Privacy

alfie.care is this website. It asks you for nothing: there is no form on it and no account behind it.

app.alfie.care is the software, where a home’s records live. That is where everything this page describes is held. The two are different addresses, run different ways, and this page covers both.

The app has no password. An account exists for one of two reasons: we made it for a named person at a home we work with, or somebody paid for a home and became its owner.

There are two doors. Most people sign in through Google. If the address you use is not a Google account, you ask for a link instead and we email you one. It lasts fifteen minutes, it works once, and the database holds only a sha256 of it.

We ask Google for three things: openid, email and profile. What comes back, and what we then keep, is your name, your email address and the account number Google uses for you. That is the whole list. We do not ask for and cannot read your mail, your files, your calendar or your contacts.

We keep those three because every document filed in Alfie records who filed it, and so does every look at a resident’s record. A home has to be able to say who did what. So do we.

We never see your Google password. We read what Google sends once, at sign-in. After that the session is ours: a random value in a cookie, and the database holds only a sha256 of that too. We store no Google token of any kind. We sell none of it and rent none of it. Nobody advertises with it, and it goes to no other company.

Ask and we close the account and delete the name, the email address and the Google id. One thing outlives that, and it should. The log of what was filed, and of who looked at a resident’s record, cannot be edited or deleted by anybody, including us.

Most of what Alfie holds is photographs of a binder: face sheets, health assessments, medication records, staff training certificates. A good deal of that is medical detail about a resident, which makes it protected health information under HIPAA.

Those records belong to the home. We hold them on the home’s behalf and under a signed agreement with it, which under HIPAA makes us a business associate rather than the owner of the records. We keep medical detail inside the photograph and type in only what the work needs: a name, a date of birth, admission and discharge dates. No social security number, no Medicaid number, no next of kin, no telephone.

Photographs sit in Google Cloud storage, encrypted under a key we hold. Only the accounts that have to read a photograph can open one, and Alfie writes down every read it makes.

A resident, or somebody acting for them, has a right to a copy of their record under 45 CFR §164.524. That request goes to the home. The home asks us, and we produce all of it: every field, every document, every page, and the trail of who looked.

Nothing here is measuring you. There is no analytics package and no advertising pixel, in the app or on this website, and no third-party script runs in either. This website now stores nothing in your browser at all: it used to keep one value remembering which of two versions of the page you had landed on, and there is only one page now.

The app stores one cookie, holding your session. It is HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite, and it expires.

That is everything. We did not build a way to follow you anywhere else.

• Google Cloud runs the app, the database and the photograph storage, in Google’s South Carolina region. Google has signed a business associate agreement covering those services.
• Cloudflare serves this website and answers DNS for both names. It sees nothing at all from the app, because the address for app.alfie.care points straight at Google instead of through Cloudflare, so a phone talks to the app without Cloudflare in the middle.
• Stripe takes the payment when somebody buys a home. The card details go to Stripe and never to us, because the payment page is theirs and sits on their own address. What comes back to us is that the home is paid, the customer and subscription numbers Stripe uses for it, and the email address given at the checkout.
• Amazon Web Services will read photographs and turn them into typed records. That is switched off, and when it is switched on it runs inside an account we control, under a signed business associate agreement.

No advertising network, analytics company or data broker holds any of it, and none ever has.

The date at the top moves when the words do. If a change matters to somebody already using Alfie, we tell them rather than leave it here to be found.

Email privacy@alfie.care, or call or text (407) 349-7220. The person who wrote the software answers both.

To ask for a copy of a resident’s record, or to have one corrected, start with the home. We answer to the home for its residents’ records, which is what the agreement between us says.