Privacy policy

Who we are

Circled is published by Aureus Equity Ltd. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, Aureus Equity Ltd is the data controller. In practice there is very little for a controller to do here, because the app sends us nothing to control.

Privacy questions go to support@aureusequity.co.uk. A postal address for written correspondence is not published on this page yet. Ask at that address and we will give you one.

What we collect

Nothing. Circled contains no analytics framework, no crash reporting service, no advertising identifier and no third-party SDK of any kind. Nothing about how you use the app is measured, and nothing is sold or shared, because none of it is gathered in the first place.

The app carries a privacy manifest, compiled into the binary and read by Apple, which declares no collected data types and no tracking. The widget extension declares the same. Those declarations are signed, and they are accurate.

There are no accounts, so there is no username, no password and no email address of yours for us to hold. You never tell us who you are.

Where your appointments live

Appointments, the people in your Circle, what to bring, and everything else you type are stored in a database on your iPhone.

If you are signed in to iCloud, that database is also mirrored into your own private iCloud database inside your Apple Account, using Apple's CloudKit. It sits in your storage, under your account. We hold no key to it and have no way to reach it. Apple's terms and Apple's privacy policy govern that copy, not ours.

If you are not signed in to iCloud, Circled works as it otherwise does, on the device alone, and no copy leaves it. Circles are the one part that needs iCloud, for the reason below.

Circles and iCloud sharing

A Circle is a CloudKit share: one shared area inside iCloud that your Apple Account owns and that the people you invite are admitted to. It is not a group on a server of ours, because there is no server of ours. Nothing about a Circle passes through us at any point.

When you invite somebody, iOS presents Apple's own sharing controller, and the invitation travels by whichever route you pick, Messages or Mail or anything else. We do not see the invitation, the recipient, or the fact that you sent one.

You decide what goes into that shared area, and the starting position is that new appointments do. Settings carries one switch, New appointments visible to your Circle, which is on when you install the app; turn it off and everything you add afterwards is private until you say otherwise. Each appointment also has a switch of its own, so you can share this one and keep that one back.

Anything marked private is kept out of the shared area entirely, and nobody in your Circle can read it. Marking a shared appointment private takes it back out of the shared area rather than merely hiding it on your screen, because an appointment that has vanished from your list while its record sits on in the household's share is the worst of both. Remove somebody from your Circle, or leave a Circle you joined, and access to that shared area ends.

Location

Circled asks for your location only once an appointment has a place to be, and only ever While Using the App. It is used for two things: working out how long the journey will take in current traffic, so the leave-now alert is honest, and searching for a place when you pick one.

Your location is never sent to us. There is nowhere to send it and no way for us to receive it. The app does not store it, does not write it to a log, and does not keep it once the estimate is worked out.

The route itself is calculated by Apple Maps, which is part of iOS. That request is handled by Apple under Apple's privacy policy, and nothing comes back to us from it. Refuse location and Circled says it does not know the journey rather than inventing one.

Microphone and dictation

If you say an appointment instead of typing it, Circled listens only while the dictation screen is open and stops when you leave it. The transcription is performed on your iPhone by Apple's on-device speech recognition.

No recording is saved and no audio is sent to us. You see what it read before anything is stored.

Calendar

Writing a copy of your appointments into Apple Calendar is optional and stays off until you switch it on. If you grant access, Circled creates a calendar of its own and writes a copy of each appointment into that calendar, keeping the copy correct when something moves.

iOS grants calendar access as a single permission covering your whole diary. Circled only ever reads and writes the calendar it created. The rest of your diary is not read, not indexed and not touched.

The copy goes one way. Circled stays the original, and edits made in Apple Calendar do not come back. Switch it off and Circled offers to take the events it wrote back out.

Alerts, widgets and the Live Activity

Reminders and leave-now alerts are scheduled locally on your iPhone and fire from it. We operate no push notification server, so nothing about your appointments has to reach us, or anybody else, in order for an alert to go off. Aeroplane mode does not stop them.

Circled does register for remote notifications, and its entitlements declare push, so it is fair to ask what for. It is the iCloud sync and nothing else: when the data Apple mirrors for you changes, either on another of your own devices or in a Circle you are part of, iCloud sends the app a silent push telling it to go and read the change. Those pushes come from Apple, carry nothing to display and nothing about the appointment itself, and are never sent by us, because we have nothing to send them from. Without them a household member's edit would only appear the next time you happened to open the app.

The widgets and the Live Activity read a small snapshot of what is next, written into a container shared only by Circled and its own extensions on the same device. The countdown ring is driven by the device too, so no update to it is sent or received over the network.

Payments

Circled+ is sold through Apple's In-App Purchase, and Apple is the merchant of record. We never see your card, your billing address, your Apple Account or your name.

Whether you have Circled+ is read from Apple's own record of the purchase, on the device. Apple gives us sales reports, which are counts of purchases and identify nobody.

Children

Circled is a general audience app and is not directed at children. It collects nothing from anybody of any age, so there is no children's data for us to hold, share or delete.

This website

This site sets no cookies, runs no analytics, and carries no tracking pixels or embedded third-party scripts. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

Like any website it is served by a host, which may keep ordinary, short-lived access logs in order to serve pages and keep them up. We do not use those logs to identify anybody and we do not combine them with anything else.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to be informed, to access your data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, and to portability. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office.

Write to us about any of them and the honest answer will almost always be that we hold nothing to give you, correct or delete. The rights that actually bite are exercised on your own iPhone, and Circled is built so that you can:

• Take everything with you. Settings, then Export everything, which produces a calendar file and a full backup.
• Delete everything. Settings, then Delete all appointments. Deleting the app removes the copy on the device.
• Remove the iCloud copy. In the Settings app, open your Apple Account, then iCloud, then manage your storage, and remove Circled's data there.

The Information Commissioner's Office can be reached at ico.org.uk (opens in a new tab). We would rather you wrote to us first, but you do not have to.

Data leaving the UK

We transfer your data nowhere, because we never receive it. Where iCloud physically keeps your own copy is a matter between you and Apple, governed by Apple's terms.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the effective date at the top changes with it and the change is described plainly here. We will not quietly start collecting something and reword this page later. Collecting nothing is a decision made in the app, not a setting on a server that could be flipped one evening.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or about anything on this page, go to support@aureusequity.co.uk. We aim to reply within two working days.

If your question is about using the app rather than about privacy, the support page is likely to answer it faster.