Privacy
Last updated 27 October 2026
ZoxoHome has no server and no account. We never receive your data, and the app has no analytics or advertising. Data goes to someone else only when you turn it on: iCloud sync stores your rules in your own iCloud account, and cloud drafting sends a rule you describe to Anthropic or OpenAI, using your own API key or ChatGPT sign-in, once you allow it.
ZoxoHome
- Your home
- ZoxoHome reads your homes, rooms, accessories and automations from Apple’s HomeKit, and saves rules back to HomeKit. That data goes between the app and HomeKit on your device and nowhere else, unless you turn on the helper’s Home tab (below). Your rules and their history are stored on your device.
- iCloud sync (off unless you turn it on)
- If you turn on “Sync rules with iCloud”, your rules, including the names of the accessories and scenes they use, are stored in your own iCloud account so your other devices can read them. ZoxoHome can’t see your iCloud data; Apple stores it under your Apple Account.
- Location (only if you allow it)
- ZoxoHome asks for your location once, to work out sunrise and sunset at home. It rounds it to about a kilometre and keeps it on your device. You can forget it in Settings at any time.
- Calendars (only if you allow it)
- ZoxoHome asks for calendar access only when a rule first uses a calendar, such as one that warms the house before guests arrive. It reads event titles, calendar names and times from a day ago to two weeks ahead, keeps them in memory on your device, and never changes a calendar. No events are sent anywhere. Your home hub gets only the times its automations should run. A rule keeps the calendar name and the title words it looks for, which go wherever the rule goes. A booking calendar link you paste is handed to Apple’s Calendar app to subscribe to, and ZoxoHome doesn’t keep it.
- Places in rules
- A rule that starts when you arrive at or leave a place stores that spot and its radius in the rule and in HomeKit, which watches your iPhone’s location for it. ZoxoHome itself doesn’t track where you go. Picking the place uses Apple Maps, so Apple serves the map you look at. A place goes wherever the rule goes: into iCloud if you sync rules, and into a file if you share the rule.
- Siri, Shortcuts, widgets and Control Center
- So Siri, widgets and controls can offer your scenes and rules by name, ZoxoHome keeps a list of their names in a folder shared only with its own widget extension, on your device. The list holds no accessory states. Every one of these opens ZoxoHome to do the work.
- Notifications
- Notifications from your rules are created on your device. Nothing is sent through a notification server.
- Describing a rule
- When you describe a rule in your own words, Apple’s on-device model drafts it unless you pick another model in Settings. With Apple’s on-device model, your text and your accessory names stay on the device.
- Speaking a rule
- If you tap Speak or the microphone button, ZoxoHome asks for the microphone and speech recognition, and turns what you say into text on your device. It listens only while the Describe a rule sheet is open and stops when you pause, close it or leave the app. The audio is never recorded to a file or sent anywhere, including to us or Apple. The text it produces is treated exactly like typed text.
- Cameras: sound and Hold to Talk
- A camera’s live view starts muted; the speaker button plays its sound. On a camera with a speaker, Hold to Talk uses the microphone, with the same permission as speaking a rule, and only while you hold it. Your voice goes through HomeKit to that camera and is played there; ZoxoHome doesn’t record it or send it to us. For a camera the ZoxoHome Helper adds to Home, the helper passes your voice on the way the camera maker’s own app does (for Ring, through Ring’s live-view service).
- Cloud drafting (off unless you turn it on)
- In Settings › Describing rules you can choose Claude or ChatGPT instead, with your own API key or, for ChatGPT, your ChatGPT sign-in. Nothing goes to Anthropic or OpenAI until you allow it: each company has its own “Send descriptions to Anthropic” or “Send descriptions to OpenAI” switch, off at first, and it turns on only after an alert that names the company and says what is sent. A key or a sign-in alone sends nothing, and turning the switch off stops sending at once. Once allowed, each time you tap Draft, or pause after speaking a rule, ZoxoHome sends the chosen company the description you typed or spoke (as text, never audio) and the names of your home’s accessories, rooms and scenes, with the kind of controls each accessory has. Claude sends to Anthropic (api.anthropic.com), ChatGPT to OpenAI (api.openai.com), and nowhere else; there is no fallback to the other company. It never sends accessory states, your location, who is home or your saved rules. Requests to OpenAI ask it not to store the response. Anthropic and OpenAI handle what they receive under their own API terms.
