Privacy notice

The care company you receive care from, or work for, is the data controller. They decide what information is recorded about you and why. If you are a client, that is the company providing your care. If you are a carer, it is your employer.

My Care Academy is a data processor. We supply and run the software and store the information in it on the care company’s instructions. We do not decide what is collected, we do not use it for our own purposes, and we do not sell it or share it for advertising.

My Care Academy is operated by HG Care, Unit A1, The Embankment, Vale Road, Stockport, SK4 3GN — registered in England and Wales, company number 04626258, and registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office under reference ZA474115.

HG Care is also one of the care companies that uses the software. Where you receive care from, or work for, HG Care, they are your data controller as well as the operator. Where you deal with a different care company, that company is your controller and HG Care only processes the information on their instructions.

This matters for your rights: a request to see, correct or delete your information should go to the care company first. Their details are on any letter or care plan they have given you. If you contact us instead we will pass it to them, but they are the ones who can answer it.

The app is used by care staff at work. It records:

• Location, at the moment a carer starts and finishes a visit. This confirms the visit happened at the client’s home. It is read only when the carer taps to log in or out — the app does not track anyone between visits, and it does not run in the background.
• Photographs the carer takes for a visit, such as evidence that a task was completed, or a body map recording a mark or injury. These become part of the client’s care record.
• What happened on the visit — the tasks done, notes, medication prompts, food and drink, and the times of arrival and departure.
• Messages between the carer and the office.
• Employment records — the rota, hours worked, training, supervisions, and where a company uses it, reward points.
• A device identifier for notifications, if the carer turns them on. It identifies the handset, not the person, and is deleted when notifications are turned off.

The app does not collect contacts, browsing history, advertising identifiers, or anything about what a carer does outside work.

Care records contain information about a person’s health, and sometimes their religion, ethnicity or sexuality where that affects their care. UK data protection law treats this as special category data and sets a higher bar for handling it.

The care company records it because it is necessary to provide health and social care, and to meet the standards their regulator holds them to. It is visible to the staff involved in that person’s care and to the office staff who manage it — not to anyone else.

If a carer turns notifications on, we send them through Apple and Google’s notification services, which means those companies handle the message on its way to the phone.

We never put a client’s name or any detail of their care in a notification. A message notification says who it is from and nothing more. This is deliberate: a notification appears on a locked screen that other people can see.

Information is held in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, on infrastructure provided by Supabase and Vercel.

Some features send text to Anthropic’s Claude to help staff draft documents such as a complaint response. Where that happens, the text is used to produce that document and is not used to train any model.

The care company decides this, and their retention schedule applies. Adult social care records are typically kept for eight years after care ends; staff employment records are usually kept for six years after employment ends. Records connected to a complaint, a safeguarding concern or an investigation are kept until that is closed and any appeal period has passed.

When a care company stops using My Care Academy, we return or delete their information on their instruction.

Under UK data protection law you can ask to see the information held about you, to have mistakes corrected, to have it deleted where there is no good reason to keep it, and to object to how it is used. You can also ask for a copy in a portable format.

Ask the care company. They must respond within one month and cannot charge you for it in normal circumstances.

If you are unhappy with how they have handled it, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. You are entitled to do that without asking us first.

Access needs a username and password, and staff only see the people they are involved with. Care documents and photographs are held in private storage that cannot be read from a public link. Everything is encrypted in transit. Actions that change a record are logged with who did them and when.

The app is for care staff and is not intended for anyone under 16. Where a person receiving care is a child, their record is kept by the care company under the same rules as any other care record.

If this notice changes in a way that affects you, the care company will be told so they can pass it on. The date at the top always shows the current version.

For anything about the software itself, contact My Care Academy at hello@mycareacademy.co.uk, or write to HG Care, Unit A1, The Embankment, Vale Road, Stockport, SK4 3GN.

For anything about your own information — seeing it, correcting it, deleting it — contact the care company providing your care or employing you. They hold the record and they can act on it.