Privacy notice

Who we are

The Wash Guide is operated by Obasien Group Ltd (“we”, “us”), a company registered in England and Wales under company number 17314957 and the data controller for the personal data described here. Our registered office is at 128 City Road, London EC1V 2NX. You can reach us about privacy at privacy@thewashguide.app.

This website and the waitlist

When you join the waitlist we collect your email address, a note of which form you used (for example, the one on the homepage or the one at the foot of an article) and the date and time you joined. We use it for one purpose: to let you know when the iPhone app launches, plus a single note confirming you have joined. The lawful basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

The website sets no advertising or analytics cookies and does not track you across other sites. We do measure how the site is used, with Vercel Web Analytics, which is deliberately cookieless. It records which pages were visited, the site or search engine you arrived from, your approximate country, and the broad type of device and browser. It stores nothing on your device and keeps no IP address. So that one person visiting twice in a day is not counted as two, it derives a one-way hash from the incoming request using a value that is replaced every twenty-four hours; nothing in it can be traced back to you, or followed from one day to the next. The lawful basis is our legitimate interest in knowing which pages are worth keeping, and because nothing is stored on or read from your device, no consent banner is needed.

Separately, our hosting provider processes basic technical information, such as your IP address and request logs, to serve the site securely and reliably.

The app: your account

Much of the app works without an account: the dosing calculator, the catalogue, your inventory and the Learn pages all run on your device alone. If you create an account (by email magic link or by signing in with Google), we hold your email address, a display name you choose, an optional avatar photo you pick and crop yourself, and the account identifier that ties your data together. The lawful basis is our contract with you: this is the data it takes to provide the account you asked for.

If you join a household, the members of that household can see your display name, avatar and email address, along with the household’s shared content: its name, member monikers, wash assignments, custom detergent names, custom reward names and any pack prices you enter in the savings ledger. Those prices are notes you type in, not payment details; the app never handles payment cards or bank accounts.

A junior’s account holds the same and no more: the name they chose, an optional photograph, their role, their wash personality and how much washing they have logged, visible to the other members of their own household and to nobody else.

One plain fact about the photograph. Avatars are stored so that only you can change yours, but the stored file itself is readable by anyone holding its exact address, which is a long random identifier that is never listed anywhere and cannot be guessed. In practice your photograph is seen by your household and nobody else; we put it this way because “only your household can see it” would be a claim about the storage we could not literally stand behind.

How old you must be

The service is for people aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13, and if we learn that we have, we delete it. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child under 13 has an account, write to privacy@thewashguide.app and we will put it right.

The app: PRO subscriptions

If you buy a PRO subscription, the purchase happens with the store, not with us. Apple or Google tells us that a purchase was made, and we keep a record of the entitlement: which plan, when it renews, and which account it belongs to. We never see a card number, a billing address or anything else about the payment. The lawful basis is our contract with you, and the record is deleted with your account.

The app: your wash history, backed up and shared, which are two different things

Backup comes with signing in. A signed-in account backs up its own wash history, cupboard and household to our servers as a feature: it is what lets everything travel with you to a new phone, and it is what runs the features you see, such as your wash personality and the yearly Unwrapped. A wash event records things like temperature, detergent format, fabric and dose; there is no free text and no location in it. The lawful basis is our contract with you, and deleting your account deletes the lot.

Sharing is separate, and it is the opt-in.The app also has an anonymised sharing channel, governed by its own toggle and off until you turn it on. That is the channel the app’s “nothing personal leaves the device” promise is about, and the same opt-in covers simple feature-usage signals (the name of a feature and when it was used), which help us understand what is genuinely useful. The lawful basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it in the app’s settings at any time without touching your account or its backup.

The app: notifications and crash reports

If you allow notifications, we store a push token for your device so a household wash assignment can reach you; it is deleted with your account. A Firebase Installations identifier rides alongside it on both platforms, which is how a message finds the right installation of the app.

For stability, the app uses Google Firebase Crashlytics, which collects crash logs, diagnostic information and device identifiers (Firebase installation IDs) so we can group and fix crashes. Two things are worth saying plainly. Crash reports are not linked to a person: the app deliberately sets no user identifier, so a report ties to a build and a device installation rather than to your account, and the App Store privacy label says the same. And a junior’s device reports nothing: collection switches off, and anything already queued is deleted, the moment a device learns it belongs to a household junior. Crash reporting is part of keeping the app working and runs on our legitimate interest in a stable service. The app shows no adverts, contains no advertising ID and never asks for your location.

One nuance worth stating: the app’s smart-home features can, at your direction, send messages to your own equipment on your own network (an MQTT broker or a webhook you configure). That traffic goes where you point it and never passes through our servers.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for anyone else’s marketing. A small number of service providers handle data on our behalf, under contract: Supabase, which runs our database, sign-in and file storage; Vercel, which hosts this website and provides its cookieless analytics; Resend, which delivers our waitlist emails; Google (Firebase), which delivers push notifications and processes crash reports; and Apple, which processes App Store purchases and delivers notifications to iPhones. Google Play does the same for purchases made on Android.

Our database is stored in the European Economic Area (Ireland). Where any provider processes personal data outside the UK or the EEA, we rely on appropriate safeguards, such as UK adequacy regulations, the UK International Data Transfer Agreement, or equivalent standard contractual clauses.

How long we keep it

Waitlist emails are kept until the app launches and you have received the launch email, or until you ask us to remove yours, whichever comes first. Account data is kept for as long as you have the account and erased when you delete it. Crash reports are kept by Firebase for a limited period (roughly ninety days) and then roll off. Website analytics are aggregate counts held by Vercel for the period our plan allows; they carry no identifier for you, so there is nothing in them to return or erase.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account and everything attached to it, at any time, in two ways: from the app’s settings, or on the web at thewashguide.app/delete-account without the app installed. Deletion erases your wash history, profile, household membership, push tokens and avatar, then the account itself, permanently. If you would rather remove less than everything, the app’s settings hold the finer controls, including withdrawing the sharing opt-in on its own.

Your rights

Under the UK GDPR you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
• have inaccurate data corrected;
• have your data erased;
• restrict or object to how we use it;
• ask us to port your data elsewhere; and
• withdraw your consent at any time.

To exercise any of these, email privacy@thewashguide.app and we will respond within one month.

Withdrawing consent

Consent is withdrawn where it was given: the waitlist by emailing us or using the unsubscribe link in any email we send, and wash-history sync in the app’s settings. Withdrawing consent does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the UK’s data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk. We would appreciate the chance to put things right first.

Changes to this notice

If we change how we handle your data, we will update this page and change the date at the top.