Privacy Policy
Last updated: 23 October 2026
BranchBeat LLC, a California limited liability company (“BranchBeat”, “we”, “us”), is responsible for the personal information described here. This policy explains what BranchBeat collects, why, and what control you have over it. It covers both this website and the BranchBeat mobile app. If you only visit this website, we set no cookies and store nothing on your device. The site loads no fonts, scripts, or trackers from anyone else, so no third party learns you were here. Our web host records the usual server log — your IP address and browser — for every page served, which is unavoidable and used only to keep the site running. If you join the waitlist, we store your email address, the time you joined, and the fact that it came from this site. Everything else in this policy applies once you create an account in the app.
Information you give us
- Account details — email address, username, first and last name, date of birth, and a password (or a Google or Apple sign-in, in which case we receive your email, name and profile picture from them, never your password).
- Gender — you choose female, male, or prefer not to say, and you can change it at any time in Profile → Account. It is stored privately: it is never shown on your public profile, never visible to other people, never used for advertising, and never shared.
- Sign-in attempts that do not create an account — if you tap “Continue with Google” or “Continue with Apple” on the sign-in screen and no BranchBeat account exists for you, we do not create one. Google or Apple will have released your email, name and picture to us as part of that attempt; we keep none of it, and we ask Google to revoke the app’s access straight away. You can confirm or remove that access yourself at any time in your Google account under Third-party apps & services.
- Phone number — optional. We ask for one during setup so we can reach you about your account or help you recover it, and you can leave it blank. We do not send marketing texts, and we never show it to other users.
- Optional profile details — a profile photo, a short bio, and the instrument you play, if you choose to add them. All three appear on your public profile.
- Content you create — audio recordings, the notation transcribed from them, project and track names, posts, captions, comments, and direct messages. Also your follows, blocks, saved playlists and bookmarks, and your notification history.
- Audio you import — if you bring an existing audio file into a project, or upload one to correct a transcription, we handle it exactly as if you had recorded it here.
- Calibration samples — when you calibrate an instrument, the short recordings of the notes you play or sing, and the notes they were meant to be. See “How your recordings improve the AI” below, which is the section worth reading closely.
Information collected automatically
Basic technical data needed to run the service: device and operating system type, app version, IP address (used for rate limiting and abuse prevention, and when you sign up or sign in, to estimate your country and state for the age rules — see Location), and error logs. We record how much storage your cloud backups use and, on the free plan, how many minutes of AI refinement and file transcription you use each day (live transcription runs on your device and is not counted), your device’s time zone, so that the daily allowance resets at your midnight, and how many rewarded ads you have watched that day, so we can enforce plan limits.
We also record how long the app is open on your screen each day, so that you, and we, can see how BranchBeat is used. It is a daily total of time, not a record of what you did, and it is kept in your account. You can see your own totals in the app under Settings; BranchBeat staff can see them to understand and improve the service. They are never used for advertising and never shared with anyone else.
We also store, in your account, a copy of the encryption key used for your recordings, and a push notification token if you allow notifications. The key is explained under Security below.
How your recordings improve the AI
BranchBeat learns from calibration, and we want to be specific about what that means rather than hide it in a general clause.
Calibration trains the shared model. When you calibrate an instrument — the short setup that asks you to play or sing a few notes — those samples are uploaded to our servers and stored, together with the notes they were meant to be. We use them in two ways: to tune transcription to you, and, combined with calibration samples from other users, to train the shared model that serves everyone. The shared model is built from mathematical representations of the sound (audio embeddings) and note labels; your name and account are not part of it. We also keep the original audio of your calibration samples, privately, because we need it to rebuild those representations when we improve the model. It is never shown to other users. Calibration is optional: you can skip it, and the app still works using the shared model. If you are under 18, your calibration samples tune transcription to you only and are never used to train the shared model; samples recorded while you were under 18 stay out of it after you turn 18.
