Privacy Policy

Vacadock is a family trip planner: it holds your itinerary, your bookings, and an assistant that answers questions about your trip. This policy explains what information Vacadock (“we”, “us”) collects, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. Questions any time: [email protected].

Information we collect

Account information

When you sign up we collect your email address and, if you provide one, your name. You can sign in with an email and password, with Google, or with Apple; sign-in is handled by Google’s Firebase Authentication service. If you use Apple’s “Hide My Email”, the private relay address works as your account email — you never have to reveal your real one.

Profile and household details you choose to add

To personalize planning you can add optional details to your profile: home city and airport, travel pace, interests, dietary needs, accessibility needs, budget style, lodging and airline preferences, notes for the assistant, and the travel companions in your household (their names and ages, including children). You decide what to enter; everything here is optional.

Trip content

Your trips are the heart of the product, and everything in them is stored so the whole trip stays in one place: destinations and dates, the day-by-day itinerary, travelers (names, age groups, and any needs you record — including children traveling with you), bookings (provider, confirmation numbers, times, costs, and cancellation policies), budgets, notes, checklists and tasks, and files you upload. Trips also keep an activity feed that records who changed what, visible to everyone on the trip.

Emails you forward to your trip

Each trip has its own private forwarding address. When you (or someone you’ve authorized) forward a confirmation email to it, we store the complete email — including its attachments — with that trip, and our automated systems extract the booking details for you to review. See Forwarded email below for exactly how this works.

Assistant conversations

Your conversations with the Vacadock assistant are saved so you can pick them up later. Conversations attached to a trip are visible to everyone who shares that trip. Planning conversations you start before creating a trip are private to you — but if you create a trip from one, that conversation moves into the new trip and becomes visible to anyone you later share the trip with. You can delete any conversation.

Push notification data

If you turn on notifications in the mobile app, we register your device’s push token with our notification service along with basic device details (platform, model, OS version). Registrations for devices that haven’t checked in for 90 days are pruned. Push is entirely optional — every feature works without it.

Technical and log data

Our servers keep standard operational telemetry (request logs, errors, performance metrics), retained for about 30 days. Requests to our AI providers are logged — including the message content sent and received — to operate and debug the assistant; these logs are deleted automatically after 90 days. Your browser stores sign-in session data and a few interface preferences locally; we do not use advertising or third-party analytics cookies.

What we don’t collect

• No device location. The app never reads your GPS position. Maps and places come only from the place names you (or the assistant) type into the trip.
• No contacts, camera, or photo library access. The iOS app’s only photo permission is add-only, used when you choose to save a shared trip image.
• No advertising or analytics SDKs, no ad identifiers, no cross-site or cross-app tracking, and no “fingerprinting”.
• No payments. Vacadock is free and never collects payment card details.

How we use your information

• To run the product — storing and syncing your trips across your devices and with the people you share them with.
• To power AI features — answering questions about your trip, extracting bookings from forwarded emails, suggesting activities, and generating trip illustrations you request.
• To send transactional email — sign-up verification, trip invitations, and notices about emails you’ve forwarded (for example “your booking was extracted, review it now”). We don’t send marketing email.
• To send push notifications you’ve opted into — such as itinerary changes on a shared trip. You can turn these off in the app or in your device settings.
• To keep the service safe — enforcing per-account usage limits, preventing abuse, and debugging problems.

We do not use your information for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not use your content to train AI models of our own.

AI features and your data

Vacadock’s assistant, booking extraction, activity suggestions, and trip illustrations are powered by large language and image models run by third-party providers. When you use these features, the content needed to answer — your message, the relevant trip details (which can include traveler names and ages, dates, places, bookings, and your stated preferences), forwarded email content being extracted, and documents or images you attach — is sent to the model provider to generate the result.

The providers we use:

• Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service — our primary models for chat, extraction, and image generation. Microsoft states that Azure OpenAI customer data is not used to train its models.
• Google Gemini API — used when you choose the alternate assistant model (option “A”) under Profile → Assistant.
• NeuralWatt — an additional model provider we may route some requests to.

When the assistant checks the web for you (weather, opening hours, events), the search runs through the model provider’s hosted search tool (Microsoft or Google), and answers cite their sources. Provider requests and responses appear in our operational logs for up to 90 days, as described above.

Separately, if you choose to connect Vacadock to an external AI assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude, the trip data those tools read (and write) flows to that assistant’s operator — OpenAI or Anthropic — under their privacy policies. That connection only exists if you authorize it; you can disconnect it at any time from that assistant’s own settings, and its access expires automatically afterward.

AI-generated trip souvenirs you create — the trip illustration and the retro trip page, which includes trip details like traveler first names and itinerary highlights — are stored with your trip and can be shared by link. Those links are deliberately long-lived so sharing keeps working: anyone who has one can view the souvenir until the trip is deleted.

Forwarded email

Email forwarding is how bookings get into Vacadock without retyping, so we want to be precise about it:

• Each trip’s forwarding address only accepts mail from the trip’s members and from sender addresses you have explicitly allowed. Mail from anyone else is rejected with a bounce notice and is not stored.
• Accepted emails are stored in full — body and attachments — with your trip, and remain there until you delete the attachment, the trip, or your account. They are visible to everyone the trip is shared with.
• Automated systems, including the AI providers listed above, analyze the email’s content to extract booking details (flights, hotels, reservations, confirmation numbers, costs). Nothing is filed to your trip until you review and confirm it.
• Forwarded emails often contain other people’s information (a spouse’s name on a reservation, an agent’s signature). Only forward emails you have the right to share.

