Privacy Policy

ParentBoost Ltd (“ParentBoost”, “we”, “our”, or “us”) is committed to protecting your personal data and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your personal data when you use our mobile application, website, or services.

ParentBoost is a UK-based startup offering a mobile-first platform designed to support parents throughout their parenting journey by providing curated discounts, expert content, and a supportive community.

ParentBoost Ltd is registered in England and Wales. Company Registration No. 16004915. We are the data controller responsible for your personal data.

Contact details:
Email: privacy@parentboost.co.uk
Data Protection Contact: privacy@parentboost.co.uk

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, including any requests to exercise your legal rights, please contact us using the details above.

We may collect, use, store and transfer different kinds of personal data about you, including:

• Identity Data: First name, last name, username or similar identifier
• Contact Data: Email address, postal address (if provided)
• Family Data: Number of children, ages of children, children’s first names (optional), special educational needs information (if you choose to provide it), and, if you choose to tell us, that your family is expecting a baby, the month the baby is due and an optional nickname
• Account Data: Subscription tier (Free or Premium), account preferences, communication preferences
• Transaction Data: Discount codes used, gift card purchases, payment history, savings tracked
• Shopping Preferences: where you do your food shop and roughly how much you spend, if you choose to tell us, so we can show your shops first and estimate your savings.
• Technical Data: Internet protocol (IP) address, browser type and version, time zone setting and location, device type, operating system and platform, mobile device identifiers
• Usage Data: Information about how you use our app, website, and services, including pages visited, features used, time spent in app, search queries
• Community Data: Community questions, replies, Helpful votes and other community interactions
• Marketing and Communications Data: Your preferences in receiving marketing from us and our third parties, communication preferences

Some of the data we collect is Special Category Data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR: in particular, any information you choose to share about your child’s health conditions or special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). We process this data only where you have given your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a) UK GDPR), which you provide as the parent or carer holding parental responsibility for the child. You can withdraw your consent, and delete your child’s health or SEND information, at any time.

A baby on the way: if you tell us your family is expecting a baby, we store that fact, the month the baby is due (a month only, never an exact date) or “Not sure yet”, and an optional nickname. Because this can reveal information about health, we treat it as Special Category Data and only store it with your explicit consent (Article 9(2)(a) UK GDPR), which you give by ticking a box when you add it. We record when you gave that consent. We do not ask who is pregnant, and we do not store scan dates, weeks or any other health details. We use it only to personalise the guides and deals you see inside the app and to ask, around the due month, whether your baby has arrived. We never share it with advertisers, never include it in marketing emails, our email marketing platform or analytics, and never send emails or reminders based on a due date. You can remove it at any time from Your family in your profile: it is permanently deleted straight away, not hidden or kept. When you tell us your baby has arrived, it is replaced by your child’s details and deleted.

Apart from the information described above, we do not seek Special Category Data about you (such as your race or ethnicity, religious or philosophical beliefs, sex life, sexual orientation, political opinions, trade union membership, or genetic and biometric data), although you may choose to reveal such information in Community posts. Questions and replies in most Community topics are public (see section 13), so please only include information like this if you're happy for anyone to read it.

Children’s Data: We collect limited information about your children (first names if provided, ages, and, where you choose to share it, health conditions or special educational needs) so we can personalise content and discounts for your family. This information is provided by you, the parent or carer, and not by the child. ParentBoost is for adults only; we do not knowingly collect personal data directly from any child (the UK age of consent for online services is 13). We rely on your explicit consent to process any health or SEND information about your child. You retain full control and can view, correct or delete your child’s information at any time.

We take the protection of children’s data very seriously. In line with the ICO’s Children’s Code (Age Appropriate Design Code):

• Advertising and marketing pixels are never active in the logged-in application where children’s personal data is held
• We do not use profiling or behavioural advertising based on children’s data
• We apply the highest privacy settings by default within the application
• No advertising or analytics script ever runs inside the logged-in application, and nothing about your children is ever shared with advertising platforms

Direct interactions

You may give us your Identity, Contact, and Family Data by:

• Creating an account or registering for our service
• Subscribing to our Premium tier
• Using discount codes or purchasing gift cards through our platform
• Posting in our Community
• Contacting us by email
• Sending us a business, partnership or press enquiry through the Work with us form on our website
• Subscribing to our newsletters or updates
• Providing feedback or completing surveys

Automated technologies or interactions

As you interact with our app or website, we may automatically collect Technical Data and Usage Data about your equipment, browsing actions and patterns. We collect this data using:

• Cookies and similar tracking technologies on our marketing website (parentboost.co.uk) and registration pages
• Third-party advertising and analytics pixels on our marketing website and registration pages only (see our Cookie Policy for details)
• PostHog product analytics within the logged-in application

Third parties or publicly available sources

We may receive Technical Data from analytics providers, payment processors, discount platform providers, and partnership organisations. If you register through a partnership organisation, we receive basic registration data and may share aggregate (anonymised) engagement statistics with that organisation.