Your other recordings are not used for training. While the recording screen has the microphone open — from the moment it is ready, not only while you press Record — the sound it hears is sent to our servers as it happens, to detect notes live, and is not kept there. The recordings themselves stay on your device, encrypted, unless you post them or turn on cloud backup, in which case they are copied to private storage under your account. See Security below for who can decrypt them.
Review & Train, a correction tool used by BranchBeat’s own trainers, feeds the shared model in the same way.
Deleting your account removes your calibration samples and rebuilds the shared model without them. To remove them without deleting your account, email us and we will do the same.
How we use your information
- To provide the app: transcribing audio, saving projects, syncing backups.
- To operate social features: posts, follows, comments, and direct messages.
- To improve transcription accuracy, as described above.
- To keep the service safe: moderation, rate limiting, and abuse investigation.
- To apply the age rules and the protections for people under 18, including checking whether an account may belong to someone younger than they told us (see Children).
- To process subscriptions and enforce plan limits.
- To contact you about your account, or about the launch if you joined the waitlist.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not use your recordings or messages to target advertising.
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, the law requires us to name the legal ground for each of those uses, so here they are. Providing the app — transcription, saving projects, syncing backups, running your account — is performance of our contract with you: it is what you signed up for and we cannot do it otherwise. Keeping the service safe, and enforcing plan limits, rest on our legitimate interests in running a service that is not overrun by abuse; we have weighed that against your privacy and use the least data that works. Improving transcription from calibration samples rests on our legitimate interest in making transcription work well for every instrument; you can object at any time by emailing us, and we will remove your samples and rebuild the shared model without them. Recording the daily total of time the app is open rests on our legitimate interest in understanding how the app is used so we can improve it; you can object at any time by emailing us, and we will stop recording it for your account and delete the totals we hold. Applying the age rules, including the age checks described under Children, rests on our legal obligations where a law requires them, and otherwise on our legitimate interest in protecting children who use the app. Contacting you about launch, if you joined the waitlist, also rests on your consent. Where we rely on consent you can withdraw it at any time, and withdrawing it does not undo what we did before you withdrew.
About advertising. BranchBeat may show advertising. When it does, ads are supplied by Google AdMob and appear on the Tools, Tuner, Metronome and Scale Viewer screens, in the Community feed, and occasionally after you finish a recording. Subscribers on an ad-free plan see none of them, and neither do accounts we have marked ad-exempt or anyone under 18.
When you set up your account we ask whether you want personalised advertising. Where the law lets us, that choice starts switched on and you can switch it off before you continue; where the law requires you to agree first — including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil and Canada — it starts switched off. If you say yes, Google may use an advertising identifier from your device to choose which ads to show you. If you say no — or if you are in a region where we must ask first and you have not agreed — you still see ads, but they are not personalised. You can change this at any time in settings, and changing it applies from that point onward rather than undoing what came before. If you are under 18, you see no ads at all, and you are not asked. If you are an adult, the consent screen contacts Google’s consent service (the User Messaging Platform) to learn which consent rules apply in your region, so it can set that choice correctly; it does this even while BranchBeat is showing no ads.
We do not send your recordings, your notation, your messages or your account details to any advertiser. What reaches Google is what its advertising SDK collects from the device itself — an advertising identifier, coarse device and app information, your IP address, how you interact with ads (such as whether one was seen or tapped), and diagnostics about the advertising code itself, such as crash reports and how long ads take to load. Google uses the IP address to estimate an approximate location, such as your city, and may use it to choose ads, including ads that are not personalised.
Rewarded ads. If you are an adult on the free plan, you can choose to watch an ad to add a few minutes to that day’s allowance for AI refinement and file transcription, up to a daily limit. When you start one, we give Google a random, one-time code to attach to the ad; when the ad finishes, Google sends that code back to our servers so we can add the minutes. The code is not your account ID, your name or your email address, and Google cannot use it to identify you. We keep a record of each reward — which account it was for, when, and whether minutes were added — so that one viewing is never counted twice, and we delete those records when you delete your account. Anyone under 18 is never offered a rewarded ad.
