Privacy policy
Last updated: 20 October 2026
In short: The Ladybird Club collects only what it needs to work as a period tracker, keeps it in the EU, never sells it or shows ads, and never shows a parent what a girl writes in her journal.
The short version, for girls
- The Ladybird Club saves what you track and write so it can show you your patterns.
- Your journal and what you log each day are yours. A parent never sees them.
- A connected parent may see where you are in your cycle, and messages you choose to send them, depending on their plan.
- Sometimes The Ladybird Club may tell your parent that a gentle check-in might help. It never shares your words.
- We never sell your information or show you ads.
- You can download a copy of your information, or delete your account, in your profile at any time.
Who we are
The Ladybird Club is run by Elisabeth Halaczinsky, Partida dels Quadros 38, 03740 Gata de Gorgos, Alicante, Spain. We are responsible for your information (the "data controller" under data protection law).
Questions, requests or worries about your information: email hello@designbyellie.me. We reply within one month, and usually much sooner.
What The Ladybird Club is (and isn't)
The Ladybird Club is a period tracker that helps girls understand their cycles, hormones and the patterns between their periods, feelings, sleep and everyday life. It isn't a mental health app, a clinical screening tool or a safeguarding service.
Now and then, what she tracks may suggest something worth a gentle check-in, and we'll let her connected parent know. These notes can miss things and can't tell how serious something is, and nobody at The Ladybird Club watches them around the clock.
The Ladybird Club is for girls aged 9 and up, with an optional parent side.
What we collect from girls
| What | Why | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Username and password (protected by hashing, never stored in readable form) | To sign in | Yes |
| Email address | To sign in, reset a password and send account emails | Yes |
| Age in years (never a date of birth) and country | To check whether a parent's permission is needed | Yes |
| A parent's or guardian's email address | To ask for permission if her age needs it, or otherwise to let them know she's joined and tell them about the parent side | Yes |
| Who agreed (her, or her parent), to which wording, and when | To show permission was given | Yes |
| What she tracks: period days and flow, mood, energy, sleep, skin, body (including headaches and other symptoms), discharge, food, focus, screen time, social time, self-care and being unwell (including illnesses she names, like a cold or a toothache), plus her answers about her period at sign-up, and when each answer was saved | To show her patterns and cycle predictions | She chooses what to track |
| Journal entries, with the mood she picks, any prompt she answered, and when she wrote them | Her private journal | Optional |
| Messages she chooses to send her parent, with her parent's reaction | So she can share something when she wants to | Optional |
| Birthday, day and month only (never the year) | For a birthday message | Optional |
| Points, levels, badges, chosen icon and background, articles read and calm moments done (quiz answers stay on her phone) | Rewards and her reading progress | Created as she uses the app |
| Time zone and when she last used the app | So her days start at the right time, and to delete accounts no longer used | Created automatically |
| Safety notes: the level, a general category, the time, a short message written by the app (which can name an illness she logged, never her own words), and when a parent saw it | To prompt a parent check-in (see below) | Created automatically |
We don't collect her location (beyond her country and time zone), photos, contacts or anything from other apps. Some of her information is also kept on her phone, so the app works offline. When she signs out, it's cleared, except entries not yet saved to our server, which stay on that phone, hidden from anyone else, until she signs in there again.
What we collect from parents
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Name, email address (confirmed with a code) and password (protected by hashing) | To sign in and send account emails |
| Which daughter or daughters you're connected to, when you connected, and family plan links | To show you the right information |
| Family invites you send (the invited person's email address) and requests to connect (your name and email, shown to her connected parent) | To add a second parent safely |
| Your plan (free or paid) and whether it's active | To give you your plan's features. We don't take payments in the app yet; when we do, Apple will handle them and we'll never see card details |
| Observations you note at home, with where she was in her cycle that day | For your own comparison with her tracking |
| Which safety notes you've seen, and your reactions to her messages | So the app shows you what's new |
| Your email preferences (alert and message emails) | To send only the emails you want |
| If you turn on notifications: your phone's notification address, and your notification preferences | To send you a discreet notification when she sends you a message or there's a serious note. It's deleted when you sign out, your sign-in ends, or you delete your account |
| The permission you gave, with the date and version | To show permission was given |
Why we use it, and permission
We use information only to run The Ladybird Club for you. We never sell it, never use it for advertising, and never share it with anyone except the services listed below that help us run the app.
- Providing the app (the agreement between us): your account, tracking, journal, rewards, messages and emails.
- Her health information (period, symptoms, mood and similar) is a special kind of personal data. We only use it with explicit permission: her own, or her parent's if she's under her country's age for giving it herself.
- Keeping The Ladybird Club safe and working (our legitimate interest): security, preventing misuse, and technical error reports that contain no personal details.
- Legal duties: keeping records of permission, and answering requests from you or the authorities.
Age and permission. Below a certain age, a parent must give permission for a girl to use The Ladybird Club. That age depends on her country, for example 14 in Spain, 13 in the UK and the USA, 15 in France and 16 in Germany. Where a country isn't listed, we ask for a parent's permission for every girl under 18. The parent gets an email, reads what The Ladybird Club collects, gives permission, and receives a code to start her account. Until then, we keep only her sign-up details so we can ask her parent; nothing she tracks or writes is saved, though she can read articles and use calm moments. She can also cancel her sign-up from the waiting screen at any time.
For girls old enough to agree for themselves, we still email the parent or guardian she names, to let them know she's joined and to tell them about the parent side of The Ladybird Club.
When she reaches her country's age, the decision passes to her, and she can agree for herself. Connected parents keep their access unless she unlinks them.
