Safeguarding Statement

OurPath assumes two households that don't always trust each other. Sometimes it is worse than that. This page sets out the choices we made because of it, what we do when we learn of a risk, and — just as important — what we cannot do.

It forms part of our Terms of Service and should be read with our Acceptable Use Policy.

Effective from 19 September 2026. Version 1.1.

If you need help now #

In an emergency, call 999.

If you cannot speak safely: dial 999 and listen. If you are on a mobile and the operator cannot tell whether you need help, the call transfers to an automated system that asks you to press 55; pressing 55 puts you through to the police. If you do not press 55, the call ends. Pressing 55 does not tell the police where you are. On a landline you will be connected to a police call handler anyway.

Details checked {{SUPPORT_DETAILS_VERIFIED}}. We re-check them quarterly. If you find one that is wrong, please tell us at hello@ourpath.app — it matters more than most bugs.

1. The honest limits #

Before anything else, four things we would rather you knew now.

OurPath is not a safety plan. If you are frightened of your co-parent, a better record is not the first thing you need. Talk to one of the organisations above.

We do not monitor your messages. Nobody at OurPath reads your family thread in the ordinary course of business. We do not have a moderation team watching in real time, and we are not going to pretend we do. If something happens in your thread at 2am, we will not know unless someone tells us.

We are not an emergency service. Reports to us may not be read for hours. Call 999 if someone is in danger.

We cannot protect you from someone who is determined. We have removed the obvious tools — there is no location tracking, no phone number sharing, no read-receipt games — but an app cannot make an unsafe situation safe. It can only avoid making it worse, and we have tried hard to do that.

2. What we refuse to build #

These are design decisions, not settings. They are the safeguarding position of the product.

No location sharing. At all. Not off by default — not built. A co-parenting app that knows where a parent is, is a stalking tool waiting for a bad relationship. We treat this as a line rather than a preference, and we will not cross it for any feature request, however reasonable it sounds.

No GPS check-ins at handover. They have been requested. The answer is no, for the same reason.

Phone numbers are never exposed. Communication runs through OurPath. Neither parent gets the other's number from us.

Home addresses are never exposed. Handover locations are what you both agree and enter; your address is not shared by the system.

No in-app calling, video or voice notes at launch. Recording a voice in a two-household dispute is a consent problem and an escalation risk, and we are not shipping it until we have solved both.

Neither parent sees the other's drafts, private notes or payment details. Ever.

Professional access is always visible to both parents. If a mediator or solicitor has access to your family's records, both of you can see it, see who they are, see what they can do, and see when it started. A solicitor acting for one parent is labelled as acting for that parent, to both of you. There is no hidden access in OurPath, for anyone, on any basis. We will not create one, and a professional who asks for one loses their account.

No colour coding in red and green. Red implies fault, and nobody is at fault for having Tuesdays. The calendar uses colour-blind-safe colours that carry no moral weight.

3. What tone assist is, and what it is not #

Tone assist offers a calmer wording before a heated message sends. It is a prompt, not a filter.

• It never blocks a message. If the service is down, your message sends.
• It never tells your co-parent that anything was flagged. Turning "your message was moderated" into information the other parent can see would be a new weapon, and we are not building one.
• A tone assessment is not a finding about you. It does not appear in exports, it is not part of the record, and neither parent may present one as evidence about the other.
• It is not monitoring. No human reads what it sees. Drafts are not stored.

4. Court orders and legal restrictions #

If a court has restricted contact between you and another person, that restriction applies in OurPath. A non-molestation order, a restraining order, an injunction or a bail condition is not suspended because the message went through an app. Using OurPath to contact someone you are prohibited from contacting is a breach of the order and a breach of our Acceptable Use Policy.

Court-ordered arrangements override anything you agree here. If an order says something different from your parenting plan, the order is what counts. Talk to your solicitor before setting anything up in OurPath that differs from an order.

If contact needs to be supervised, that is a contact centre, not an app. NACCC can help you find one.

5. What we do when we learn of a risk #

We act on what we are told. We do not go looking, because we do not monitor.

