Tidy Privacy Policy: The "No-Nonsense" Edition

Most privacy policies are written by lawyers to protect companies. This one is written by parents to protect families — and it is written to describe exactly what our software actually does, not what sounds nice. Here is the deal: we built Tidy because we were tired of Big Tech treating our personal lives like a product to be sold. Your data belongs to you. This page explains precisely how we handle it.

Last updated: July 6, 2026.

The Philosophy

We built this tool to help you manage the chaos — the rotational brownie schedules, the bus-driver gifts, the subscription renewals, and the endless stream of school emails.

To do that, our system has to read that stuff. Tidy digests your emails, notes, files, calendar, and contacts and turns that noise into structured, useful sanity — events, tasks, reminders, and search. This means our systems do process the content of your data to deliver the features you asked for. We are honest about that because pretending otherwise would be a lie you could catch us in.

What we don't do is turn that processing into a product about you. We are not building a map of your desires to manipulate you, and we are not selling your family's data to advertisers.

The "Absolutely Not" List

We are incredibly strict about what we don't do. For clarity:

• No Selling: We do not sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
• No Training on Your Content — By Us: We do not use the content of your emails, notes, files, calendar, or contacts to train AI models. Full stop.
• No Training on Your Content — By Our AI Providers: When Tidy sends data to an external AI provider (see the list below), we require them to process it on a zero-retention, no-training basis — they run the request and forget it, and they may not use your content to improve their models.
• No Advertising Use of Google Data: Data obtained from Google APIs (like Gmail) is used only to provide and improve the Tidy features you asked for. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not transfer it to others except as needed to run those features (our sub-processors below) or where you direct us to. Our use complies with the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
• No "Aggregated" Sneakiness: A lot of companies say they don't sell your data, but then they strip your name off it and sell the "aggregate" patterns. We don't do that. It's gross. We don't want it.
• No Third-Party Tracking: To help features like your inbox defenses and your personal insights understand which messages you actually engage with, Tidy records first-party interaction signals — such as which emails you opened and roughly how long you spent reading (in coarse buckets like "under 30 seconds", never precise timings). These signals are private to you, stay inside Tidy, and are never sent to any third-party analytics service. They are the opposite of the sender tracking pixels Tidy blocks on your behalf, and they feed only your own features.

How the AI Actually Works

Tidy's intelligence — extracting events and tasks, summarizing, search — runs on a mix of AI models. Being straight with you about where your content goes matters more than a marketing slogan:

• Most processing runs on our own hardware. Our primary language model is self-hosted on infrastructure we control. Your content is processed there without leaving our environment.
• Some processing uses trusted external AI providers. For certain tasks — and as a fallback when our own models are unavailable — Tidy sends the relevant data to a small, fixed list of external AI sub-processors. They are contractually bound to zero-retention, no-training terms. They are:

This is our current sub-processor list. If it changes, we update this page. None of these providers is permitted to retain your content after the request or to train on it.

How We Protect It

• Encrypted in Transit: Every connection between your device and Tidy, and between Tidy and its providers, is encrypted with TLS. Nothing travels the open internet in the clear.
• Encrypted at Rest: Sensitive data on our servers — including email bodies and connected-account credentials — is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM with keys derived per customer. If someone stole a disk or got hold of a raw database dump, they would get ciphertext, not your mail. Our own systems hold the keys and decrypt your data to run the features you asked for; we are being precise here rather than claiming a zero-knowledge system we don't have.
• End-to-End Encryption — For Chat: Tidy's real-time messaging is end-to-end encrypted using the Matrix protocol: only the participants' devices can read those messages, and we cannot. This end-to-end guarantee applies specifically to chat. It does not apply to email, notes, calendar, or files, because those features require our systems to process the content to work.
• Offline Search Stays on Your Device: Tidy syncs a copy of your data to your device so it loads instantly and works offline. Keyword search over that local copy runs entirely on your device, with no server round-trip. Your device's copy is protected by your operating system's storage encryption and the browser's security sandbox.
• Lost a Device? Cut It Off. You can revoke a device from your account at any time. Once revoked, it stops syncing and clears its local copy of your data the next time it connects.
• Tenant Isolation: Every request is scoped to your account, and cross-account access is blocked at the data layer. Your household's data and another household's data never mingle.

The Two Times We See Anything

Beyond the automated processing described above, there are only two scenarios where a Tidy human is involved with your account:

1. The "Is the Engine Running?" Metrics: We collect operational stats on system performance — whether the server is up, whether processing is fast, whether a service crashed. These are about the health of the machine, not the content of what you were processing.
2. The "Help Me" Button: If you get stuck and ask for support, our staff access your data only to the extent needed to resolve your issue. This access is logged.

Deleting Your Data

When you delete your account, we remove your data from our live systems — the database, search indexes, file storage — and revoke Tidy's access to any accounts you connected (like Gmail). Encrypted backups, which exist so we can recover from a disaster, are retained on a rolling schedule and age out; they are never used to repopulate a deleted account.

The Bottom Line

We are parents too. We want to use the best AI to manage our households, but we want to sleep at night knowing our privacy is respected — and we want you to be able to verify every claim on this page against what the product actually does. Tidy is the tool we built for ourselves, and this policy is the promise we make to you.