CubCompass Privacy Policy

Last updated: November 2026

Overview

CubCompass is a family safety app built by Derek Lund (Less Than Latte). It shares location and safety alerts between the members of one family. Your family's data is stored in Apple iCloud, under the family organizer's Apple account, and is visible only to the family members that organizer invites. We do not have access to it, we do not sell it, and CubCompass contains no advertising, analytics, or tracking.

What CubCompass Stores

All of the following is stored on your family's devices and in the family's private iCloud storage — not on our servers:

• Location: each member's current location and location history, used to show the family map, detect arrivals and departures, learn regular routes, and raise late or offline alerts. History older than the retention period you choose in Settings is deleted automatically.
• Places and schedules: home, school, and other zones you define, and school or activity schedules.
• Family profiles: names, roles (parent or child), optional photo, and optional phone number.
• Messages: family chat messages and check-ins.
• Motion: motion and fitness activity is read on the device to detect hard impacts or sudden stops. It is not stored as a history.
• Device status: battery level and whether a device is reachable.

Live Listen and Audio

Live Listen lets a parent hear the surroundings of a child's device.

• Audio travels directly between the two family devices over an encrypted peer-to-peer connection. It does not pass through our server and we cannot hear it.
• The child's device shows an incoming-call screen when a session starts.
• During a session the device can listen for distress words such as "help" using Apple's speech recognition.
• Recordings, if you choose to save them, are stored on the parent's device only. You can delete them in Settings > Recordings.

What Reaches Our Server

CubCompass uses one small relay server (cubcompass-signaling.lessthanlatte.com, hosted on Cloudflare) for two things:

• Connecting a Live Listen session: the two devices exchange short technical connection messages through the relay so they can find each other. These are passed along and not stored.
• Ringing a family device for Live Listen or a panic alert: the relay forwards a request to Apple's push notification service using the target device's push token.

The relay does not receive names, locations, messages, or audio, and it keeps no database of families or users. Like any web server, it sees the IP address of each request; we do not use it to identify anyone.

Third-Party Services

• Apple iCloud (CloudKit): stores and syncs your family's data and delivers sharing invitations.
• Apple Push Notification service: delivers alerts and incoming Live Listen calls.
• Apple Maps: draws the map.
• Open-Meteo (weather): the approximate coordinates of a trip are sent to api.open-meteo.com to estimate weather delays. No account or identifier is sent.
• Home Assistant (optional): if you connect a smart home, CubCompass talks to YOUR Home Assistant server at the address you enter.
• Apple App Store: handles subscription purchases. We never see your payment details.

Children's Privacy

CubCompass is designed for families, and children use it as members of a family that a parent or guardian sets up and controls.

• A child's profile and location are created by, and shared only with, the family members the parent invites.
• We do not collect personal information from children on our servers, we do not show children advertising, and children cannot make contact with anyone outside their family through the app.
• A parent can review, export, or delete a child's information at any time from the parent's device, or remove the child from the family.

If you believe a child's information has been handled in a way this policy does not describe, contact us and we will help.

Permissions

• Location (Always): required so the family can see where a member is when the app is in the background.
• Microphone and Speech Recognition: used only during Live Listen.
• Motion & Fitness: impact and sudden-stop detection.
• Photos and Camera: only to choose or take a profile photo.
• Notifications: arrival, late, offline, and panic alerts.

Each can be turned off in iOS Settings; the related feature stops working.

Your Choices

• Retention: choose how long location history is kept in Settings > Data.
• Leave or delete: a member can leave the family in Settings, and the organizer can remove members. Deleting the app removes local data; to remove synced data, use iOS Settings > [your name] > iCloud > Manage Account Storage > CubCompass.
• Pause sharing: tracking can be paused in Settings; quiet hours silence alerts.

Changes

We may update this policy as features are added. The current version is always available in the app and at lessthanlatte.com/cubcompass/privacy.

Contact

Questions? Contact Derek Lund at support@lessthanlatte.com