What a family calendar app knows about you, and what to ask before you trust one
A family calendar is one of the most revealing things you can hand to an app: where you are on a Tuesday afternoon, which clients you meet, which school your children go to, when the house is empty. Before connecting one, the questions worth asking are where the events end up, who inside the family can see what, what reaches a model if the app has an assistant, and what happens when you leave.
This page is those questions, with our own answers to each. Alfie is our product; check any of it against our privacy policy.
Where do the events end up?
There are two designs. An app can hold its own calendar, in which case everything lives with it. Or it can connect to the calendars you already use and keep a copy so it can draw the week and answer questions.
Alfie is the second. Events stay in the calendars they came from — Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com, iCloud, or any CalDAV server. Alfie keeps a synced copy, and deletes that copy when the account is disconnected. Google reviewed and approved Alfie's access to Google Calendar in September 2026.
How are the keys to your calendar stored?
Connecting a calendar means giving an app a token, or in the case of iCloud and CalDAV an app-specific password. Ask how those are kept.
In Alfie, provider tokens and CalDAV passwords are encrypted with AES-256-GCM before they are stored. Traffic between you and Alfie, and between Alfie and every calendar service, uses TLS. Your own password is stored only as a hash.
Who in the family sees what?
This is the question most often skipped, and the one families actually run into. Sharing a calendar with a household is not all-or-nothing in real life: a work calendar is exactly the one you do not want to share in full.
Alfie sets it per calendar, once, for the whole household: Full details, Busy only or Hidden. A calendar marked as a work calendar starts at busy only, so the family sees the time as taken and nothing else.
The filter is applied where the data is read, not in the interface, so it holds for the schedule, for search and for the assistant alike.
What reaches the model?
If the app has an assistant, something is being sent to a language model. Ask what.
Alfie sends a third-party large language model the conversation so far — your questions, its answers and the entries it looked up earlier in it — together with the entries needed for the new question. Those entries are already filtered by what the person asking is allowed to see. It never sends a whole calendar history, and never a calendar the household has not shared with the person asking. That data is not permitted to be used to train the model.
What about the children?
Children under 13 generally cannot hold accounts, and an app that needs one for each child is asking for something a parent should not have to give.
In Alfie a child is a profile: a name, their own calendar, managed by a parent, with no account, email address or password. Alfie does not offer accounts to children under 13 and does not knowingly collect personal data directly from them.
How do you leave?
Two separate things: disconnecting one calendar, and deleting the account.
Disconnect a calendar account in Alfie and it deletes the calendars that account brought in, the events copied from them, and the stored token or password. The calendars themselves stay where they are, in Google, Microsoft or wherever they came from.
An account and everything belonging to it is deleted on request: write to support@alfie.family from the address on the account. That removes the account, its place in every household, the profiles only it managed, any household nobody else has an account in, and its calendar data.
What is it paid for with?
An app with no price still has a business model, and for a calendar the obvious one is the data.
Alfie is free to use, assistant included. Nothing is sold, and nothing is used for advertising. The assistant will later come with a monthly free allowance and paid plans or usage packs beyond it, announced before anything changes.
To look at it yourself, create a household — it takes about ten minutes, and you can disconnect a calendar again in one click.