Little Guardian Privacy Policy
Last updated: 21 September 2026
Little Guardian helps a parent or guardian keep the information that matters in an emergency ready in one place, and get it to the right people quickly if a child goes missing. That means the app holds some of the most sensitive information a family has: photographs of a child, a description of them, and location data. This page explains exactly what is collected, why, who it can reach, and what control you have.
Who is responsible for your information
Little Guardian is operated by LittleGuardian (Pty) Ltd, of
6 Kensal Road, Sunningdale, Western Cape, 7441, South Africa. For any question about
this policy, or to make any of the requests described under Your choices and rights,
contact info@invelopsoftware.com.
Your consent and the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA)
Little Guardian processes personal information, including a child's location, in line with South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA). You cannot create an account without ticking the box that says you agree to this Privacy Policy and to Little Guardian storing your family's location data. We record that you agreed, and when, against your account. You can withdraw that consent at any time by deleting your account, as described under Your choices and rights.
In plain terms: a child's location can be seen by the guardians on the account, and by the emergency contacts you nominated when an alert is sent to them, whether you raised it or it was raised automatically because a paired tracker left a safe zone. The alert message, which includes the location or a map link, stays in their app, SMS or email after the alert ends. Device position history is deleted automatically after 90 days. If your family is registered through a safety organisation, that organisation's staff have the access described under Who your information can reach.
What the app collects, and why
Information about you, the parent or guardian
| What | Why it is collected |
|---|---|
| Your name, surname, email address and phone number | To create and identify your account, and so the app can email you a child's details in an emergency. A phone number is required rather than optional: a guardian who cannot be reached is the one case the service exists to avoid. |
| Your home address | Entered when you create your account and held on your account record. It is not sent to your emergency contacts or to responders: an alert carries the address of where the incident is, worked out from your position at the time, not where you live. |
| Your password, stored only as a cryptographic hash | To sign you in. The password itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from what is stored. |
| Your home location, if you choose to set one | Only to power the leave-home reminder described below. Setting a home is optional. |
Information about your child
| What | Why it is collected |
|---|---|
| Their name and surname, date of birth, and a description of what they are wearing | These are the details a search is run on. They are what you would otherwise be trying to recall under pressure. |
| Photographs: a face photograph, a full-length photograph, and photographs of identifying marks | A recent, clear photograph is the single most useful thing to hand to anyone searching. |
| Emergency contacts you nominate: their name, phone number, email address and relationship to the child | So they can be contacted immediately if you raise an alert. |
| Emergency information you choose to add: a free-text note about allergies, medical conditions, medication or anything else a responder might need to know | So it is saved in one place, for you to read out or share with responders yourself if you ever need to. It is not sent to anyone automatically. |
You choose what to enter. The app works with less, and a profile with no photographs is simply a less useful profile in an emergency.
Emergency information is treated differently from everything else on this page. Health information about a child is special personal information under South African law, so it is optional, it is never asked for again if you leave it blank, and you can clear it at any time. It is encrypted before it is stored, which means it is not readable in our database the way the rest of a child's profile is. Only you, and any other guardian you have added for that child, can open it to read or change it. Our own staff and dispatchers cannot read it, and every time it is read or changed is written to the account's activity record.
Location information
Little Guardian uses your device's location for three purposes, and no others:
- The leave-home reminder. If you turn this on, the app watches in the background for you leaving the home location you set, and reminds you to photograph your child. This is why the app asks for background ("Always") location permission. It is optional and off unless you enable it.
- Sharing your position when you press SOS. Raising an alert attaches where you are, so the people responding know where to go. This uses foreground location only, taken at the moment you press it.
- Saving a place you tag. When you use "Tag Location" on the dashboard, the app saves where you are so you can find it again: the coordinates, the street address worked out from them, and the name you type for the place. This one is entirely up to you and happens only when you tap it. Unlike the two above, a tagged place is kept until you ask for it to be removed; see How long information is kept.
The app itself collects location only from the phone it is running on, which is the parent's or guardian's phone. The app is not a device worn by a child and it does not track a child's own phone.