Analytics. We do not run third-party analytics. The only measurements we make of how you use the app are the daily total of time the app is open and, on the free plan, your AI refinement and file transcription minutes, both described above; we make them ourselves, and none of it leaves BranchBeat. If we introduce anything more we will update this policy first.
Location
Where you live, for the age rules. The minimum age, and whether a parent has to agree, depend on the country or US state you live in. So when you sign up we ask which country you live in (and your state, in the US, Canada, Australia and Brazil), and when you sign up or sign in we also read the approximate country and state of your internet connection, which Google’s network works out from your IP address. If the two differ, we apply whichever rules are stricter. The same information decides whether new accounts are available where you are: they are not yet available to people who live in, or connect from, Mississippi or Tennessee, and an existing account there works with the practice tools only. We use this only to apply those rules. From it we keep only the country and state codes, not your IP address, and we do not use them for advertising or anything else.
Georgia accounts. Georgia law lets a service either verify the age of everyone with an account there or give every account there the protections it requires for minors. We do the second, and we never ask you to prove your age for it. So if you live in Georgia, or connect from there when you sign up or sign in, then whatever your age: the ads you see are never personalised, whatever you chose about personalised advertising (Google may still use your approximate location to choose them); and your calibration samples tune transcription to you only and are never used to train the shared model, and samples recorded while this applies stay out of it even after you move. This is one of the age rules above: it can only make your advertising less personalised, never more.
Your age range from Apple or Google. Where the law of the place you live relies on the app stores’ age information, we ask Apple (Declared Age Range) or Google Play (Age Signals) for your age range. They tell us only a range or a status (for example “sharing 13–15”, or “declined”), never your date of birth. We keep that range or status, how the store established it, the platform and the date, as part of your account’s age decision, together with a one-way coded form of the store’s identifier for your app install or download, which we use only to act on a parent withdrawing approval through the store. We use this only to apply the age rules and for nothing else, including advertising. It is deleted with your account, with one exception: if a parent withdrew approval through the store, we keep the coded identifier and the date of that withdrawal, no longer linked to any account, so that the withdrawal still applies if the app is used again from the same install or download.
We do not use your device’s location. The app does not request location permission and never receives your GPS position. We are considering location-based features in future — such as helping you find musicians near you, and surfacing local music events or news. None of that exists yet. If we build it, it will be opt-in and off by default, we will ask before collecting anything, and we will update this policy first rather than after. The ads we show never use your device’s location, though Google may use the approximate location of your internet connection to choose them (see About advertising).
What other users can see
Your username, display name, first and last name, profile photo, bio, and instrument are visible to other signed-in users, along with anything you post publicly. Your real name is part of your public profile because search relies on it. Your email address, phone number, date of birth, and subscription details are never shown to other users. Direct messages are visible to you and the person you send them to — with one exception worth naming rather than burying: the notification telling them a message arrived carries a short preview of it, and that preview travels through Expo's push service and then Apple's or Google's on the way to their lock screen.
Security
Recordings stored on your device are encrypted with AES-256, and each account’s local data is kept separate from any other account that has used the same device. Data in transit is encrypted with TLS.
Where the encryption key is kept, and what that means. A copy of the key that decrypts your recordings is stored in your account on our servers, not only on your device. We do this so that you can restore your recordings after reinstalling the app or moving to a new device — without it, losing the device means losing the audio permanently, with no way for anyone to recover it.
The consequence is worth stating plainly rather than burying: your recordings are not end-to-end encrypted. Because we hold a copy of the key, BranchBeat is technically able to decrypt recordings backed up to your account, and so is Google, which provides the infrastructure we run on. Our access rules restrict these keys to your own account, and we do not access your recordings except where necessary to operate the service, investigate abuse, or comply with a legal obligation. If you would rather no copy of a recording leave your device, leave cloud backup turned off.
No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security, but we will notify affected users of a breach involving personal data as required by law.
