Your own photos live on your device and are never uploaded to us. Only albums you deliberately create to gift or share are stored in our cloud, for the people you invite, and you can delete them (and every link to them) at any time. Fondly needs no account to use. We do not sell your data, ever. That is the whole idea.
Fondly is a calm new-tab experience made by Plainly Productive. This policy covers the Fondly browser extension and the website at startfondly.com. Questions? Write to hello@startfondly.com.
When you add photos to Fondly's new tab, they are stored locally in your browser (in IndexedDB) on the device you are using. They are never sent to us, never uploaded to a server, and never stored in the cloud. No one at Fondly can see your photos, because they never leave your machine. Removing a photo, or uninstalling Fondly, removes it from local storage. The one exception is an album you deliberately create to gift or share, described next.
Fondly's gift and shared-album features need a copy of those specific photos to exist somewhere your family can reach. So when an album keeper builds an album in the Album Builder, the photos in that album (and only that album) are uploaded to Fondly's cloud storage. Here is exactly how that works:
Your preferences (name, theme, quick links, intentions, the words you write for your daily line, and which widgets you show) are saved in your browser's local storage on that device. They are yours, they stay put, and they are used only to draw your new tab the way you set it up.
Some widgets are turned on only if you choose them. When enabled, they fetch just what they display, with no account and no key tied to you:
These requests carry only what is needed to return the content, and Fondly does not build a profile of you from them. Turn any widget off and the request stops.
Fondly does not ask you to sign up, and the core experience works with no account at all. Receiving a gifted album, viewing a shared album, and adding photos to one via an invite link all work without an account too. Only the album keeper (the person who creates and manages a cloud album) signs in, so their albums belong to them and no one else. We do not track who is in your photos, we do not run ads, and we do not sell or share your personal information with anyone.
The marketing site at startfondly.com does not set advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. To see how the site is doing, we run our own first-party, cookieless counters: an anonymous tally of page views, button clicks, and scroll milestones. No cookies are set, no IP addresses or device fingerprints are stored, and nothing identifies you as an individual. There are no third-party analytics services or ad pixels on the site.
The extension requests only the permissions it needs to replace your new tab and store your photos and settings locally. It does not read your browsing history or the content of other sites.
Fondly is built for families and often holds photos of children. Because those photos never leave your device and we collect no personal information about them, they remain entirely under your control.
If we update this policy, we will change the date at the top and, for anything meaningful, note what changed. Continued use of Fondly after an update means you accept the current version.
For any privacy question or request, email hello@startfondly.com and we will help.