Sharing, households, and what others can see

• People you invite to a trip see the whole trip — itinerary, bookings and their attachments, forwarded emails, notes, budget, and the trip’s assistant conversations — and can edit it. Only the trip owner can delete the trip or manage who has access.
• Households link accounts that plan together (for example, partners). A household member can add another Vacadock account to the household by its email address; once accounts are linked, household members automatically see and can edit all of each other’s trips, and their profiles are used together to personalize suggestions. You can leave a household at any time from your profile.
• Invite links let anyone who has the link preview the trip’s title, its cover illustration, and who invited them — and join the trip. Links stay valid until you disable or regenerate them from the trip’s Share screen.
• The activity feed shows your name alongside changes you make, to everyone on the trip.
• The trip owner can remove any collaborator’s access at any time.

Service providers we rely on

Vacadock runs on established cloud services that process data on our behalf, only to provide the product:

Each of these providers is bound by data-processing terms that require it to protect your information to a standard at least equal to this policy and to use it only to provide their service to us. Beyond these providers, we disclose personal information only if required by law, to protect the safety and integrity of the service, or as part of a merger or acquisition of the service (in which case this policy’s protections would continue to apply and we would notify you). We never sell your personal information and never share it for advertising. Because we don’t track visitors across other sites, there is nothing for a browser’s “Do Not Track” signal to change — we treat everyone as if it were on.

How long we keep data

• Your account and trip content (including forwarded emails and attachments) are kept until you delete them — there is no automatic expiry, because your trips are meant to be a lasting record.
• AI request logs are deleted automatically after 90 days.
• Server telemetry is retained for about 30 days.
• Inactive push registrations are removed after 90 days.
• Emails we have already sent (like a trip invitation) can’t be recalled, and residual copies of deleted data may persist in encrypted backups for a short period (no more than 30 days) before cycling out.

Delete your data

You can delete your data from Vacadock yourself, immediately and permanently, without contacting anyone:

• Delete a trip: open the trip’s options and choose Delete. This permanently removes the trip and everything in it — itinerary, bookings, notes, forwarded emails, attachments, conversations, and generated images.
• Delete your account: in the app or at app.vacadock.com, go to Profile → Delete account. This permanently deletes every trip you own (as above), your profile and household membership, your planning conversations and their uploaded files, your push registrations, pending invitations, and your Vacadock sign-in itself. There is no waiting period and no recovery.
• Delete individual items — attachments, conversations, notes, bookings — from within the trip at any time.

After account deletion, what remains is limited to: the time-limited operational records described above (AI request logs for up to 90 days, server telemetry for about 30 days, and residual copies in encrypted backups for a short period), all of which are deleted automatically; and content you added to trips owned by other people — your edits, your messages in those trips’ conversations, emails you forwarded to them, and activity entries — which stays with those trips, under their owners’ control. If you can’t access the app, email [email protected] from your account’s email address and we will delete the account for you.

Your rights

You can access and correct nearly everything Vacadock holds about you directly in the app — your profile, household, and trip content are all editable — and delete it as described above. Wherever you live, you can also contact us to access, correct, or delete your personal information; we will verify the request using your account email and respond within 30 days, and we will never treat you differently for exercising a privacy right.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland: we process your data to provide the service you signed up for (contract), to keep it secure and functioning (legitimate interests), and, for optional features like push notifications, with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. You additionally have the rights to object to or restrict processing, to data portability, and to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority.

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in California law, and we honor the rights to know, delete, and correct described above.

Where data is processed

Vacadock is operated from the United States and data is stored and processed there by the providers listed above. For users outside the US, transfers rely on safeguards in our providers’ data processing agreements, including Standard Contractual Clauses and, where applicable, the providers’ EU–US Data Privacy Framework certifications (Microsoft and Google are certified participants).

Security

Your data is encrypted in transit (HTTPS) and at rest, stored in access-controlled cloud infrastructure, and sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication rather than passwords stored on our servers. Attachment viewing uses short-lived signed links; the shareable links for AI-generated souvenirs are deliberately long-lived (so sharing keeps working) and stop working when the trip is deleted. No online service can promise perfect security, but we deliberately keep Vacadock’s footprint small: no ad tech, no trackers, no data resale — less collected means less at risk. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by law.

Children

Vacadock accounts are for adults and teens aged 13 and up (or the higher minimum age of your country); we do not knowingly let younger children create accounts, and we delete any account we learn belongs to a child under 13. Trips naturally contain information about children — the names, ages, and needs of kids traveling with you — entered by you, the account holder. That information is used only to make trip features work (kid-friendly suggestions, traveler lists), is never used for advertising, and is deleted with the trip or account. Please only add details about children in your care.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we will notify you by email or with a notice in the app before the changes take effect, and update the effective date above. Earlier, less significant edits (like clarified wording) may simply be posted here.

Contact

Vacadock is the data controller for the information described in this policy. For any privacy question or request, contact [email protected].