Retention
We keep your account data while your account is active. That includes the record of your account’s age decision: the result, the version of the rules applied, the country and state codes it was based on, and any age range Apple or Google shared. When you delete your account, we remove your profile, posts, recordings, cloud backups, training data, your usage totals, that age record, the age-check and age-review records described under Children, and any parental consent record, approval request, parent link and link request for your account. Usage totals also age out while your account is open: daily totals are kept for 24 months and monthly totals for five years, and older ones are deleted the next time the app records a day for you. Some things are deliberately kept: messages you have already sent remain visible, in their conversations, to the people who received them; reports filed about content are retained as moderation evidence for as long as that safety record is needed; material preserved for a child-safety report is kept as described below; the record of a parent withdrawing approval through an app store is kept as described under Location; and when we delete an account because it belonged to a child under 13, we keep a short record that the deletion happened, as described under Children. Routine encrypted backups can hold copies for up to 30 days before they are overwritten, after which nothing remains.
Child safety. When our team reviews content reported as a child-safety concern and decides it must be preserved, we keep a copy: the content itself, who posted it (including their account’s email address, username and display name), the report or reports about it including who made them, and copies of any reported images or audio. The copy is kept apart from the app, is never shown to other users, and is kept even if the account is deleted. It is kept for at least one year and then deleted, unless the law or a request from law enforcement requires us to keep it longer. When our team confirms apparent child sexual abuse material, we preserve it and report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline as US law requires (18 U.S.C. §2258A).
TAKE IT DOWN requests. When someone asks us to remove an intimate image under the TAKE IT DOWN Act, we keep their request email, including the name, contact details and signature in it, and a record of what we did. We keep no copy of the image, unless it must be preserved as a child-safety report as described above.
Parents and guardians. A parental consent record — the date of approval or withdrawal, the notice version, the places whose rules applied, the parent’s account ID, their confirmation that they are the teen’s parent or legal guardian, the yes-or-no checks described under Parents and guardians, and, where a consent form was signed, the name signed, the date and the version of the form — is kept for as long as the teen’s account exists, including after approval is withdrawn or ends, because the law asks us to be able to show that consent was given and when. If the parent deletes their own account, their account ID on the consent record, its history and the teen’s requests is replaced with a marker saying the account was deleted, and any name they signed is removed, leaving only the date of signing and the version of the form. The controls a parent set are removed when approval is withdrawn or ends. If a teen removes a parent, the link and the controls that parent set end at once; a copy of them is kept for 24 hours only so the teen can undo the removal, and is then removed. An approval request expires 7 days after it is sent; when it closes or expires we delete the parent’s email address from it and the coded values described under Parents and guardians, keeping a masked form of the address (such as j***@example.com) so the teen can see whom they asked, and the account ID of the parent who opened it, if one did, for as long as the teen’s account exists. Copies of the emails we send to a parent, including the copy of a signed consent form, are also kept in the mailbox we send from for 30 days, and are then deleted; Google, which runs that mailbox, can keep a deleted copy for up to about 30 more days before it is gone for good.
Age checks. The age-check and age-review records described under Children are kept while the account exists and deleted with it, with one exception: when we delete an account because it belonged to a child under 13, we keep a short record that the deletion happened, as described there.
The waitlist. If you gave us your email to hear about launch, we keep it until we have sent the launch announcement and for twelve months after that, then delete it. We use it for nothing else — no newsletter, no reminders, and we do not pass it on. Ask us at support@branchbeat.com and we will remove it sooner. Deleting a BranchBeat account does not automatically remove a waitlist entry made with the same address, because the two are separate records; ask and we will remove both.
Where this information comes from
Almost all of it comes from you, or from your device as you use the app. A few things do not. If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive your email address and name from them rather than from you — never your password. Where the age rules use it, your age range from Apple or Google comes from them, as described under Location. If another user reports something you posted, or reports that your account may belong to someone under 13 or under 18, that report comes from them, and we keep it as described under Retention. A parent may tell us a child’s age, or ask us by email, without an account, to remove a child’s content or delete their account; we keep that parent’s email and request. And if you are a parent, your email address may first reach us from the teen who asked you to approve their account. Nothing here is bought, and nothing is collected about you from data brokers, advertising networks, or public sources.
