This policy covers the Arooqa family-history app and the contact form on this website. It does not cover Arooqa Care program participation or the care-team web app.Learn about Arooqa Care.
This draft describes the Arooqa family-history app, which stores your history and documents on your device, including its optional Apple Health connection. Changes to the app's data practices require an updated policy and an explanation of your choices.
The short version
- Your health information is stored on your phone.
- No account is required to keep your family's history locally.
- There is no Arooqa cloud synchronization. We do not receive copies of your records.
- There is no advertising in the app and no advertising SDK.
- We do not sell health data. We do not have it.
- There is no cloud AI processing. Any document reading happens on the device or not at all.
- If you connect the Apple Health app, Arooqa only reads the readings you allow, keeps them on your phone, and never writes to Apple Health.
- The app asks whether a newer version of its document reader is available. That request carries nothing about you, your family or your documents, and you can switch it off.
Information the app stores on your device
You decide what to enter. This may include the names and dates of birth of family members, measurements, medications, conditions, allergies, visits, immunizations, notes, and photos or PDFs of medical documents. The app also records where each piece of information came from (for example, entered by you or read from a scanned document), whether you have said you checked it, and how much you said you were checking when you did.
This information stays inside the app's private storage on your device. It is protected by your device's own security (passcode, biometrics, and platform encryption). Where the app build supports it, the local database is additionally encrypted with a key kept in the device's secure keystore.
Information we receive
The current family-history app sends us no health information. The app does not include behavioral analytics or crash-reporting services, and it never transmits your records, your documents, or the names of the people in your family.
The app makes one kind of network request. Most of what Arooqa knows about reading a medical document is ordinary application code rather than part of the installed binary, so a correction to how a lab report is read can reach you without waiting for an app store review. To find those corrections, the app asks an update service, operated for us by Expo, whether a newer version of that code exists. The request carries the app's version, the platform it is running on, which release track it follows, and a random identifier created when the app was installed, which is not connected to you or to any account. As with any request over the internet, the service also sees your device's IP address. It does not carry your health information, because the app never sends that anywhere.
You can turn this off in Settings, under "Keeping the reader current". With it off the app makes no network request at all, and improvements to reading reach you only when you update the app from the App Store. An update received this way changes how Arooqa reads a document; it never changes, uploads or deletes anything you have already saved.
If you contact us for support, we receive whatever you choose to include in your message. Please do not send medical documents to support.
Website contact form
When you use the contact form on this website, we receive your name, email address, enquiry topic, and message so we can respond. The website is hosted by Vercel, which processes the submission, and Resend delivers it to our team by email. These providers also process technical information needed to operate their services, such as IP addresses. Please do not include medical documents or health details. Contact messages are separate from the records kept locally in your Arooqa app.
Device backups
Arooqa's health database, which holds your records and any readings from the Apple Health app, is excluded from your device's backup, including iCloud Backup. Its encryption key never leaves your phone, so a backed-up copy could not be opened elsewhere in any case. To move your history to a new phone, export an archive from Arooqa and restore it there.
Original documents you scan or import are ordinary files and may be included in your device's own backup, according to your device settings. Those backups are governed by Apple's or Google's terms, not by Arooqa.
Camera and documents
The camera is used only when you choose to scan a document. Scanned images and imported files are saved to the app's private storage on your device and are not uploaded anywhere.
Apple Health
Connecting the Apple Health app is optional, and you choose which family member its readings belong to. When connected, Arooqa reads blood pressure, blood glucose, weight, oxygen saturation and body temperature readings that the Apple Health app on your iPhone allows it to read. It only reads: it never writes to Apple Health.
Readings are kept in the app's private storage on your device with the rest of your history, marked with the device or app they came from. They are not sent to us or to anyone else, they are not used for advertising or marketing, they are never sold, and they are never stored in iCloud: the database that holds them is excluded from device backup.
You can stop at any time: disconnect Apple Health in Arooqa's Settings, or turn offArooqa's access in the Apple Health app. Readings you already kept stay in your history until you delete them.
On-device intelligence
The current iPhone development build uses the operating system's built-in text recognition to offer basic lab-style values for review. This processing happens on the device. It can miss or misread information, and it refuses rather than guessing when it cannot read something — the original remains visible, and anything it could not read is listed with the page to look at. Android document reading is still under development. Saving a result is not the same as checking it: nothing is treated as confirmed health information until you say you checked it.
Children
Arooqa is designed to let adults keep records for their family, including children. The app is not directed at children as users.
Your control
Because your data is on your device, you can delete it at any time by deleting records in the app or by removing the app. Settings offers export of the whole family history, including original documents, and restore from that archive. Export an archive before removing the app if you want to keep a copy outside it.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page when the app's data practices change, and the "last updated" date above will change with it.
Contact
See the contact page for how to reach us.