What parents can and can't see
A parent never sees her words: her journal entries, the answers she logs each day, or anything she wrote that led to a safety note. The only words a parent can read are messages she chooses to send them, on the paid plan.
| What a parent sees | Free parent account | Paid parent plan |
|---|---|---|
| Serious (red) safety notes: level, general category and time | Yes | Yes |
| All safety note levels | No | Yes |
| That she sent a message | Yes | Yes |
| The message itself and the day she sent it (messages sent since the parent connected, plus her most recent one from before) | No | Yes |
| Her patterns and where she is in her cycle (for example, day 8), and when her next period might come | No | Yes |
| A daily wellbeing score and a comparison with what the parent notices at home | No | Yes |
| How regularly she tracks, and how much of the library she has read, shown only as a general level | No | Yes |
| Her points, level, streak, badges, chosen icon or background, or when she last checked in | Never | Never |
| Her journal words, daily answers or discharge details | Never | Never |
Totals and patterns on a parent's dashboard only cover days up to the end of the previous week, so no single day's answers can be worked out.
Safety notes. Sometimes what she tracks or writes may suggest a gentle check-in would help. Her parent then gets a general note, never her words. These notes can miss things and can't tell how serious something is, and nobody at The Ladybird Club reads them or watches around the clock.
When someone else may be hurting her. If what she writes suggests someone is hurting her, including at home, pressuring her sexually, or making her feel unsafe, her parent is not told, because we can't know whether that parent is the right person to tell. Instead, she sees a gentle note pointing her to an adult she trusts. Two kinds of note do still reach parents: threats online, blackmail or requests for pictures (a serious note), and bullying (a lower-level note, paid plan only).
Safety notes are automatic, so they can be wrong or miss something important. The Ladybird Club isn't an emergency service. If she ever feels unsafe, she should get to a safe adult straight away, or call the local emergency number.
She can see which parents are connected, and can unlink any of them at any time. An unlinked parent no longer sees her patterns or messages, but still gets general safety notes. Anything a parent already downloaded stays with them.
Who helps us run The Ladybird Club
These services handle information only on our instructions, under data processing agreements, and can't use it for anything else.
| Service | What it does | Where the data is |
|---|---|---|
| Neon (part of Databricks) | Stores the app's database | Frankfurt, Germany (EU) |
| Render | Runs the app's server | Frankfurt, Germany (EU) |
| Resend | Sends the app's emails | Ireland (EU) |
| Sentry | Technical error reports, with no names, emails, journal words or tracking answers | Germany (EU) |
| UptimeRobot | Checks the app is online (no personal data) | Not applicable |
| Apple | The App Store and TestFlight, notifications to parents' phones (which never show her words), and parent plan payments once they're added | Under Apple's own privacy policy |
Some of these companies are based in the USA. Where any information could be reached from outside the EU, it's protected by safeguards approved by the EU, such as Standard Contractual Clauses or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.
How long we keep it
- While the account is open: we keep her information so the app works, until she or her parent deletes it.
- Deleting an account: everything about her is removed, including her tracking, journal, messages and permission records. She can do this in her profile at any time; a parent who gave permission can withdraw it, which closes her account. A few traces remain briefly: the confirmation email itself, our services' short-term logs, and the database's history (up to 7 days).
- Accounts no longer used: if she doesn't open the app for 12 months, her account is deleted. We email her, her connected parents and the parent who gave permission at 6 months, 11 months and 48 hours before, and opening the app at any point keeps it.
- Waiting for permission: if a parent doesn't give permission within 14 days, the sign-up is deleted. She can also cancel it herself from the waiting screen.
- Parent accounts: kept until the parent deletes theirs; deleting it also removes their observations about her. Her account and her information stay hers.
- Backups: the database keeps up to 7 days of history for recovering from mistakes; deleted information leaves it within 7 days.
- Error reports and email records: kept only for a limited time by Sentry and Resend.
Keeping it safe
- Everything travels encrypted between the app and our server.
- Her journal entries, with their mood and prompt, are encrypted before they're stored in the database. The key is kept separately, so the stored entries can't be read on their own. This isn't end-to-end encryption: the app's server can unlock them to show her own journal back to her.
- Passwords are protected by hashing, so they're never stored in readable form. Codes we email are stored scrambled with a secret key.
- Parents confirm their email address with a code before they can connect to a daughter.
- Access to our systems is limited and protected with two-step sign-in.
- No online service can promise perfect security. If personal data were ever exposed, we'd act straight away and tell the authorities and the families affected where the law requires it.
Your rights
You can ask us at any time to:
- see the information we hold (girls and parents can download a copy from their profile);
- correct anything that's wrong;
- delete it (in the profile, or by emailing us);
- withdraw permission (a parent who gave it, or a girl who agreed for herself; this closes her account);
- object to or limit how we use it;
- take a copy to use elsewhere.
A girl can use these rights herself, and so can the parent who gave permission while she's below her country's age. Email hello@designbyellie.me, and we'll reply within one month.
Withdrawing permission stops what we do from then on; it doesn't make what we did before unlawful. A parent's rights depend on her age and the law where she lives, so a parent can't always see everything about her.
Storage on your phone, ads and tracking
The app stores a little information on your phone so it works: keeping you signed in (in the phone's secure storage), saving entries while you're offline, and your settings. When she signs out, everything of hers is cleared from the phone, except entries not yet saved to our server, which stay hidden on that phone until she signs in there again.
The Ladybird Club has no advertising, no tracking across other apps or websites, and no selling of data. Our website has its own cookie information at theladybirdclub.com/cookies.
Changes and complaints
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we'll tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and ask for permission again where the law requires it.
If you're unhappy with how we handle your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to a data protection authority: in Spain, the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos (aepd.es); in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk); or the authority where you live. You don't have to contact us before complaining to an authority.