5.1 Where a child is at risk of significant harm #

If we become aware of information indicating that a child is at risk of significant harm, we will:

1. Act immediately. We do not wait for a pattern, a second report or a confirmation.
2. Contact the police, and/or the relevant local authority children's services, where the information warrants it.
3. Preserve the relevant records so they are available to the authorities.
4. Consider whether to suspend an account, weighing the risk that suspension itself creates.
5. Not necessarily tell the account holder, where notifying them would increase risk to a child or prejudice an investigation.

5.2 Child sexual abuse material #

Where we become aware of any indecent image of a child or material that sexually exploits a child, we report to the police and, where appropriate, the National Crime Agency, preserve the evidence, and suspend the account immediately. There is no warning and no appeal before we act.

5.3 Threats of violence, or risk to an adult #

Where there is a credible threat of violence or serious harm to a person, we will suspend the account, preserve the records, and contact the police where the threat warrants it. Where there is an immediate risk to life we will act on the lawful basis of protecting someone's vital interests.

5.4 Risk of suicide or serious self-harm #

Where someone tells us they are at risk of taking their own life, we will respond, provide the appropriate support details, and where there is an immediate risk to life we will contact the emergency services. We will not treat a disclosure of this kind as a conduct matter.

5.5 Where we are told of abuse between parents #

We will:

• take it seriously, respond, and tell you what we can and cannot do;
• give you the specialist support routes above, because they can help you in ways we cannot;
• act under the Acceptable Use Policy where our service is being used to abuse or harass;
• not adjudicate the allegation. We do not decide whether abuse occurred. That is not a refusal to help; it is a recognition that we are a software company and that a finding by us would be worthless to a court and potentially damaging to whichever of you it went against.
• not tell your co-parent that you reported them, unless we are legally required to.

5.6 What we will not do #

• We will not delete or alter records, for any safeguarding reason. The record is evidence, including evidence of the thing you are worried about. Removing it helps nobody.
• We will not give one parent a report on the other's conduct. If you need a finding, that is what a court is for; if you need the underlying record, export it — it is free and it is yours.
• We will not act as your advocate, your witness or your investigator.

6. Designed against being a weapon #

The obvious failure mode for a product like this is that it becomes a tool for building a case against someone. Provoke, record, export, repeat.

We cannot fully prevent that. What we have done:

• The record is symmetrical. Every message you send is as permanent as every message you receive.
• An export contains the whole thread over the range you choose — not the parts you liked. Selective quotation is possible, as it is with anything, but the verifier makes the complete document checkable by anyone.
• Nothing in the product scores, rates or grades a parent. There is no conduct score, no reliability rating, no "reasonableness" metric, and there never will be. Those would be irresistible to weaponise and worthless as evidence.
• Tone assist is invisible to the other parent, for the same reason.
• Deliberately provoking your co-parent to generate a record is a breach of our Acceptable Use Policy.

If you find a way to misuse OurPath that we have not thought of, tell us at safeguarding@ourpath.app. We would rather hear it from you than read about it.

7. Children #

Children do not have OurPath accounts, and we hold data about them only because their parents enter it. Section 7 of our Privacy Policy sets out our commitments in full, including that we treat the child's best interests as a primary consideration, never profile children, and never use children's data for marketing.

We will not provide a parent with information about a child where doing so would put the child at risk.

8. Our people #

• Staff with access to any family data are vetted appropriately for their role and trained on safeguarding before they get it.
• We have a named safeguarding lead: {{SAFEGUARDING_LEAD}}, contactable at safeguarding@ourpath.app.
• Every safeguarding concern raised with us is logged, with what we did and why, and retained for at least seven years.
• We review this statement and our safeguarding procedures at least annually, and after any incident.

name the safeguarding lead, confirm the internal escalation procedure exists in writing, and have the whole of section 5 reviewed by someone with child protection expertise as well as by a solicitor. A published safeguarding commitment you cannot operationally deliver is worse than none.

9. Contact #

Our Path Digital Ltd · Registered in England and Wales, company number 17406043

Version 1.1 · Effective 19 September 2026 · Support organisation details last verified {{SUPPORT_DETAILS_VERIFIED}}