If a separate tracking device is paired to your account, that is different and you should know how it differs. A paired device reports its own position to us continuously, those positions are stored on our servers, and they are what safe-zone checks run against. That history is covered by the automatic deletion schedule described under How long information is kept. This applies only if you have such a device; nothing about the app on your phone does this.
Technical information
| What | Why it is collected |
|---|---|
| A push notification token for your device, and whether it is an iOS or Android device | So alerts and reminders can reach your phone. It is stored against your account rather than on its own, because that is how an alert for your family is routed to the right handset, so treat it as identifying you and not merely the device. |
| A record of significant actions taken in the account | A security and accountability record, so it is possible to establish afterwards who changed or accessed what. |
Little Guardian does not use advertising identifiers, does not run third-party analytics or advertising software in the app, and does not sell or share personal information for advertising.
Who your information can reach
Your family's information is not published, sold, or shared for marketing. It leaves the service in only the following circumstances.
When you raise an alert
- Your nominated emergency contacts receive a message by SMS and email containing the child's name, their photograph, the incident location, and anything you added. This is the point of the feature, and it is the most significant disclosure the app makes. It happens only when you raise an alert.
- An email is sent to you containing the child's full profile and photographs, so you have everything in one message to forward to police or a search party.
- A short audio clip, about ten seconds long, is captured on your phone when you press the SOS button, so whoever reviews the alert has some context about what was happening at that moment. This only happens if you have turned it on in Settings, and it never delays or changes anything else about raising the alert. If captured, the clip is attached to your own dossier email above (or sent to you separately if it finishes after that email has already gone) and, if your account belongs to a safety organisation, is made available to that organisation's staff reviewing the incident on their console. It is not sent to your emergency contacts or to security partners.
- Security partners associated with your organisation, where your account belongs to one, are notified so responders near the incident can act. They receive the incident's location, its type and severity, a timestamp, and internal reference numbers. They are not sent the child's name, photographs, or the audio clip.
If your family is registered through a safety organisation
Some parents sign up directly; others are added under a safety organisation that supervises several families, such as a school or a community safety programme. If your account belongs to one, that organisation's own staff, not just the automated notification described above, can view your child's full profile, including their date of birth, clothing description and photographs, and the details of any incident you raise. This access is ongoing for as long as your account is linked to the organisation, not limited to the moments an alert is active. Your emergency contacts' phone numbers and email addresses are withheld from that view. If you are not sure whether your account is linked to an organisation, ask us at the address above.
Service providers
Little Guardian uses these providers strictly to deliver the service, and each receives only what that job needs:
- Twilio, to send SMS alerts to your emergency contacts.
- Resend, to send email alerts and the emergency dossier.
- Expo, to deliver push notifications to your device.
- Google Maps, to display maps in the app.
- OpenStreetMap, to display map tiles behind a position in the dispatcher console and on the public alert page an emergency contact opens from a text or email during a live alert. Showing a position causes your device to request the map imagery covering that area directly from OpenStreetMap's servers, which reveals the general area shown, though not the exact coordinate, to that provider.
- Google Places, to suggest matching addresses as you type your home address, and to look up the full address and coordinates when you select one of those suggestions. What you have typed, and the suggestion you selected, are sent to Google for these purposes; we do not log or store either ourselves beyond the address you finally save to your account.
- Cloud hosting and database providers, which store the information described above.
Legal requests
Information may be disclosed where required by law, or where it is necessary to protect the safety of a child.
How long information is kept
Account information, children's profiles, photographs and emergency contacts are kept for as long as your account is open.
Removing a child's profile in the app hides it rather than erasing it. The profile stops appearing on your own screens, but the record and its photographs are retained, because a profile can be attached to an incident history that has to remain intelligible afterwards. For that reason a removed child's name still appears to authorised responders when they look at an incident that child was involved in. If you want a child's details and photographs actually erased, ask us using the address above and we will do it.
