Legal

Children and dependents

1. Children do not have accounts

Visible Needs accounts are for adults. A child does not sign up, does not sign in and has no login. An adult in the household may create a profile for a child or dependent so the household can plan capacity, agreements and care responsibilities around them.

This is a rule the database itself holds, not one the app remembers to follow. A child profile with a login attached is rejected by a constraint on the table, so every route fails the same way — the invitation flow, this website, the app, and any direct call to the API underneath them. We wrote it that way after finding that checks placed in the invitation code alone left other doors open.

2. What a child or dependent profile can contain

• A display name or nickname.
• A household role — child, or dependent.
• Relationship or care context.
• Agreements they are related to.
• Household planning context an adult chooses to enter — the impact a need has on them, for example.

3. What we deliberately do not collect

There is no field for a school name, a precise location, a photograph, an exact date of birth, a medical record or a therapy note, and no way to message a child directly. We never ask for any of it, and adding such a field later would need its own review before it shipped.

But free text is free text. A need's description, the note on how a need affects someone, and the notes on a household member are open boxes, and an adult can type anything into them — including a child's medical or therapy details. We cannot prevent that without reading what people write, which we do not do. So the honest statement is not that such information is impossible, it is that we do not ask for it, do not build features around it, and treat everything typed about a child as sensitive: same visibility rules, same exclusion from audit logs and crash reports, same deletion. If you would rather it were not stored at all, do not type it — and the data management page will remove what already is.

4. Who can see it

Only the household, and only according to the same visibility rules that govern everything else. Children and caregivers cannot see adult emotional or couple needs. A caregiver sees only the agreements they are responsible for or supporting. These rules are enforced in the database and covered by tests that run on every change.

5. What we ask of adults

Enter a child's or dependent's details only where you have a genuine household reason and the authority to do so. In a separated or co-parenting household this is not always obvious, and it is one of the questions currently with counsel.

6. How long it is kept

Until an adult in the household edits or deletes it, the household is deleted, account deletion reaches the related content, or a legal request requires correction or removal. The general rules are in the privacy policy.

7. If child accounts are ever introduced

They would need their own legal and product review first, covering at minimum: an age gate, parent or guardian consent, age-appropriate explanations, no targeted advertising, no behavioural profiling, child-friendly rights and deletion, and safeguarding and crisis routing. None of that exists today because none of it is needed today.

8. Contact

privacy@visibleneeds.site, or the data management page to export or delete a household's data.

Version 21 August 2026. Written against the running system rather than from a template — section 3 names fields that genuinely do not exist in the schema, and then says plainly what free text can still carry, because the first half without the second would be an overclaim. If something here does not match what the product does, the page is wrong and we want to know: get in touch.