Survival Box

Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 8, 2026

Who we are

Survival Box is an emergency preparedness app operated by Buckethead, Inc. (“Survival Box,” “we,” “us”), a California corporation. Questions about this policy or your data: support@survivalbox.app.

This policy covers the Survival Box iOS app and this website. It explains what we collect, why, who else touches it, and the controls you have.

If you use Survival Box for free

The free tier works entirely on your device. You don't create an account, we don't have your email, and your emergency profile — your medical card, documents, photos, supply kits, and map — lives only in the app's local storage on your phone. Deleting the app deletes that data.

A few features fetch public information over the network, and those requests necessarily reach outside services:

• Offline maps download map tiles from OpenFreeMap and nearby emergency resources (hospitals, shelters, water sources) from public map databases. These requests include the coordinates of the map area you chose.
• Address lookup during map setup uses Google's address services to turn the address you type into map coordinates.
• Government alerts are fetched from the U.S. National Weather Service using the general coordinates of your chosen map area — not your live location.

These requests carry no account identity (you don't have an account), though like any internet request they expose your device's IP address to the service being contacted.

If you grant location permission, your position is shown on your own map, on your own device. In the free tier your location is never uploaded anywhere.

If you subscribe to Survival Box+

Survival Box+ adds an account, encrypted cloud backup, and household coordination. Here's the complete inventory.

Account information

• Email address — used to sign you in (we send one-time codes; there are no passwords), to send invitations you initiate, and for essential service messages. Never for marketing lists we didn't ask you about.
• Account identifiers — random IDs that link your account to your data, and a device push-notification token so we can deliver emergency alerts.
• Subscription status — your plan and its expiration, so the app knows what features you've paid for. Payment itself is handled entirely by Apple; we never see your payment details.

Content encrypted before it leaves your phone

The following is end-to-end encrypted on your device (AES-256) with keys that only you and your household hold. We store the encrypted files and cannot decrypt them:

• Legal name, date of birth, physical description, and phone number
• Medical information — allergies, conditions, medications, and care instructions
• Documents and photos you store (IDs, insurance cards, records)
• Emergency contacts
• Household chat messages, your Household Emergency Plan, and personal notes
• Rally point names, addresses, and notes
• Pet details
• Your location (see “Location” below for the one exception)

Information our systems can read

Some data has to stay readable on our servers for the service to function — coordination doesn't work if the server can't route it. This includes:

• Your display name and profile photo (so your household and invited teammates can recognize you)
• Household structure — who is on your team, invitations, and their status
• Email addresses you provide when inviting someone (used to send that invitation)
• Map area and rally point coordinates (so they can be shared with your household)
• Supply kit items and expiration dates (so reminders work)
• Emergency status signals — whether your household is in Emergency Mode, your status beacon (“I'm OK,” “Need Help,” “En Route”), and their timestamps
• Timestamps showing when your encrypted location was last updated (the location itself stays encrypted)

Location: “find, don't track”

Location is the heart of Survival Box+: your household can find you in an emergency, even if networks fail, because your last known position is already waiting — encrypted — on their phones.

• Continuous, including in the background. With your permission, the app periodically captures your position even when closed, and shares it — encrypted — with your household.
• One position, not a history. We keep a single last-known location per person, overwritten with each update. There is no movement history or location trail on our servers.
• Encrypted end-to-end. Your coordinates are encrypted on your device before upload. Outside of an active emergency, we cannot read your location.
• The Emergency Mode exception. While you are in an active Emergency Mode, a readable copy of your location also exists on our servers so it can reach authorized people trying to help you — such as trusted emergency contacts on your Readiness Team. When the emergency ends, the readable copy is deleted and your location returns to being fully encrypted. We designed it this way on purpose: in a life-threatening emergency, being findable matters more than perfect secrecy.

Readiness Team connections

Survival Box+ lets you connect one-to-one with trusted friends and neighbors outside your household. A connection shares your display name and profile photo with that person, plus a shared emergency plan you both can edit. Shared Readiness Team plans are protected by strict server-side access rules and visible only to the two connected people, though unlike household content they are not end-to-end encrypted. If your household enters Emergency Mode, your Readiness Team connections are notified and can see your status and location so they can help.

How we use your information

• To provide the service: backup, sync, household coordination, and emergency alerts
• To send emails you initiate (sign-in codes, invitations) and essential service notices
• To manage your subscription and prevent abuse
• To comply with legal obligations

We do not sell your personal information, share it for advertising, or use third-party analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. Your data is used to run Survival Box — that's it.

Children

Survival Box is built for families, and we handle children's information conservatively:

• Children under 16 do not create accounts. A parent or guardian creates and manages a child's profile inside their own household, and any device access for a child is set up and verified by the parent using the parent's own email. Children never provide us an email address.
• What a child's profile may contain: name, date of birth, photo, medical information, and — if a parent sets the child up with the app on a device — that device's location, shared only with the household. All of it is end-to-end encrypted like any other household member's data (subject to the same Emergency Mode location exception described above).
• Parents are in control. A parent can review, update, or delete a child's profile at any time from within the app. Deleting the household account deletes the child's data with it.
• No ads, no profiling. We show no advertising to anyone, children included, and build no behavioral profiles.

If you believe a child's information reached us outside this parent-managed model, contact support@survivalbox.app and we will delete it.

Service providers

We use a small set of infrastructure providers to run Survival Box+. Each receives only what its role requires:

Security

Sensitive content is encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM before upload, using keys derived and stored in your device's secure enclave (iOS Keychain). Your recovery phrase — or a re-share from a household member — is the only way to restore those keys; we cannot reset them for you, because we never have them. All traffic to our servers is encrypted in transit. No system is perfectly secure, but our architecture is built so that a breach of our servers would expose ciphertext, not your family's information.

Retention and deletion

• While your account is active, we keep your data so the service works — that's the point of a backup.
• Delete your account anytime in the app (Settings → Delete & Reset). Deletion of your account records begins immediately; residual encrypted files and backup copies are purged from our systems within 30 days.
• Free tier: deleting the app deletes your data, since it only ever lived on your device.
• Household note: content you shared with your household (like a shared document) may persist on your household members' own devices after you leave — the same way a text message you sent remains with its recipient.

Your rights and choices

• Access and portability: your data is visible in the app, and key records (like medical cards) can be exported from within it.
• Correction: everything is editable in the app.
• Deletion: in-app account deletion, described above.
• Permissions: location and notification access are controlled in iOS Settings and can be revoked anytime. The app keeps working without them — you just lose the features they power.

California residents: we do not sell or share personal information as defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we collect only the categories described in this policy for the purposes described here. Residents of the EEA/UK: we process your data to perform our contract with you (providing the service) and, where required, with your consent (e.g., location permission); the rights above apply, plus the right to lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority. To exercise any right, use the in-app tools or email support@survivalbox.app.

Survival Box is operated from the United States and data is stored in the United States.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we'll update this page and note the new date at the top. Material changes to how we handle your data will be announced in the app before they take effect.

Contact

Buckethead, Inc.
support@survivalbox.app