HomeCareGuide is built by one independent iOS developer registered with Apple under team ID ZM8LF8494F. References to "we" and "us" below mean that developer. Privacy questions are answered personally at captainlongevity@gmail.com.
Because care records are some of the most sensitive things a family handles, we wrote this policy to be readable end-to-end in about five minutes, in plain English. If a section is unclear, that is a bug — please tell us.
HomeCareGuide stores everything you enter through Apple's SwiftData framework on the device's local storage. The data set covers:
This data is included in your standard iOS device backup — iCloud Backup if you use it, Finder backup if you sync locally. Apple, not us, governs those backups under their published privacy terms. The practical implication: keep iOS device backup on, so your archive survives a lost or replaced iPhone. We have no copy to restore from.
We don't have your name, your email address, or any account identifier. There is no account to create. There is no signed-in state in the app. We do not transmit advertising identifiers (IDFA, IDFV) or fingerprint-style device data. No crash reporter, no analytics SDK, no telemetry beacon — we ship with none, and none are added by build pipelines.
HomeCareGuide offers Premium via Apple StoreKit 2 (three products: Premium Annual, Premium Monthly, Premium Lifetime). When you tap Subscribe, when you tap Restore Purchases, or when the app silently re-verifies on launch, your device talks to Apple's StoreKit servers. We receive only one signal back: whether your entitlement is active or not, plus an opaque purchase identifier. We do not see your Apple ID, your payment method, your billing address, your purchase history, or your country code. Apple's handling of subscription information is governed by Apple's own privacy policy.
This is the only network communication the app performs. Everything else — ADL scoring math, HCBS reference lookup, PDF generation, photo handling — happens on the device.
iOS permission prompts only fire when you take an action that needs them. They never appear at launch. Concretely:
Every permission is revocable in iOS Settings > HomeCareGuide. Revoking a permission turns the corresponding feature off; it does not delete the records you have already entered.
Several Premium-tier features run through Apple frameworks on-device. None reach our servers because we don't have any:
21st Century Cures Act EVV (Electronic Visit Verification) is something agencies have to comply with. HomeCareGuide is not part of any agency's EVV stack. When you tap "Record GPS Check-In" or "Record GPS Check-Out" on a paid caregiver visit, iOS captures the coordinates at that exact moment and stores them locally with the visit record. The coordinates are never transmitted anywhere. The cross-reference comparison — whether the agency's reported visit times match what you logged — runs entirely on your phone. This is a tool that helps a family check their own paid-caregiver records; it is not a portal into any government or agency system.
The app does not use artificial intelligence, machine learning, or remote processing of any kind on your records. The HCBS waiver eligibility hints, the EVV discrepancy flag, the longitudinal ADL trends — all of this is rule-based logic that runs on the device. The 50-state Medicaid HCBS waiver reference, the asset spend-down reference, the VA Aid & Attendance reference, and the family-caregiver paid-programs reference are static informational text bundled with the app build, sourced from publicly available state and federal regulations.
If a future version of HomeCareGuide ever introduces a cloud feature or an on-device ML model, we would publish a revised version of this policy with the change called out in the app before the feature became usable. We would also document it in the in-app About section.
HomeCareGuide is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect information from anyone, including children. The age rating in the App Store reflects this.
The app is published in English only and is primarily aimed at U.S. users because the Medicaid HCBS context is U.S.-specific. We do not transfer your data internationally for one simple reason: we do not transfer your data anywhere at all.
Because storage is local, you control retention completely. Tap Delete on any record to remove it (a confirmation alert appears first; there is no Recently Deleted recovery layer by design). Delete the app from your iPhone to remove every record at once. There is no remote copy to delete; uninstalling the app is the end of the data, modulo whatever lives in your iOS device backup until it is overwritten or you remove it.
Privacy is sensitive enough that we would not change how HomeCareGuide handles your data quietly. Any material change — for example, an opt-in cloud feature, or a new external service — would be announced in the app before you could use it, and the "Last updated" date at the top of this page would reflect the revision. The forward-looking commitment matters more than any single sentence in the current version, and we stand by it.
Privacy questions, data-handling questions, and "I read your policy and I have a concern" notes all reach the same place: captainlongevity@gmail.com. A real person reads every message.