We will only use your personal data when the law allows us to. Most commonly, we will use your personal data in the following circumstances:

• Contract Performance: Where we need to perform the contract we are about to enter into or have entered into with you
• Legitimate Interests: Where it is necessary for our legitimate interests and your interests and fundamental rights do not override those interests
• Legal Obligation: Where we need to comply with a legal or regulatory obligation
• Consent: Where you have given consent for specific purposes (e.g., receiving marketing communications, using cookies)
• Explicit Consent (Special Category Data): Where you provide information about your child’s health or special educational needs, or tell us your family is expecting a baby, we rely on your explicit consent under Article 9(2)(a) UK GDPR. You can withdraw this consent at any time by removing the information from your profile.

Specific uses include:

• Account Management: Creating and managing your account, authenticating your identity, providing customer support
• Service Delivery: Providing access to curated discounts, processing transactions, tracking your savings, personalising content based on your children’s ages
• Community Features: Enabling Community participation, moderating content, connecting you with other parents
• Payment Processing: Processing subscription payments, managing billing, preventing fraud
• Employer Partnerships: Verifying employee eligibility, reporting anonymised usage statistics to employer partners, billing employers based on registered users
• Communications: Sending service updates, responding to enquiries, providing customer support
• Marketing: Sending promotional materials about new features or partner offers (only with your consent, and you can opt out at any time)
• Advertising measurement: Measuring the effectiveness of our advertising campaigns, via third-party pixels on our marketing website and registration pages, and via conversion records sent from our own server when you sign up or make a purchase (only if you have accepted advertising cookies)
• Which links bring new members: When you sign up, we save the campaign tags on the link you came from, the first page you visited and the name of the website that sent you, to see which of our posts bring new members. We never save anything about your children with it.
• Improvement and Analytics: Analysing usage patterns to improve our service, conducting user research, developing new features
• Legal Compliance: Meeting legal obligations, enforcing our terms, protecting our rights and the rights of others

Service Providers

We work with carefully selected third-party service providers who process data on our behalf. These include providers of database hosting and authentication, web and mobile app hosting, payment processing, email marketing, discount and gift card processing (transaction data only, never children’s personal information), website analytics, and cloud storage. All service providers are required to maintain appropriate security measures and comply with data protection laws.

Advertising and Analytics Platforms

We share limited data with advertising and analytics platforms (Meta, TikTok and PostHog) in two ways.

On our marketing website. If you accept advertising cookies, the Meta and TikTok pixels run on our homepage, brands page and advertising landing page, so we can understand how visitors find us. They do not run on our guides, our sign-up pages or inside the app.

From our server, when you sign up or buy. If you have accepted advertising cookies, our server sends a record of that conversion to the advertising platform that referred you, so we can measure which campaigns work. No advertising script runs inside the application. The record contains only a scrambled (hashed) version of your email address, an advertising click identifier if you arrived from an ad, your IP address and browser type, and the value and currency of the purchase.

We never share your name, your children’s information, or anything about your family circumstances. This happens only if you have accepted advertising cookies, and stops immediately if you withdraw.

Partnership Organisations

If you register through a partnership organisation, the organisation receives confirmation of your registration and may receive anonymised aggregate engagement statistics. They never receive your personal content or children’s information.

Legal Requirements

We may disclose your data if required by law, court order, or regulatory authority, or to protect our rights, property, or safety, or that of others.

Business Transfers

If ParentBoost is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your data may be transferred to the new owner.

What We Never Share

• We never sell your personal data to third parties
• We never share your children’s personal information with advertisers or data brokers
• Advertising and analytics pixels are never active within the logged-in application
• We never share your name, your children’s information, or any family details with advertising platforms. Only a scrambled email, purchase value, and ad click identifier
• Discount providers receive only transaction data necessary to process your purchase
• Community posts in the Health, SEND & EHCP and Behaviour topics stay within the ParentBoost platform. Posts in other topics are public (see section 13)

We have put in place appropriate security measures to prevent your personal data from being accidentally lost, used or accessed in an unauthorised way, altered or disclosed. Our security measures include:

• End-to-end encryption for data in transit (SSL/TLS)
• Encryption of sensitive data at rest
• Regular security audits
• Secure authentication systems with password hashing
• Access controls limiting employee access to data on a need-to-know basis
• Regular backups and disaster recovery procedures
• GDPR-compliant infrastructure and third-party services

We have procedures in place to deal with any suspected personal data breach and will notify you and any applicable regulator of a breach where we are legally required to do so.

We will only retain your personal data for as long as necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for.

