Privacy Policy

Ruah is a two-sided marketplace based in Washington, DC. Families use it to find childcare. Caregivers use it to find work. An AI coordinator we call Ruah does the back-and-forth in between.

This policy covers everyone who uses Ruah: families, caregivers, and visitors who never make an account. It explains what we collect, why we collect it, who can see it, and what you can ask us to do about it.

The company behind Ruah is TO CONFIRM — registered legal entity name, entity type, and business address, and the site is at TO CONFIRM — the launch domain.

Ruah accounts are for adults 18 and over. See section 4 for how we handle information about children.

From everyone with an account: your name, email address, the role you signed up as (family or caregiver), your ZIP code, and the city and state that ZIP code resolves to. Your password is handled by our authentication provider — we never see it.

From families:the neighborhood or area where care would happen (for example, “Northwest DC, near Tenleytown”), how many children you have, and whatever you choose to write in your care request — schedule, budget, languages, routines, and any needs a caregiver should know about.

From caregivers: your experience, languages, hourly rate, availability, service area, and bio. If you choose to get verified, we also collect a photo of a government-issued ID and a selfie. See section 6 — those are handled differently from everything else.

From both sides, as you use Ruah: the messages sent through the platform, including the ones our AI coordinator drafts and sends on your behalf; your matches and their history — who was contacted, who accepted or declined, what was promised and by when; and the notes our team adds when we review something.

Automatically: sign-in activity, browser and device information, IP address, and basic usage data, used to keep your account secure and the service working.

Cookies: we use the cookies required to keep you signed in. TO CONFIRM — whether any analytics or product-measurement cookies will be in place at launch — if yes, this section needs a cookie disclosure and possibly a banner

Care happens in your home, so location matters more here than on most sites. Here is exactly how much of it we hold.

• What your profile stores: a ZIP code and a free-text neighborhood description. We do not ask for, or store, your street address as part of your profile.
• What caregivers see: the neighborhood and area information on your request — enough to know whether the job is reachable.
• Your full address: if you share it, you share it yourself, in a message, when you have decided to move forward. It then lives in that message thread. Please share it when you are ready and not before.
• A third party sees your ZIP code: to turn a ZIP code into a city and state, we send it to a public postal-code lookup service (zippopotam.us). We send the ZIP code only — no name, no account, nothing that identifies you.

TO CONFIRM — whether the zippopotam.us lookup should be replaced with a local lookup table before launch, which would remove this third party entirely

Children do not use Ruah. Only adults create accounts, and the service is not directed to children. Parents and guardians provide information about their children so that a caregiver can understand the job.

• You decide how much to share. The only structured field we ask for is how many children you have. Everything else — ages, names, allergies, medical needs, school schedules, routines — is optional free text that you write into your request or a message.
• Share what a caregiver needs to do the job well, and no more. You can always tell a caregiver more once you have decided to work with them.
• Who can see it: you, the caregivers matched to your request, and authorized members of the Ruah team. Our AI coordinator reads your request in order to describe the job to caregivers.
• What we never do: we do not use information about your children for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not share it with anyone outside the people listed above.
• You can ask us to delete it at any time — see section 12.

TO CONFIRM — counsel to confirm the COPPA position. Our reading: because children neither create accounts nor provide information themselves, the federal rules on collecting information online from children under 13 are not triggered — a parent is describing their own household. This needs to be checked, not assumed.

Ruah is not just a search box. An AI coordinator works your request: it reads what you need, contacts caregivers, follows up when they go quiet, records what they commit to, and reports back to you. This is the part of the product most people have questions about, so here is how it handles your information.

• It sends messages on your behalf. Those messages are labeled as coming from Ruah, so nobody is misled into thinking a person typed them.
• What it can read: your care request, your profile, the caregivers matched to you, and the message history on those matches.
• It uses a third-party AI provider.To generate a message, we send the relevant parts of your request and the conversation to Anthropic’s Claude API. Anthropic processes that content on our behalf in order to return a response. TO CONFIRM — current Anthropic API terms and data-processing addendum, and state plainly here whether API content is used to train models — do not paraphrase from memory
• Every action is logged. Each decision the coordinator makes — including the ones our safeguards block — is written to an audit record so we can check what it did and why.
• People can read it. Authorized members of our team can review AI conversations for safety and quality.
• TO CONFIRM — whether users can turn the AI coordinator off and still use Ruah, and if so where that switch lives. Today there is no opt-out, and this policy should say so rather than imply one exists.

If a caregiver chooses to get verified, they upload a government-issued ID and a selfie. These are the most sensitive files on the platform and they are handled separately from everything else.

