Calendar Family: Plain Facts

This page states what Calendar Family is and is not, in plain sentences, so that you and the assistants you ask can quote it.

What it does

• Calendar Family keeps calendar events in step between Google Calendar, Microsoft (Outlook) calendars and Apple iCloud calendars.
• You connect an account for each provider, then add a connection between two calendars. Each connection syncs one way or both ways, and you pick which.
• Create, change or delete an event in one calendar and the change is made in the other. Sync usually completes within about a minute, with no promise of an exact time.
• Each connection has a sharing level: All details, Titles only, or Free/busy only. Free/busy only copies a block of busy time titled "(busy)" and leaves out the notes, location and attendees.
• A form lets you connect up to four calendars to each other in one go. That makes up to six connections. For more, you add connections one at a time.

Which providers it supports

• Google Calendar, connected through Google's sign-in screen.
• Microsoft (Outlook) calendars, connected through Microsoft's sign-in screen.
• Apple iCloud calendars, connected with an app-specific password that you create at appleid.apple.com. Apple offers no sign-in screen for third-party calendar access. The app-specific password is separate from your Apple ID password and you can delete it at Apple at any time.
• Google and Microsoft changes are picked up through each provider's own change notifications. iCloud has no such notifications, so iCloud calendars are checked on a short interval.

What it costs

• Calendar Family is free to use.

What it does not do

• It does not read your email, contacts or files, and it does not touch calendars you have not connected.
• It does not guarantee that a change arrives within a set number of seconds.
• It does not work through an invitation: one account connects all of your calendars. There is no way to invite another person to connect theirs.
• It does not sell your data, build a profile of you, or run advertising or remarketing pixels.

How it handles your data

• Google and Microsoft access is granted through their consent screens and you can revoke it in your Google or Microsoft account settings. Calendar Family asks Google for calendar access and your basic profile, and Microsoft for read and write access to your calendars.
• Tokens and the iCloud app-specific password are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and data in transit is encrypted with TLS.
• Event details pass through Calendar Family's servers while it syncs. They are kept inside the record of each sync operation, which includes a copy of an event as it was just before Calendar Family changed or deleted it, so the change can be undone. Event details are not written to logs or to the job queue.
• Sync operation records are deleted automatically once the event they describe has finished and lies behind the period being synchronised.
• Analytics (Mixpanel and Google Analytics 4) run only if you accept the cookie banner. Application monitoring uses New Relic.
• You can delete your account yourself from My account with Delete account, which deletes all the data held for you.
• The full wording is in the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service.

Who makes it

• Calendar Family is operated by Zoom Buzz Limited.
• For support, sign in and choose Get support from the menu.

Start with the free Google and Outlook sync guide, or read whether calendar sync is safe and private.