• Active accounts: We retain your data for as long as your account is active
• A baby on the way: Kept only until you remove it, tell us your baby has arrived, or ask to delete your account. In each case it is permanently deleted straight away, not after the usual 30 days, and it is not restored if you later cancel an account deletion
• Cancelled subscriptions: We retain your data for 6 months after cancellation then delete it
• Transaction records: We retain transaction data for 7 years for tax and accounting purposes
• Community posts: Community questions and replies are retained indefinitely as part of the community archive, but can be deleted upon request
• Marketing data: We retain marketing consent records for 3 years after last interaction
• Business enquiries: Messages sent through our Work with us form are delivered to our email inbox and kept only as long as we need them to reply and manage any resulting relationship. They are not stored in our app and we do not add you to any mailing list

You can request deletion of your data at any time by contacting us at privacy@parentboost.co.uk.

Under UK data protection laws, you have rights including:

• Right to Access: Request a copy of your personal data (Subject Access Request)
• Right to Rectification: Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data
• Right to Erasure: Request deletion of your personal data (“right to be forgotten”)
• Right to Object: Object to processing of your personal data where we are relying on legitimate interests
• Right to Restriction: Request restriction of processing your personal data in certain circumstances
• Right to Data Portability: Request transfer of your personal data in a machine-readable format
• Right to Withdraw Consent: Where we rely on consent to process your data, you can withdraw consent at any time

To exercise your rights: contact us at privacy@parentboost.co.uk. We will respond within one month. There is no fee unless your request is clearly unfounded or excessive.

We operate a data protection complaints procedure. If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please contact us at privacy@parentboost.co.uk; we will acknowledge your complaint and respond as soon as we can, and within one month. You also have the right to make a complaint at any time to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at www.ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to deal with your concerns before you approach the ICO, so please contact us in the first instance.

We use EmailOctopus as our email marketing platform. EmailOctopus is a UK company, and subscriber data is stored on servers within the UK and the European Union. When you subscribe to our mailing list, your email address and associated data are processed by EmailOctopus under a data processing agreement.

We use Resend to send transactional emails, such as account confirmations and purchase receipts.

We also work with other carefully selected third-party service providers including payment processors, hosting providers, and analytics tools. All third parties are required to respect the security of your personal data and treat it in accordance with the law.

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies on our marketing website and registration pages. Please see our Cookie Policy for full details of the cookies and tracking technologies we use and how to manage your preferences.

We use PostHog for product analytics within the logged-in application. PostHog collects usage data to help us improve our service and operates under a data processing agreement.

Our Community is designed to be a safe, supportive space for parents. To protect all users:

• We moderate Community content to ensure compliance with our Community Guidelines
• We reserve the right to remove content that violates our terms or is harmful
• We may restrict or ban users who repeatedly violate guidelines
• Posts containing inappropriate content about children will be immediately removed
• We do not tolerate bullying, harassment, or hate speech

Who can read your posts: questions in most Community topics are public. Anyone can read the question on our website, including people who aren't members, and it can appear on search engines such as Google under your username. Questions in the Health, SEND & EHCP and Behaviour topics never appear on Google: they, and their replies, can only be read by signed-in members. Visitors who aren't members may also see the replies to a public question, or the first line of some of them, so please write replies as if anyone could read them. Your posts show your username only, never your name, email address or your children's details. We tell you which applies before you post, and our moderators may take any thread off the public site.

You can delete your own posts at any time. They disappear from our website straight away, although search engines can take a little longer to update their results. We ask AI companies' training crawlers not to collect Community posts.

Hiding a question from Google: you can hide any of your own questions from Google by choosing "Hide from Google" in the question's menu, and undo it with "Show on Google". The question can still be read on ParentBoost. Google can take a few days to drop a page it has already listed. If you need help with this, email hello@parentboost.co.uk.

By posting in our Community, you grant ParentBoost a licence to display and store your content, including on our public website for posts in public topics. You retain ownership of your content and can request deletion at any time.

Some of our service providers process data outside the UK. Where this happens, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place, including the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or a relevant adequacy regulation made by the UK government. Our email marketing data is held within the UK and EU. Where a provider processes data in the United States, we rely on the UK Extension to the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework or the safeguards described above.

ParentBoost is designed for use by parents and caregivers, not by children, and is intended for adults aged 18 or over. We do not knowingly collect personal data directly from any child. The UK age of consent for online services is 13; any information about a child held in our service is provided by their parent or carer, who holds parental responsibility, on the basis of explicit consent.

Parents maintain full control over any information about their children stored in their account. If you believe we have collected information from a child without parental consent, please contact us immediately at privacy@parentboost.co.uk.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page, updating the “Last updated” date, sending you an email notification, and displaying an in-app notification.

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at privacy@parentboost.co.uk.

You have the right to make a complaint to the ICO at any time: www.ico.org.uk.