Legal

Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 22, 2026

ColdMinder (“ColdMinder”, “we”, “us”) is a fridge and freezer monitoring product (a smart-plug gateway, small wireless sensor pucks, and an app for iOS, Android, and the web) operated by ColdMinder LLC, a Virginia limited liability company.

This policy explains what data the product handles and why. We wrote it to match what the product actually does — nothing here is aspirational.

1. What we collect

1.1 Your account

• Email address and sign-in credential, handled through Firebase Authentication (a Google service). We use your email to identify your account and to contact you about your account or the service.
• Preferences you set in the app, such as °F vs °C and alert thresholds.

1.2 Your devices

• Device identifiers: the hardware (MAC) addresses and device IDs of your gateway plug and sensor pucks. These identify your ColdMinder hardware — not your phone — and we need them to bind your devices to your account so their readings reach you and nobody else.
• Push notification tokens for each phone or tablet where you enable alerts, so we can deliver notifications through Apple’s and Google’s push services.

1.3 Telemetry — the readings from your appliance

Your sensors and gateway report, with timestamps:

• Temperature and humidity inside the appliance.
• Sensor battery level.
• Sensor motion (accelerometer axes). This is the orientation and movement of the sensor puck itself — we use it to detect things like a door opening and closing or a puck that fell or was moved. It says nothing about you or your movements.
• Radio signal strength (RSSI) between sensor and gateway, and the gateway’s Wi-Fi signal strength and connection status. This is connection health, not location.
• The gateway plug’s electrical readings — power draw (watts), voltage, current, and cumulative energy — and the plug’s relay on/off state.

This telemetry is data about your appliance, and it is the product: it powers the live view, history charts, alerts, and diagnoses.

Sensors also record readings to their own onboard memory when they can’t reach the gateway (for example, during a power outage). Recovery is not automatic: when you choose Sync trip, the app reads that stored history over Bluetooth and uploads it; recovered data is labeled as recovered and any remaining gaps stay visible in your charts.

1.4 Information you enter about your appliances

Names you give appliances, appliance types, sensor placements (“top shelf”, “door”), and interior layouts you configure. This exists so the app can say “the top shelf is warming” instead of quoting a hardware address.

1.5 Household activity (audit log)

If your household has more than one member, we record actions that affect the shared household — for example who invited or removed a member, who changed settings, and who switched an appliance’s power if control mode is enabled. The household owner can view this log. That is its purpose: in a shared household, “who turned the freezer off” must be answerable.

1.6 Support

If you email us, we receive what you send. We use it to help you.

1.7 Waitlist (the signup form on coldminder.com)

If you give us your email address on our website, we store that address, when you gave it to us, and which form on the page you used. We use it to send the launch messages you requested. We do not sell it or use it for ads; Loops processes those messages for us.

That form is public and unauthenticated, so it also has to defend itself. To do that we store a one-way, salted hash of your IP address — never the IP address itself, and the hash cannot be turned back into one — and your browser’s user-agent string. Both exist to stop the form being used to flood our database or to sign other people up, and for nothing else.

A waitlist entry is not an account. Email privacy@coldminder.com and we will delete it.

1.8 Orders and email

When you order hardware, Stripe collects your name, email, shipping address, payment details, and order contents for checkout and fraud prevention. ColdMinder receives the contact, shipping, and order information needed to fulfill and support the purchase, but not your full card number. Postmark processes transactional messages such as order, shipment, account, and alert email. Loops processes waitlist and other marketing email you asked to receive.

2. Phone permissions — and the location permission, honestly

The app asks for:

• Bluetooth (iOS and Android) — to set up your gateway’s Wi-Fi during onboarding, and to read a sensor’s stored records during outage recovery.
• Camera (iOS and Android) — to scan your kit’s QR code. Images are processed on your device to read the code; we do not upload photos.
• A location permission, on both platforms, during setup only. Android requires a fine-location permission before an app may list nearby Wi-Fi networks (which we do so you can pick the network your gateway joins), and older Android versions require it for Bluetooth scanning. iOS similarly requires location permission to read your current Wi-Fi network name and find the gateway over Bluetooth during setup. We do not derive, collect, or store your location. The permission exists because the operating systems gate Wi-Fi and Bluetooth scanning behind it. On current Android versions our Bluetooth scanning is explicitly declared “never for location.”

3. What we do not collect

• No location data — see Section 2; the OS permission is not location collection.
• No contacts, photos, health data, or browsing history.
• No advertising identifiers, no ads, and no third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.

If we ever add crash reporting or analytics, we will update this section and our App Store privacy label before turning it on.

4. How we use data

We do not use your data for advertising. We do not sell or rent it to anyone.

