Privacy Policy

Earshot is used by childcare providers to record children’s days and share them with their families. That means it holds information about children, which deserves plainer language than a privacy policy usually gets. This page says what is collected, who else sees it, and what is never done with it.

Who holds what

Your childcare provider decides what is recorded about your child and who receives it. Earshot stores that information on their behalf and does not use it for anything else. If you are a parent and want something changed or deleted, ask your provider first — they control the record.

What Earshot records about a child

What the provider logs during the day:

• The child’s first name, or whatever short name the provider uses
• Arrival and departure times
• Meals, with what was served; naps; diaper changes and potty visits, with times
• Sleep checks, which California requires for infants every fifteen minutes, with the name of the staff member who did each one
• Medication given, and any incident the provider records
• Activities set out for the children, and notes the provider chooses to add
• Things the provider asks the family for, such as more diapers

Two settings per child say whether sleep checks apply and whether the child is under one. If the provider writes an incident report, the form asks for the child’s date of birth, sex, date of admission and primary language, because the state’s form does; those are kept on the child’s record for the next report. A provider can also store a link to a photo album that lives in another service.

When the provider speaks a sentence, the words as transcribed are kept alongside the entries they produced. One sentence often names several children, so a child’s entry may carry a transcript that mentions others. Parents never see transcripts; only the provider does.

There is no location tracking and no behavioural profiling of any kind.

Photographs

A provider can photograph a meal before it is served, or an activity laid out before the children come to it. Earshot stores that picture, attaches it to the entry, and includes it in the family’s update. Before the photo is kept, an AI model checks whether a person is in the frame; if one is, the photo is deleted and the provider is asked to take it again. Providers are asked to take these before any child is at the table or the activity. Earshot has no feature for photographing children and will not add one without changing this page first.

Photos in family emails are served from an address that works without signing in, because an email has no way to sign in. The address is unguessable, but anyone who has it can open the picture, and email programs keep their own copies.

In Messages, a provider and a parent can send each other pictures. Those are stored and can be opened only by the two people in that conversation. What is in them is up to whoever sends them.

Voice recordings

Providers log by speaking. While the record key is on, the audio is streamed to Deepgram, a transcription service, which turns it into text as it is spoken; if that live connection fails, the recording is sent to Deepgram once the key is released instead. The text is stored. Earshot does not keep the audio.

Where information goes

Earshot runs on other companies’ computers, as nearly every web service does. These are the ones that handle what the provider logs, and what each one sees:

• Deepgram — the spoken audio and the children’s first names, which are given to it so it recognises them.
• Anthropic — the day’s log entries for a child, the child’s first name and the program’s name, in order to file what was spoken and to write the summary that goes to that child’s parents; the provider’s own writing, if they have pasted some into Settings as a style to follow; and a meal or activity photograph, when one is taken, to name what is on the plate or set out to play with.
• Resend — sends the family emails, so it sees parents’ names and email addresses, the text of each update and the addresses of any photos in it.
• Cloudflare — stores the photos and message pictures.
• Railway — hosts Earshot and its database. Everything above lives there.
• Google — the typefaces on these pages load from Google Fonts, which means Google sees your device’s address and browser when a page opens. It sees nothing about any child.

Anthropic’s commercial terms do not permit it to train its models on content sent through its API. Deepgram offers a programme in which customers’ audio is used to improve its models; Earshot does not take part in it and sends nothing asking to be included. Nothing is sold, there is no advertising, and there is no analytics or tracking of any kind on any page of Earshot.

What parents receive

Parents get an email about their own child, and only their own child. Where a child has two parents on file, they receive one email together, addressed to both, so each can see who else was written to. Where two children have exactly the same parents on file, the family receives one email with a section for each child.

The text is drafted by an AI model from the provider’s log. By default nothing is sent until the provider has read the draft and chosen to send it. A provider can instead choose, in their settings, to have updates go out automatically at times they set, without reading each one first. That is the provider’s decision and it is off unless they turn it on; if you want to know which your provider uses, ask them.

The parent portal

Parents can, if they choose, create an account and see their own children’s entries for the day, check their child in or out, and message the provider. The portal shows the entries themselves, not the sleep-check record and not the provider’s spoken transcripts. The portal is optional; the emails work without it. An invitation to it is a link the provider gives to one family, and it binds whichever account accepts it to that child, so accept it only from your own account.

Accounts, passwords and cookies

Providers, and parents who use the portal, have an account with an email address and a password. Passwords are stored hashed with bcrypt, so nobody at Earshot can read them. Signing in sets one cookie that keeps you signed in for up to thirty days. Earshot stores three preferences on your own device — day or night screen, text size, and which staff member is on duty — and nothing else. There are no tracking cookies.

How long it is kept

Log entries stay until the provider deletes them or closes the account, because a childcare record is often something they are required to keep. A child marked inactive stops receiving updates immediately. Ask your provider to remove a record and they can.

A provider who deletes their account removes everything it holds: every child, every entry, attendance, sleep checks, incident reports, family links and the updates sent to them, messages, and the photos and message pictures in storage. A parent who deletes their portal account is disconnected from their children; the provider’s record of those children is theirs and stays. Emails already delivered stay in the inboxes they were sent to.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit, the database is not publicly reachable, sign-in attempts are rate limited, and deleting an account requires the password again. No system is perfectly secure, and anyone claiming otherwise is selling something — but the information here is treated as what it is: records about small children.

Children’s data and COPPA

Children never use Earshot. All information about a child is entered by their provider, under the arrangement the family has with that provider, and is shared only with that child’s own parents or guardians.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. Anything that would meaningfully alter what is collected or who sees it will be communicated rather than quietly edited in.

Contact

Parents should contact their childcare provider, who holds the record. Providers with a question about Earshot itself can reply to any email the app sends.

Terms of Service