Pickup Circle privacy notice
Effective 17 September 2026.
What this is
Pickup Circle is a small app operated by Thomas Collective, LLC, a one-person company, for a handful of families who already know each other. It helps a parent who is already driving to a school or activity pickup say so, and lets other parents in the same invite-only circle ask them to bring their child too. This notice says what the app keeps about you and your children, who can see it, and how to get it removed. If anything here is unclear, write to support@pickupcircle.app and a person will answer.
What you give us
About you. Your mobile number, which is how you sign in. Your first name, so other parents know who is posting. Optionally a photo of yourself, a description of your car so a parent at the curb can spot it, an email address for account recovery, and up to two backup adults (a name and a number) a driver can call if they cannot reach you. If you set up a passkey, the app keeps the public half of it; the private half never leaves your phone.
About your children. A first name, and optionally a photo, whether they need a booster seat, a medical note a driver should know, and an emergency contact. For each circle a child is in, a pickup card: the usual release time, the usual spot, and any extra lines you write for a driver (a teacher's name, a gate, a rule). We never ask for a child's surname, date of birth, school records or home address, and the database has no place to put an address.
About your circle. The circle's name, its members, and one meeting spot the circle's owner chose on a map, which may be a gate, a curb or a car park but is never a home.
About rides. Who offered to drive on which day, who asked, who accepted, and a record of the rides that happened, so the app can show who has driven for whom.
How it is kept
Everything that identifies you or your child is encrypted before it reaches the database: children's names, photos, medical notes and emergency contacts, and your own name, email address and the description of your car, are all unreadable without a key that lives in a separate key service, not in the database. The pickup card's working details, the usual release time, the usual spot and the extra lines you write, are stored as ordinary text on purpose, because every member of the circle is meant to read them at a curb; the app refuses an address in them. Your mobile number is encrypted the same way, and the only copy the app can search is a one-way fingerprint of it. Every photo, yours or a child's, is decoded and re-encoded before it is stored, which strips the location, camera and date details a phone writes into pictures, and then encrypted like everything else — the file on our disk is not a picture and cannot be opened as one. Photos have no public link; they are served only to a signed-in parent the app has decided may see them.
Sign-in sessions expire on their own. The app writes no addresses, phone numbers or children's names into its logs.
Who can see what
Only people in your circle see anything, and only what the app needs to show them. Members of a circle see each other's first names and photos, the posts and asks for that circle, and the first names of the children on an ask. Any member of a circle can open a child's pickup card in that circle: first name, photo, whether a booster is needed, the emergency contact and the card's lines. That is what lets a parent at the curb do the pickup. The medical note is not on the card and is read only by the child's own household today. If a parent cannot reach the driver of a ride their child is on, the app may send that parent the driver's first name and number, since a child stuck at a curb matters more than a phone number.
Nobody outside your circle can look you up. There is no public profile, no directory and no search across circles.
Notifications
The app sends notifications through your phone's own push service (Apple, Google or Mozilla, depending on the device). A notification on your lock screen says how many children an ask is for, the times and whether a booster is needed; it never carries a child's name or a photo. The app asks your permission once before sending any.
Sign-in codes, and who else touches your data
Signing in sends a one-time code to your mobile number by text message through Twilio. The app runs on servers hosted by Render in the United States, and the keys that protect children's data are held by Amazon Web Services. When you place a circle's meeting spot the app can use your phone's location if you tap the button that asks for it, once, and does not store where you were. That is the whole list. We do not run advertising or analytics trackers, we do not sell or share your data with anyone, and nobody but the one person behind Thomas Collective, LLC can reach the database.
Children
Children do not use Pickup Circle. Parents and guardians enter their own children's details, and only a parent in the child's household can add, change or delete them. If you believe a child's details have been entered by someone without the right to, write to support@pickupcircle.app and they will be removed.
Keeping and deleting
Your data stays while your account does. Deleting a child removes them from every circle and every card immediately, and the photo file is scrubbed from storage within thirty days by a job that runs on its own. Removing your own photo works the same way. Leaving a circle removes you and your children from it at once. Ride history stays with your account so both parents can see it. To delete your whole account during the pilot, write to support@pickupcircle.app and it is done by hand within a week, with the same thirty-day scrub for photos. (A delete-account button replaces this line when it ships.)
Drivers are other parents
Drivers in a circle are other parents. They are not vetted, employed or insured by Pickup Circle. You choose who joins your circle and you choose who drives your child, and the app shows you this the first time you ask for a ride.
If you cannot reach a driver
If nobody has confirmed picking up your child, the app sends you an alert carrying the driver's first name and phone number, so you can call them even when the app itself will not load on a crowded car park's signal. Call the driver first: they are the person standing where your child is. If you cannot reach them, call or text the pilot contact number you were given when you joined. During the pilot a person, not a system, is watching every pickup. Anything that is not urgent goes to support@pickupcircle.app, and a person answers.
Changes and contact
This notice will change as the app does, and the date at the top moves when it does; anything that changes what is collected or who sees it will be sent to every member of every circle before it takes effect. Questions, corrections, copies of your data and deletion requests all go to support@pickupcircle.app.