removed.
- Notifications can be turned off by level.
Specific rights under state consumer-health-data laws (for example in Washington, Nevada and Connecticut), and how to exercise them, are to be confirmed with our lawyer and will be listed here.
Security
The app is built to keep the journal on your phone in an encrypted database. Data in transit uses HTTPS. Our server runs on our own rented machine, not a big cloud platform, and access to the operator tools requires two-factor sign-in and is logged.
Requests from authorities, and breaches
Our approach to legal requests for data, and what we do and tell you if data is ever exposed, are to be confirmed with our lawyer.
Changes and contact
We’ll post changes here with a new date, and tell you in the app about significant ones. Questions: see Contact.