What Cairn does with what you write

Only the people in that circle, and only as much as their role allows. A circle is invite-only. There’s no way to browse, search, or stumble into one, and no public page anywhere shows what’s in a circle.

The four roles see different amounts on purpose. A helper — the neighbour who drives to appointments — gets what they need to turn up and help safely: the address, how to get in, who to call. No medical detail at all. An observer — kept in the loop, not given the keys — gets no address and no door code.

That’s enforced in the database itself, not just hidden in the screens, and there are a few hundred automated tests whose whole job is trying to get around it.

The evening summary goes out by email, through a mail provider (Resend). That email has what the circle wrote that day in it, so it’s worth knowing it lands in a regular inbox like any other message.

Nothing is sold, nothing goes to advertisers, and there’s no analytics company watching what you do in here. Cairn doesn’t sell data. That’s not the business.

Photos live in private storage. They’re never public. Every time a photo is shown, Cairn hands out a link that works for about ten minutes and then stops. Copy that link and send it to someone outside the circle and they get an error, not the picture.

Anyone removed from a circle, or who leaves on their own, loses access right away — the app, the evening email, all of it.

What they wrote stays, with their name on it. That’s on purpose, and it’s the one choice here you might disagree with. A family’s record of who took care of someone shouldn’t end up with holes in it because one person fell out with everybody else. The same is true if you delete your account: your name, photo, email and phone come off Cairn entirely, and what you wrote remains, shown as “Former member.”

Whoever creates a circle has to confirm they have the standing to share that person’s information — because the person being cared for often cannot be asked, and somebody has to be accountable for that. Cairn can’t verify that. What it can do is make sure a real person answered the question.

Every screen in Cairn is written as though the person it is about may read it one day, which is a deliberate constraint on the whole product.

Cairn is not covered by HIPAA. HIPAA binds hospitals, insurers and the companies working on their behalf — a daughter writing “Mom seemed confused this morning” is none of those. Anyone telling you a family app is “HIPAA compliant” is usually selling you something.

That is not the same as no rules applying. Health apps outside HIPAA are covered by the FTC’s Health Breach Notification Rule, which means that if this is ever breached, you get told — by name, promptly, and not in a footnote.

The application is hosted on Vercel, the database on Supabase, and email is sent through Resend — all in the United States. Backups are held by the database provider.

Cairn is new. A few families are using it, and it’s free. Keep anything you can’t afford to lose somewhere else too — not because I expect something to go wrong, but because that’s the honest advice about anything this new holding something this important.

Email fructifyme@gmail.com and a person — me — will answer. If you want everything about a circle deleted instead of archived, just say so and I’ll do it.