Privacy
What Mantel knows about your family.
Last updated 28 July 2026. This notice describes what the app actually does, checked against the code and the database rather than written from a template.
The short version
A family calendar knows where your children are on a Tuesday. Mantel is built on the assumption that this is the most sensitive thing on your phone.
- There is no advertising in Mantel, no advertising identifier, and no mechanism to sell your data. The only income is people who choose to pay for Mantel+.
- There are no third-party analytics or tracking tools in the app or on this website.
- Photographs of letters are not stored. They are sent for reading and are not kept by us.
- Anything in My Space cannot be shared out of the app - the app will not offer it and the database refuses it.
Who is responsible for your data
Mantel is operated by Mohammed Patel, who is the data controller for the purposes of the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. For anything in this notice, including a request to see, correct or erase your data, write to support@mymantel.app.
If you are not satisfied with how a request is handled, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
What is collected, and why
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your email address and password | To create your account and sign you in. Passwords are stored hashed by our authentication provider; we never see them. |
| Your display name, and the names and colours of the people in your household | So the plan can say who a thing is for. These are typed by you and may include children's first names. |
| Your household's plan: events, their times, places, notes, and who each is for | This is the product. It is shared with the other members of your household. |
| Lists and list items, including anything due | So the kit list can sit on the day it is needed. |
| My Space entries: private notes, reflections, and things you keep for later | Visible only to you, or shown to your household as "busy" with no detail, depending on what you choose. |
| Meals and saved recipes | For Tonight's Table. |
| Shared invitations you create, and replies to them | A shared card holds a copy of the fields you approved, not a link into your calendar. A reply holds a name and yes, no or maybe - nothing else. |
| A count of how many AI uses your household has spent this month | To enforce the free allowance. This is a number. No content of any request is stored against it. |
| Whether your household has Mantel+ | To unlock the paid features. |
What is not collected
- No location data. Mantel never asks your phone where it is.
- No contacts, no photo library beyond the single image you choose to send.
- No advertising identifier, no device fingerprint, no analytics.
- No push notification tokens. Reminders are scheduled on your own phone by iOS and do not travel through a server.
- No photograph of any letter is retained after it has been read.
Artificial intelligence, and what leaves your phone
Some features send text to Google's Gemini model. This never happens silently in the background - it happens when you use a feature that reads or writes something for you.
What is sent
- When you capture a letter: the photograph or the text you pasted, plus the first names in your household and a short list of your upcoming event titles and dates, so it can tell a new event from one already on the plan.
- When you ask Mantel a question: your question, the first names in your household, and your upcoming events with their titles, times, places and notes, so the answer can be about your actual week.
- When you speak instead of typing: the audio recording, to be written down.
- The daily brief, the week read and Tonight's Table: the relevant events for that day or week. If you have switched weather on, the brief also uses a one-line forecast - your coordinates are turned into that sentence on our server and are never sent to the model.
- My Space features send your private entries for that feature. They are marked as private in the request, but they do leave the device. If you would rather something never went to a model at all, do not use the AI features on it.
How it is sent
Requests go through our own server function, which holds the Google API key. Your phone never holds that key, and your phone never talks to Google directly.
What Google does with it
Google processes the request and returns an answer. Mantel uses the paid Gemini API, and Google's terms for it state that data submitted through it is not used to train their models. This is the paid tier specifically - the free tier is treated differently, which is why Mantel does not use it.
When Mantel crashes
If the app crashes, a report goes to Sentry so the fault can be found and fixed. It is deliberately blind to your family: no screenshot, no record of what you tapped, no console output, no network addresses, and nothing you have typed — every one of those is switched off in the code rather than left at its default, because a crash reporter's defaults are built for apps that do not hold a child's timetable. What it sends is where in the code the crash happened, the iPhone model and the iOS version. It is not linked to your name, your email or your account, and it is handled in Sentry's European region rather than crossing the Atlantic.
Where your data lives
Your account and your household's plan are stored with Supabase, in their London region in the United Kingdom. This website and the shared invitation pages are served by Cloudflare. Crash reports are processed by Sentry. Payments are handled entirely by Apple - Mantel never sees your card details.
Requests to Gemini are processed by Google and may be handled outside the UK.
Who can see what
- Your household sees the shared plan, the lists, and anything you have not marked private.
- Nobody else can read your household's data. Access is enforced by row-level security in the database, per household, not by the app being polite.
- People you send an invitation to see only the fields you approved on the sharing screen, on a page that cannot reach your calendar. You can switch any link off at any time.
- My Space is yours. Other members see either nothing at all or the word "busy", depending on what you chose for each item.
Your lawful basis
- Performance of a contract - storing and syncing your plan is the service you signed up for.
- Legitimate interests - keeping the service secure, preventing abuse of the free AI allowance, and fixing faults.
- Consent - for the optional device permissions you are asked for: camera, photo library, microphone, calendar and Face ID. Each is requested only when you first use the feature that needs it, and can be withdrawn in iOS Settings.
How long it is kept
Your data is kept while your account exists. When you delete your account from inside the app, your household's plan and your sign-in are removed. See how deletion works.
Shared invitation links expire automatically thirty days after the event they describe, and can be switched off sooner.
Deletion is final. The database Mantel runs on is not covered by automated backups, so there is no separate backup copy in which deleted rows could survive. When something is gone, it is gone.
Children
Mantel is for adults running a household. The account holder must be 18 or over. Children's first names and activities may appear in the plan because a parent typed them there; Mantel does not knowingly create accounts for children and does not market to them.
Your rights
Under UK GDPR you have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to how it is used, and to receive it in a portable form. You can delete everything yourself from inside the app at any time. For anything else, write to support@mymantel.app and you will have a reply within one month.
If you are not satisfied with how we handle a request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
This website
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Changes
If this notice changes in a way that matters, the date at the top will change and the app will say so.