Your rights and choices
You can view and edit your profile, skip calibration, and delete your account from within the app, or from branchbeat.com/delete-account. Deletion is permanent.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to request a copy of your data, correct it, restrict how we use it, or object to processing. To make a request, email support@branchbeat.com. We will respond within the period required by applicable law. You will never be treated differently for exercising these rights.
You can also ask us to delete your data, or to send you a copy in a portable format, and where we rely on your consent you can withdraw it at any time. Email us from the address on your account and we will act on it. If you write from a different address, or someone writes on your behalf — a parent, a lawyer, anyone you have authorised — we will ask for enough to be sure the request is genuine before we do anything, because acting on a fake request is the worse mistake.
If you are a parent or guardian of someone under 18 who uses BranchBeat, you can ask us to take down or delete their posts, comments or messages, or their whole account, without having a BranchBeat account yourself; branchbeat.com/delete-account explains how. We keep your email and your request as the record of what you asked.
If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area and you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office, and in the EU it is the authority in the country where you live. We would rather you told us first so we can fix it, but that route is yours regardless and you do not need our permission to take it.
Children
BranchBeat is not for children under 13. The minimum age is 13, or higher where the law of the place you live requires it (up to 16). We ask for a date of birth and where you live at signup, and we do not open the account if you are below the minimum there. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger. Where the law requires a parent’s consent, or limits social features at your age, your account works with the practice tools only — no posting, following or messaging — until that changes. Where it is a parent’s consent that is needed, a parent or guardian approves the account in the BranchBeat app, from their own adult BranchBeat account, after confirming that they are your parent or legal guardian, and can then set a daily time limit, quiet hours and whether direct messages are on. The approval and those settings end automatically when you reach the age at which the law where you live no longer requires a parent; see Parents and guardians below. Wherever you live, you can also link a parent or guardian to your account, which is not the same as their consent; that is described there too. If you believe a child under the minimum age has an account, report the account in the app or email us at support@branchbeat.com; if a person confirms it, we delete the account and everything it holds — recordings, messages and all — rather than only closing it.
If you are between 13 and 17, or where we have reason to believe you are under 18, your account works differently from an adult’s. That is based on the date of birth you gave at signup, on the age range Apple or Google shares where the age rules use it (see Location), and on the age checks described below. You cannot switch these protections off yourself before you turn 18:
- Your posts, and any link you share, can be seen only by people you follow who also follow you.
- You do not appear in search results or suggestions, and you are left out of other people’s lists of followers and people they follow.
- Someone can follow you only if you follow them first. Another account under 18 can follow you first, unless it is treated as under 18 only because of the age checks described below.
- You can start a conversation with anyone you follow. Anyone else can start one with you only if you follow each other.
- You see no ads at all, on any plan.
- Your calibration samples tune transcription to you only and are never used to train the shared model.
- The daily total of time the app is open is kept for you as it is for everyone, and is seen only by you and by BranchBeat staff. It is never used to decide what you see or to show you advertising.
Your public profile — username, display name, first and last name, profile picture, bio and main instrument — can still be seen by others who come across you, for example beside a comment you leave on someone else’s public post.
How we check age. Besides the date of birth you give us, we look for signs that an account belongs to someone younger than they told us. Our own software applies written rules, such as a stated age (“I’m 14”), birthday wishes (“happy 16th”) or a school grade, to the captions of your posts, the comments you write, your display name, username and bio, and, for birthday wishes, the comments other people leave on your posts. We also use reports, including the report reason “May be too young to use BranchBeat”, the age range Apple or Google shares where the age rules use it, and what a parent tells us. For age checks we do not read direct messages unless one is reported, and then a person reads only the reported message. We never use faces, voices or recordings to estimate anyone’s age, and no outside service or AI model is used for these checks. (If you turned on the safety check, direct messages are still checked for harmful content as described under Who we share it with; that check is not used to estimate age.)