• They are stored in a private, access-restricted location, not alongside public profile information.
• Only authorized members of the Ruah team can open them, and only to confirm that the person is who they say they are.
• Families never see them. Neither do other caregivers. What a family sees is a verified badge, not a document.
• They are never used for advertising and never sold.
• You can ask us to delete them at any time. Doing so removes your verified status.

TO CONFIRM — how long verification documents are retained after a decision is made. The honest options are to delete on approval and keep only the outcome, or to retain for a fixed period for fraud and safety review. Pick one and state the period here.

Separately, profile photos are public. If you upload a profile photo, it is served from a public web address and can be viewed by anyone who has that address. Do not use a photo you would not want seen outside Ruah.

• To match families with caregivers, and to keep those matches moving.
• To let the AI coordinator contact caregivers, follow up, and report back to you.
• To review caregiver identity documents and issue verified status.
• To keep the platform safe: investigating reports, preventing fraud and abuse, and enforcing our Terms of Service.
• To send you service messages — a new match, a reply, an account or security notice.
• To fix problems and improve how the service works.
• To meet legal obligations.

TO CONFIRM — whether marketing email to users is planned. If yes, this section needs a separate line and an unsubscribe commitment; if no, say so explicitly.

Between users. This is the point of the service. When a caregiver is matched to your request, they see your first name, your neighborhood, and the details of the request. When you look at a caregiver, you see their profile and whether they are verified. Anything beyond that is what you choose to write in a message.

Companies that run parts of the service for us. They may only process your information to provide their service to us, under contract:

• Supabase — database, sign-in, and file storage, including identity documents.
• Vercel — website hosting.
• Anthropic — the AI model behind the coordinator (see section 5).
• zippopotam.us — turning a ZIP code into a city and state (see section 3).
• TO CONFIRM — email delivery provider, error monitoring, and analytics, once chosen. Every processor with access to personal data belongs on this list.

For legal or safety reasons. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or if we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect someone from harm.

If the business changes hands. If Ruah is acquired or merged, information may transfer as part of that deal. We would tell you before your information became subject to a different policy.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

Ruah does not process payments today. We do not collect card numbers, bank details, or tax identification numbers. Families and caregivers agree on pay and settle it directly between themselves.

If we add payments, this policy will change before that happens, and we will tell you.

While your account is open, we keep your information so the service works. When you close your account, we delete or anonymize your personal information, except where we need to keep something for legal or safety reasons.

TO CONFIRM — specific retention periods, which counsel will want stated rather than implied. At minimum: how long after account closure profile data is deleted; how long message threads survive a closed account, given that a thread has two participants and one may still need it; how long identity documents are kept (section 6); how long AI decision logs are kept; and how long backups persist after a deletion request.

We use access controls, encrypted connections, and restricted storage for sensitive files. Identity documents sit behind stricter controls than the rest of the platform, and administrative access is limited to a named list of people.

No system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say that plainly than promise otherwise. If a breach affects your information, we will notify you as required by law.

TO CONFIRM — breach-notification obligations that apply to us, including the DC statute and any other state where we have users, and the timeline each requires.

Whoever and wherever you are, you can ask us to:

• show you the information we hold about you;
• correct anything that is wrong;
• delete your information, or close your account entirely;
• delete your identity verification documents specifically.

To do any of these, email us at hello@ruahruah.com. We will respond within a reasonable time and will not charge you for it.

Some states give residents additional rights — California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut and others have comprehensive privacy laws. Because we do not sell personal information or use it for targeted advertising, the opt-outs those laws provide have nothing to switch off here.

TO CONFIRM — which state privacy laws actually apply to us given our size and user counts, and whether the District of Columbia has enacted a comprehensive consumer privacy statute by the effective date. Where a law applies, counsel should add the specific rights language and appeal process it requires rather than relying on this general paragraph.

Ruah is operated from Washington, DC, and your information is stored and processed in the United States.

TO CONFIRM — the hosting regions for our database, file storage, and AI provider, and whether we intend to serve users outside the United States. If we do, this policy needs a transfers section and counsel needs to look at GDPR and UK data protection law. Today the service is offered in the DC area only.

We will update this policy as the product changes — adding payments and changing what the AI coordinator can do are both likely. When we make a meaningful change, we will update the date at the top and tell you through the platform before it takes effect.

Questions about this policy, or about anything we hold on you, go to hello@ruahruah.com. A real person reads it.

TO CONFIRM — whether this policy should name a dedicated privacy contact rather than our general address, and what postal address to publish alongside it.