The leave-home reminder's position history stays on your phone. While the reminder is on, the app keeps a short rolling list of recent positions in the app's own storage on the device, and it keeps only the most recent hundred: each new one pushes out the oldest. Those positions are not uploaded to us, so there is no server-side trail of your movements to delete. Deleting the app, or signing out, removes them with it.
The location we hold on our servers is: the position attached to an alert you raised, any place you saved with Tag Location, and, if you have a paired tracking device, that device's position history.
A paired device's position history is deleted automatically after 90 days. A job runs every day and removes anything older, so that trail does not build up for as long as the account exists.
The internal record of account activity is aged out automatically after 365 days, because it is what makes it possible to establish afterwards who accessed or changed what.
Deleting your account removes this record immediately, rather than leaving it to age out on that schedule.
Places you tag are not on that schedule. A location you save with "Tag Location" is kept until you ask for it to be removed, because it is something you chose to keep rather than a by-product of the reminder running. Contact us at the address above and we will delete it.
How information is protected
- Traffic between the app and the service is encrypted in transit.
- Passwords are stored only as bcrypt hashes, never as readable text.
- Every request for a child's record is checked against the account that owns it, so one family's information is not reachable by another.
- Photographs are kept in private storage that is never public, and are opened only through links that expire: an hour when you view your child's profile, and up to 7 days for the link sent to your emergency contacts in an alert. Your emergency contacts receive only the face and full-length photographs (never photographs of identifying marks), and you receive all of them, only when an alert is raised. The alert email sent to you (the parent) also carries as attachments the photographs that fit within the email size limit (any that are too large or cannot be read are left out and the email says so), which you may forward; those copies are ordinary email attachments, so they do not expire and stay in that email until it is deleted. The app does not write them to the phone's own storage.
- Administrator sessions are re-checked against the account record on every request, so removing an administrator's access takes effect immediately rather than when their session eventually expires.
No system is perfectly secure, and this page does not claim otherwise.
Children's information
Little Guardian is designed to be used by a parent or legal guardian, and is not intended for use by children. Information about a child is entered by the adult responsible for them, who decides what to provide and can delete it at any time. The app does not create accounts for children, does not let a child sign in, and does not collect information directly from a child.
Your choices and rights
- Location permission can be refused or withdrawn at any time in your phone's settings. Three things then stop working, and the second one matters most: the leave-home reminder, SOS, and Tag Location. Raising an alert needs your position in order to tell anyone where to go, so without location permission the SOS button will not send and will tell you to call emergency services directly instead. Everything else in the app keeps working. If you turn location off, know that you are turning off the emergency alert with it.
- The leave-home reminder can be switched off in the app without changing any phone permission.
- Notifications can be turned off in your phone's settings.
- Access, correction and deletion. You can view and edit everything in your account from within the app, remove a child's profile (see How long information is kept for what that does), and delete an emergency contact. Individual photographs cannot be deleted from within the app today: a face or full-length photograph is replaced when you take a new one, and a photograph of an identifying mark cannot be removed at all. Removing the child's profile does not remove it either, because removing a profile hides it rather than erasing it; the photographs stay with the hidden profile until we act on an erasure request. To have specific photographs erased, or to request a copy of everything held about your family, contact us at the address above. To delete your account and everything in it, use Settings > Delete Account in the app; if you no longer have the app installed, use portal.littleguardian.co.za/delete-account.html instead.
Deleting your account removes your profile, your children, their photographs, your emergency contacts, your safe zones, your saved places, your location history, and the internal record of your account's own activity described above, rather than leaving that record to age out on the schedule above.
Depending on where you live, you may have further rights under data protection law, including the right to object to or restrict certain processing, and the right to complain to your national data protection authority.
Where information is processed
Information is stored and processed on cloud infrastructure that may be located outside your country. Where information is transferred across borders, it remains protected by this policy and by the terms agreed with the providers listed above.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who it reaches, the date at the top of this page will change and, where the change is significant, you will be told in the app.
Contact
Questions, requests, or complaints about this policy:
info@invelopsoftware.com.
This policy is governed by the laws of South Africa.