When a rule matches, we record which rule matched and its version, where it matched (a pointer to the post, comment or profile field) and when, and, if the text is your own, up to 140 characters of it; for someone else’s text, such as a birthday wish on your post, we keep only the pointer. BranchBeat staff review these records. If the records suggest you are under 18, we may apply the protections above to your account and tell you so in the app. If that is a mistake, you can say so in the app and explain in your own words, and a person will look again; you never have to send documents, and you can always choose to keep the protections. Follow connections and post settings changed when the protections were applied are not changed back if the protections are later lifted.
If we believe an account belongs to a child under 13 — for example the account holder says they are 12 or younger, a parent tells us, or Apple or Google reports an age under 13 — we lock it to the practice tools at once, hide its posts and comments from other people, and stop recording its daily app time. A person reviews it within 3 business days. We do not ask for more information during the review; the account holder can explain in the app. If the review confirms the account belongs to a child under 13, we delete it and everything it holds; if not, we restore it. The review record holds why the review started, who or what opened it and when, any note the BranchBeat staff member who opened it wrote, who at BranchBeat reviewed it, the outcome and its date, the account’s age status before the review, which of its posts and comments the review hid, any explanation the account holder wrote, and the same details of any earlier review of the account; it is deleted with the account. After deleting an account because it belonged to a child under 13, we keep a short record that the deletion happened — its date and the kind of sign that started the review — with no account ID, email address, name or content, so that we can show we acted.
Parents and guardians
Where the law of the place a teen lives requires a parent’s consent before they can use BranchBeat’s social features, the teen asks a parent or guardian from the app, and we email that parent a link. The parent approves in the BranchBeat app, from their own BranchBeat account. Everything the rest of this policy says about an account applies to a parent’s account too; this section describes what we collect, in addition, because you are a parent or guardian. We do not ask parents for an identity document or a selfie, and we use no outside service to check who a parent is.
The request. The teen’s request holds your email address as the teen typed it, and when it was sent. When you open the link in the app and sign in, it also records your account ID and when you opened it, and we tell the teen, by your public name, that you opened it. To help spot a teen approving their own request, it holds a coded form of the internet address the teen asked from, made with a random value used for that request only so it cannot be matched against anything else, and a coded form of the teen’s app installation; both are deleted when the request closes.
Who can approve. You need an adult BranchBeat account that is in good standing and has a confirmed email address, on a different phone from your teen’s, and you can approve up to five teens. To check this we use your account’s date of birth and age decision, whether your email address is confirmed, and whether your account and your teen’s have been used on the same phone or with the same app store account. If you later stop meeting these conditions — for example your account is deleted, deactivated or suspended — your approval ends.
When you approve. You confirm that you are the teen’s parent or legal guardian, and you choose the controls: a daily time limit, quiet hours and whether direct messages are on. Where the law asks for a signed consent form — in Georgia, for a teen under 16 — the app shows you the form, which says what you are consenting to, the protections and controls that apply and how to withdraw, and you sign it by typing your full name; we email you a copy.
The consent record and the controls. When you approve, we record the date, the version of the notice you were shown, and the places whose rules applied; if you withdraw, we record that date too. It also holds your account ID, your confirmation that you are the teen’s parent or legal guardian, and, if you signed a consent form, the name you typed, the date and the version of the form’s text. The consent record is kept for as long as the teen’s account exists. The controls you choose (a daily time limit, quiet hours and whether direct messages are on) are stored on the teen’s account and are removed when your approval is withdrawn or ends.
Checks we record. The consent record also holds yes-or-no answers to four questions: whether you opened the link from the same internet address the teen asked from, whether your account was created after the request was sent, whether your account signs in with Google or Apple, and whether your account’s email address is the one the teen typed. They never stop an approval on their own; they help us notice a teen approving their own account, and BranchBeat staff may look at them if something seems wrong.
When approval ends. Your approval and the controls end automatically when the teen reaches the age at which the law of the place they live no longer requires a parent. Withdrawing approval is final for that approval; your teen can send you a new request from the app.