5. Sharing you control

• Household members. You can invite family, housemates, or a landlord. They sign in with their own accounts and see the same appliances, according to the role you give them (owner, member, or viewer). Owners can remove members; members can leave.
• Recorded-air records / sharing. A proof link is a recorded-air record you choose to create for a selected period. The record is a saved snapshot: later readings do not rewrite it. Anyone with the link can view it until it expires (you pick the duration, currently 7 to 90 days) or you revoke it, which disables the page immediately. A proof link shows: the appliance’s name, its appliance type, a summary of temperature readings in and out of the safe range, and the safe band itself. It does not show your email, your account, or your device identifiers. Treat the link like the public page it is.

6. Service providers

These providers process data on our behalf to run the service. We do not give them your data for their own advertising use.

Our cloud providers process data under their standard data-processing terms (Google Cloud's Data Processing Addendum applies to our Firebase and Google Cloud use). Your data is stored in the United States (Google Cloud, us-central1 region).

7. Disclosures required by law

If we are legally required to disclose data, we will comply, and we will tell you unless the law prevents it.

8. Retention and deletion

• Telemetry is retained to power history features — long history is a core part of the product (charts, trends, and proof links depend on it). Readings from a deleted home become unreachable by any account, app, or link the moment the home is deleted, and are queued for purge from our analytics warehouse in periodic maintenance. That warehouse does not yet have a guaranteed deletion deadline, so we cannot enforce one today.
• Account data is kept while your account exists.
• Read-only links to saved recorded-air records: Until revoked or their selected expiry; links from a deleted home stop working immediately.
• Order records, including contact and shipping address, are retained as required for fulfillment, returns, warranty service, tax, accounting, and legal duties.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account in the app, yourself, at any time: Settings → Account → Delete account. You will be shown exactly what is about to happen and asked to type DELETE to confirm. No email, no support ticket, no waiting. The step-by-step is also written up at coldminder.com/delete-account.

What deletion removes, immediately:

• Every home where you are the only member is torn down: its appliances, sensor readings, alert history, alert settings, activity log, and any proof links you created from it. Any read-only links to saved recorded-air records that you created stop working immediately.
• Your profile data: temperature-unit preference, push-notification tokens, and your account’s household memberships.
• Your sign-in itself, from our authentication provider.

What deletion does not destroy — deliberately:

• Your hardware. Your gateway and sensors are released, not scrapped. The claim code that came in the box works again, so you (or whoever you give the hardware to) can set it up on a new account. Deleting an account does not brick a fridge monitor.
• Homes you share with other people. If you are a member of someone else’s home, you simply leave it. Their appliances and their history are theirs, and they keep them. Your departure is recorded in that home’s activity log, so the people still in it can see that the seat was vacated and by whom.

One case we stop you: if you are the only owner of a home that other people still use, deleting your account would leave them with nobody who can manage it. The app will ask you to make someone else an owner first (People → their name → Make owner), and then your deletion goes through as an ordinary departure. Nothing is deleted while you are in that state.

Backups holding deleted data roll off within 35 days. Records we must keep by law — order, tax, and warranty records tied to a hardware purchase — are retained for as long as the law requires and no longer, separate from your account.

9. Security

All app–server traffic uses TLS. Access to household data is enforced server-side and in database security rules: apps can read only their own household’s data, and all writes go through our API. Telemetry is accepted only from a broker-verified device identity, and readings from sensors not bound to your gateway are discarded. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not promise ours is — but isolation between households is a design requirement, not an afterthought.

10. Your rights

You can, at any time:

• See your data — your readings and history are visible in the app.
• Correct your account information and appliance details.
• Delete your account (Section 8).
• Withdraw sharing — remove household members, leave a household, or revoke proof links.

For access, export, correction, or deletion requests, email privacy@coldminder.com from your account email. We will verify the request is really from you before acting, and respond within the window the applicable law requires.

If you are in California, these correspond to your CCPA rights. We do not sell your personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

If you are in the EEA or UK, these correspond to your GDPR rights (access, rectification, erasure, portability, restriction, objection); our legal bases are performance of contract and legitimate interests (service security and improvement); and you may lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority. We are honest about our current size: we have not appointed a Data Protection Officer or an EU/UK representative — we sell only in the US today, and will assess GDPR Article 27 representation before selling outside it.

11. Children

ColdMinder is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email privacy@coldminder.com and we will delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters — new data types, new purposes, new sharing — we will notify you in the app or by email before the change takes effect. The current version lives at coldminder.com/privacy.

13. Contact

• Privacy requests: privacy@coldminder.com
• Everything else: founder-led email support at support@coldminder.com. No guaranteed response time is published yet.

ColdMinder LLC
8401 Mayland Dr Ste A
Richmond, VA 23294
USA