Privacy Notice

Marina Seppä (Business ID 2898679-9), Hiihtomäentie 31 A 4, 00800 Helsinki, Finland, trading as Birth Companion, is the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: marina.seppa@gmail.com.

What we collect and why

• Account data (email address, password hash, language) — to create and secure your account and to sign you in. Legal basis: performance of our contract with you.
• Profile and pregnancy data (name or nickname, estimated due date, pregnancy stage, previous birth experience, notes and mood check-ins you choose to enter) — to personalise your daily practice and week view. This can include health-related information; we process it based on your explicit consent, which you give by entering it and can withdraw at any time by deleting it or your account.
• Journal entries and saved practices — stored so we can show them back to you. Legal basis: performance of our contract.
• Usage data (pages and practices opened, device type, approximate technical logs including IP address) — to keep the service secure and to understand what to improve. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in a safe, working product.
• Support messages you send us — to answer you. Legal basis: legitimate interest and contract.
• Purchase records (plan, order reference, status, dates, amount) — to give you the access you paid for. Legal basis: performance of our contract. Card and payment details are collected and processed by Paddle as Merchant of Record, not by us; we never see your card number, billing address or tax details. Paddle issues the invoices and receipts and retains them under its own policies.

Who we share data with

• Paddle.com Market Ltd — our Merchant of Record, which handles the sale, subscription management, payments, tax compliance and invoicing.
• Service providers (processors) — hosting, database, authentication, email delivery and error monitoring providers acting on our instructions.
• Professional advisers — accounting and legal advisers where necessary.
• Authorities — where we are legally required to disclose information.

We do not sell your personal data and we do not use your journal entries for advertising.

International transfers

Your account, profile, journal entries and other in-app content are stored in a database hosted in the European Union (Ireland). Not all processing can be limited to the EU/EEA:

• The app is delivered through a global content delivery network (Cloudflare), so your web requests — including your IP address and technical log data — may be processed briefly at the network location closest to you, which can be outside the EU/EEA.
• Our Merchant of Record Paddle.com Market Ltd is established in the United Kingdom and uses its own sub-processors, which may operate outside the EU/EEA.
• Authentication emails (for example password resets) are sent through our platform's email service, which may process your email address outside the EU/EEA.

Where personal data is transferred outside the EU/EEA, we rely on a European Commission adequacy decision (for example for the United Kingdom) or on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses together with appropriate additional safeguards. Our newsletter runs on a separate platform (beehiiv); if you subscribe, you give your email address directly to that service and no data is transferred there from your Birth Companion account.

How long we keep data, and account deletion

We keep your account and content for as long as your account is active. You can ask us to delete your account at any time by writing to marina.seppa@gmail.com from the email address linked to your account.

When your account is deleted, your ordinary Birth Companion content is deleted from our database as part of that same deletion — it is not kept for any additional period afterwards. This covers your journal entries, personal notes, onboarding responses, mood and wellbeing check-ins, pregnancy and estimated due date information, personal preferences, usage events, and the subscription and purchase records held inside the app.

We cannot promise that every trace disappears instantly: encrypted database backups persist for our platform's backup window (normally up to about 30 days) and short-lived technical logs roll over automatically, after which they are overwritten. We do not use backups to restore a deleted account. An internal administration log may retain only an identifier and a membership-tier change, without your name or any of your content.

Legally required accounting records

Your Birth Companion journal entries, wellbeing check-ins, pregnancy information and other personal app content are not accounting records and are never retained on accounting grounds. Accounting records arise from the sale itself: because Paddle acts as Merchant of Record, Paddle collects the payment data and issues the invoices and receipts, and retains them under its own policies. The vouchers that reach our own bookkeeping — such as Paddle payout statements and receipts — are kept in our accounting records outside the app, in line with the Finnish Accounting Act:

• generally 6 years from the end of the financial year: purchase and sales invoices, receipts and other accounting vouchers, settlement data, bank statements and travel expense records, and correspondence relating to business transactions or statutory accounting records;
• generally 10 years from the end of the financial year: financial statements and annual reports, journals and general ledgers, balance sheet specifications and supporting specifications, and the chart of accounts and description of accounting methods.

These records contain personal data only to the extent that it forms part of a legally required accounting record — for example a name or email address appearing on an invoice. No other personal data is retained on this basis.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to access your data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to processing, to data portability, and to withdraw consent at any time (which does not affect processing already carried out). Write to marina.seppa@gmail.com and we will respond within one month. You may also lodge a complaint with the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman (tietosuoja.fi) or your local supervisory authority.

Security

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures: encryption in transit, encrypted storage, row-level database access rules so you can only reach your own data, access controls and least-privilege administration. No online service can be completely secure, but we treat pregnancy data as sensitive and design accordingly.

Cookies and local storage

We use only what the service needs to work: a session cookie or local storage entry to keep you signed in, and a stored preference for your language. We do not use advertising or third-party tracking cookies. Paddle may set cookies during checkout as described in its own privacy notice. You can clear these at any time in your browser settings; clearing them signs you out.

Children

Birth Companion is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 16.

Changes

If we update this notice, we will change the date above and inform you in the app or by email if the change is significant.