18/25
apps earned Mozilla’s privacy warning label
Of 25 popular pregnancy and reproductive-health apps and wearables reviewed, 18 failed Mozilla’s privacy expectations — most collecting far more than they need and sharing it widely.
Privacy · checkable, not promised
Your baby’s first months are not a data product.
A baby log is intimate by nature — every feed, every wake-up, your family’s whole daily rhythm. Much of the parenting-app economy treats that as inventory: researchers keep catching popular apps sharing data with brokers, advertisers and social networks. mybabynotes takes the boring way out: no ads, no analytics SDKs, no telemetry, one SQLite file — and it’s open source, so “trust us” isn’t part of the deal.
No ads · No analytics SDKs · Open source (AGPL) · Export everything, anytime
The category’s track record
Researchers keep checking family apps. The results keep being bad.
Mozilla’s *Privacy Not Included team audited the pregnancy- and family-tracking category — the same app economy every baby tracker lives in. Worth knowing before you pour a year of your family’s life into one.
8
failed even minimum security standards
Eight of the reviewed apps couldn’t meet Mozilla’s baseline — things like encryption and having a way to report vulnerabilities. One popular app had no privacy policy at all.
“Sell”
is in real parenting apps’ own policies
Mozilla found major parenting brands sharing data with data brokers and social networks — one stating it “may sell or transfer” user data to advertisers. This is the mainstream of the category, not its fringe.
0
trackers, ad SDKs or telemetry in mybabynotes
Not “minimal”, not “anonymized” — none. The code is public, so anyone can verify what leaves your phone: your log syncing to your household, and nothing else.
Sources: Mozilla Foundation, *Privacy Not Included (2022) · The Register’s coverage · Gizmodo’s coverage · mybabynotes claims are verifiable in the source code
Privacy by architecture
Not a policy you have to believe. A design you can check.
Open source, auditable
The whole app is AGPL on GitHub. Privacy policies describe intentions; source code describes behavior. Anyone — you, a security researcher, your one paranoid friend — can read exactly what it does with your data.
Self-host: data never leaves home
Run it on your own box — Unraid, Docker Compose, a Raspberry Pi in the closet — and your baby’s log lives in one SQLite file on hardware you own. The maximum-privacy option is also the free one, and it’s not a stripped-down demo. Install guide →
Invite-only, role-scoped
No public profiles, no discovery, no social layer. A household is up to six invited adults; caregivers can log but can’t change settings or membership. The only people who see your baby’s day are the ones you handed a code to. How sharing works →
Leaving is a feature
CSV export of everything, from Settings, on every plan. Move from hosted to self-hosted (or out entirely) whenever you like. Data you can’t take with you was never really yours — that’s the test we built to pass.
Honesty note: hosted means our servers hold your household’s log so it can sync and be backed up — that’s the service. What we don’t do is mine it, profile it, share it or sell it, and the same code with the same guarantees runs at home if “don’t” isn’t enough for you.
Fair questions
What data does mybabynotes collect about my family?
Only what you type into the log — feeds, diapers, sleep, notes — plus the email addresses used for household invites. There are no analytics SDKs, no ad networks, no telemetry, and nothing is shared with or sold to anyone. Self-hosted, the data never leaves your server at all; the code is open source, so this is checkable, not a promise.
Is a hosted account private too?
Yes — hosted runs the exact same open-source code, with no trackers added. What hosted adds is operational: our servers, nightly off-site backups, and email delivery for invites and password resets. Your log is your household’s; we don’t mine it, profile it, or share it. And you can export a CSV and move to self-hosting whenever you like.
Aren’t the Mozilla findings about pregnancy apps, not baby trackers?
Mostly, yes — Mozilla’s 2022 review covered pregnancy and period-tracking apps and wearables, and we cite it as evidence about the family-app economy, not about any specific baby tracker. But the overlap is real: several flagged brands run parenting and baby products on the same data practices, and baby trackers sit in the same ad-funded ecosystem. Our answer is structural either way: nothing to leak, nothing to sell, code you can read.
Keep the baby book in the family.
One private log for your household — on our server or yours.