What you can do. In the BranchBeat app, in Settings, where the teens you approved are listed, you can see your teen’s privacy settings, change the controls you set, see the display names and usernames of the people they follow and the people they exchange messages with (never the messages themselves), and withdraw your approval. Your teen can also remove you as their parent from the app. When approval is withdrawn the teen’s account stays open; if the law still requires a parent’s approval for it, it works with the practice tools only. The same applies when your teen removes you.
Emails and notices. We email you, and notify you in the app, when you open a teen’s request, when you approve, when your teen removes you, and if your teen’s account is deleted. We also email you when you withdraw your approval. The email confirming your approval tells you to manage it in the app, in Settings. Copies of the emails we send you, including the copy of a signed consent form, stay in the mailbox we send from for 30 days and are then deleted (Google can keep a deleted copy for up to about 30 more days).
If you delete your account. Your approval of every teen you approved is withdrawn, and your account ID on their consent records, their history and their requests is replaced with a marker saying the account was deleted. If you signed a consent form, the name you typed is removed from the consent record in the same way; only the date you signed and the version of the form stay, as the record of the consent, for as long as the teen’s account exists.
How long we keep it. The consent record is kept as described above. If you ignore a request, it expires after 7 days and we then delete your address from it automatically; when a request closes for any other reason, we delete your address from it then.
Linking as a parent. Separately from approval, and wherever the teen lives, any teen can link a parent or guardian to their account. A parent can ask in the app, by the teen’s username, or the teen can email a parent a link from the app. Either way the parent first confirms that they are the teen’s parent or legal guardian, and nothing is linked until the teen accepts in the app. The conditions under Who can approve also decide who can link, and a teen has at most one linked parent. A linked parent sees the teen’s settings, the controls they set and the teen’s daily totals of time the app is open, but never the people the teen follows or messages. They can set a daily time limit, quiet hours, whether direct messages are on, and whether the teen gets notifications about likes, comments, replies and new followers. The teen can ask them, from the app, to change one of those settings. A link is not a parent’s consent: where the law requires a parent’s approval, the teen still needs it as described above, and if another adult approves the account, the link ends. The teen can always see that a parent is linked, and either of them can end the link at any time in the app; the other is told in the app. A link also ends when the teen turns 18, or when the parent’s account stops meeting those conditions.
What a link keeps. The link record holds the two account IDs, how and when the link was made, the parent’s confirmation that they are the teen’s parent or legal guardian, and when and why it ended. A link request holds both account IDs, how it was started, its dates and its outcome, and coded forms of the app installations involved, made as described under The request; a link the teen emails also holds the parent’s email address as the teen typed it, a masked form of it, and a coded form of the internet address the teen sent it from. The email address and the coded values are deleted when the request is opened, answered or replaced, or when it is found to have expired; the masked address stays, so the teen can see whom they asked. A request a parent sends expires after 7 days, and a link a teen emails after 7. If a teen declines a parent’s request, that parent’s requests to that teen are not passed on for 30 days, and the parent is never told of the decline. These records are kept while the teen’s account exists and are deleted with it. If the parent deletes their account, the requests they sent or opened are deleted, and the link record no longer names them.
The link we email you belongs to your teen’s request, and the first adult account that opens it in the app is the one asked to approve, so please do not forward it. The page it opens on this website stores nothing in your browser. If you receive a request you did not expect, you can ignore it; the account stays limited to the practice tools.
International users
BranchBeat is operated from the United States, and your data is stored and processed there — on Google Cloud, in US regions. If you are in the UK or the European Economic Area, that is an international transfer, and it happens under the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission, which bind our providers to protect your data to European standards wherever it sits. You can ask us for details of these safeguards at support@branchbeat.com. US law differs from European law, and we would rather name the mechanism than tell you it is fine.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy as the app changes. The date at the top always reflects the current version. If a change materially affects how we use your information, we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions, requests, or concerns about this policy? Email support@branchbeat.com, or write to us:
BranchBeat LLC2108 N St, Ste NSacramento, CA 95816United StatesEmail is faster and reaches the same people. The postal address is here because a company that holds your recordings should be somewhere you can actually reach.