Horse Flow App — Privacy.

01What this covers

This is about the Horse Flow app specifically. Everything in our main Privacy Policy still applies — who we are, our Information Officer, your rights under POPIA and the GDPR, cookies, and how to complain. This page adds what is different about the app.

For POPIA we remain the responsible party for the personal information described here.

02The short version

Your records are yours. We do not sell them, we do not advertise against them, we do not read them, and nobody sees them unless you send them to somebody. We hold them so we can give them back to you on whatever phone you sign in from — that is the whole reason they are on our server at all.

Most of what the app stores is about horses, not people, and information about an animal is not personal information. But the record also carries your name, your vet’s name and phone number, what you paid and who you paid it to — and that is personal information, so it is treated as such throughout.

03What the app holds

About you. The name and email on your Horse Flow Academy account, your subscription status, the country and currency you use, and your device’s time zone.

About your horses. Their details and identification, the care schedules you set up, everything you log — visits, treatments, training sessions, observations — what each thing cost, and the names and phone numbers you record for the people who look after them.

What you photograph. Receipts, reports, x-rays, and pictures of hooves, posture or an injury, with the date and category you give each one.

Nothing else. The app does not read your contacts, your photo library, your location, your calendar or anything else on your phone. When you attach a photograph you choose that one file and the app receives that one file.

04Where it is kept

In two places, on purpose.

On your phone. Everything you write is saved on the device first, so the app works in a stable with no signal. That copy stays there until you sign out or clear the browser’s data.

On your account, on our website’s server. It syncs there when you have a connection, which is what lets the same records appear on a second device and survive a lost phone. Our hosting is provided by our web host under a contract that requires them to keep it secure and to process it only on our instructions.

We are a South African business and the records are held on our website’s infrastructure. Section 09 of our main Privacy Policy explains how we handle information that leaves South Africa.

05Photographs and documents

A photograph you take is stored on your phone first, and uploaded to your account when you have signal. Until it uploads it exists only on that device.

Once uploaded, files are stored in our website’s media library under a randomly generated filename. We do this deliberately: a file called receipt.jpg would sit at a web address anybody could guess, and a vet’s report carrying somebody’s name is their personal information. A random name means the address cannot be guessed.

Being honest about the limit. That makes the address unguessable, not secret. Anyone you send the link to can open it, and it is not protected by a password. Treat a link to a document the way you would treat the document itself.

We do not analyse your photographs, and no photograph is used to train anything.

06Health observations

If you record a horse’s temperature, heart rate or other observations, that is stored the same way as everything else and treated the same way. It is a record about an animal.

Nobody is watching it. We do not monitor what you record, we are not alerted by it, and no one at Horse Flow Academy reads it. If you are worried about a horse, phone your vet — the app is a notebook, and section 04 of the app Terms of Use sets that out in full.

07Your country and time zone

The first time you open the app while signed in, we make a rough guess at your country from your IP address, so that costs are shown in your own currency rather than in rand. Your IP address is used for that lookup and is not stored by us for this purpose.

Your device also tells us its time zone. We keep that for one reason: so a reminder arrives at seven in the morning where you are, rather than seven in the morning in South Africa.

Both are a guess and both are yours to correct in the app’s settings. Neither is location tracking — the app never asks for or receives your GPS position.

08Reminders and notifications

If you turn reminders on, your browser gives us an address to send notifications to. That address is issued by Apple or Google and it identifies your device, not you. We store it against your account and delete it when you turn reminders off.

The notification itself is empty. We send a blank message whose only job is to wake the app on your phone. The app then asks our website what is due and writes the words itself. Nothing about your horses ever passes through Apple’s or Google’s servers — they carry an empty envelope.

09Paying for a subscription

Payments are handled by PayFast. Your card details go to them and never to us — we cannot see them and we do not store them. We keep what we need for our own records: what you bought, when, how much, and whether the subscription is live.

PayFast is a separate responsible party for what it holds, under its own privacy policy.

10What stays on your phone

A few things never leave the device at all:

— a count of the days you have opened the app, used once to decide whether to ask you for a review. It is a list of dates in your browser’s own storage, it is never sent to us, and we never see it;
— photographs that have not yet uploaded;
— your working copy of everything, so the app opens instantly and works without signal.

Clearing your browser’s data, or removing the app from your home screen and clearing its storage, removes all of that from the device. Anything already synced is still on your account.

11Who else can see any of it

Nobody, unless you send it to them. The app has a share and a print function so you can hand a health record to your vet or a full history to a buyer. When you do that, you choose the person and what it contains. We are not part of it and we do not keep a copy of what you sent.

The people who can technically reach the underlying data are our web host, and us when we are fixing something you have asked us to fix. We do not browse members’ records, and we do not share or sell them to anybody — not to insurers, not to vets, not to advertisers, not to anyone.

The assistant. If you use the assistant, what you say or type to them is sent to Anthropic, the company whose Claude model works out the answer, together with what the app needs from your records to answer: your horses’ names and details, the people you have listed who look after them, and recent entries. The answer comes back to the app. The same happens when you ask the app to read a receipt: the photograph is sent to Anthropic to be read. A research question is answered by Anthropic searching scientific and veterinary websites. None of this happens unless you use those features. When you talk instead of typing, your phone or browser turns your speech into words, and it may use its maker’s speech service (Google or Apple) to do it.

The natural voice. The assistant normally speaks with your phone’s own voice. If you switch on the natural voice, the words of each spoken reply are sent to ElevenLabs, which turns them into sound and sends the sound back. A reply can include your horse’s name and what was logged. It is off until you turn it on, and turning it off stops it.

Anthropic and ElevenLabs are outside South Africa. Each handles what it is sent in order to do that one job, under its own terms and privacy policy. We do not send them your own name, your email address or your payment details.

12How long we keep it

For as long as you have an account, and after a subscription ends.

Ending a subscription does not delete anything. Your records stay exactly as you left them, so that starting again brings everything back. This is deliberate: a horse’s history is worth most years later, and losing it because a card expired would be the worst thing this app could do to somebody.

If you close your account entirely, we delete your records within 30 days, apart from anything we are obliged to keep — invoices and payment records, which tax law requires us to hold for five years.

13Deleting your records

You can delete any individual horse, entry or photograph in the app whenever you like.

To delete everything — your whole logbook, or your account — email us and ask. We will confirm it is you, do it, and tell you when it is done. It cannot be undone, so we will make sure you mean it before we start.

You can also ask for a copy of everything we hold about you, in a form you can take elsewhere. The app can already produce a full report of your records itself, at any time, without asking us.

14Your rights, and how to reach us

Your rights under POPIA — and under the GDPR if you are in the EU or the UK — are set out in sections 13 and 15 of our main Privacy Policy, and they apply to everything here. That includes the right to see what we hold, to correct it, to have it deleted, to object to how we use it, and to complain to the Information Regulator.

Mark privacy queries PRIVACY in the subject line and we will get to them properly.