- API keys and Sign in with ChatGPT
- Each key is stored in the device’s Keychain, on that device only, and sent only to its own company. With Sign in with ChatGPT, drafting runs on your ChatGPT plan instead of an API key. ZoxoHome doesn’t charge for this; what drafting uses counts against your plan, and Manage usage opens chatgpt.com/settings/usage, where you can see and limit it. Signing in opens OpenAI’s own page at auth.openai.com. The tokens it gives back are stored in the device’s Keychain, sent only to OpenAI, and never written to the app’s settings or logs. Signing out removes them.
- Shared rules
- A rule you share is a file with the rule and the names of its accessories, rooms and scenes. It goes only where you send it.
- ZoxoHome Helper (optional download)
- The ZoxoHome Helper is a separate free program you can run on a computer at home. It talks only to the devices in your home over your own network, has no account and sends nothing to us. It keeps its setup code, the homes it’s paired with, the waits and messages your rules set, its settings and the password for its own web page (as a hash) on that computer. That web page is served by the helper on your home network and loads nothing from elsewhere. It contacts nothing on the internet unless you set it up yourself to post alerts to an ntfy topic, which then receives the alert’s message, or add a device whose maker only works through its own servers (Ring, Moen Flo, VeSync, SimpliSafe, Hatch and Google Nest). Then it signs in to that maker’s service with the account you give it, keeps that sign-in on its computer, and exchanges with the maker only what Home needs to show and control those devices (for Ring, its doorbell and motion alerts arrive through Google’s Firebase push service, as they do for the Ring app). Letting it fit a sprinkler’s schedule to the weather has it fetch your area’s weather from Open-Meteo. For Mitsubishi Kumo Cloud, Meross and Enphase gateways on newer firmware, it signs in to the maker once with the account you give it, to fetch the keys for each device, and then reaches those devices over your home network (an Enphase gateway gets a new sign-in when its token runs out). Every other device it adds, such as Rain Bird, Reolink and Philips Hue, is reached over your home network only.
- The helper’s Home tab
- Off unless you turn it on, in ZoxoHome’s Settings > The Helper’s Home Tab. ZoxoHome then sends one home’s rooms, accessories and their states, doors and locks included, over your home network to the helper you pick, after you give it the helper web page’s password. The helper keeps the home in memory only, never on disk or in its log, and drops it when it restarts; anyone with that password can see it on the Home tab. Nothing goes to us or anyone else. Turning it off, or Forget or Unpair on the Home tab, removes it.
This website
zoxohome.com (and zoxobit.com, which sends you here) has no cookies, no scripts and no tracking. Like most websites, its host (Amazon CloudFront) keeps standard access logs: the time, the page asked for, your IP address and your browser’s user agent. These are used only to keep the site running and to count visits, and are deleted after 90 days.
The tip jar’s card option is a link to Gumroad. If you tip that way, Gumroad takes the payment under its own privacy policy, and we see what Gumroad shows a seller: the amount and the email address you give it. We never see your card.
The buy links on Works with ZoxoHome go to Amazon, and may be affiliate links: Amazon then knows you came from zoxohome.com, and pays us a small share if you buy. Once you follow one, you’re on Amazon’s site under Amazon’s privacy notice, and Amazon and others may set or read cookies there. We see only Amazon’s totals, never who bought what.
Children
We don’t collect personal information from anyone, children included.
Changes
If this policy changes, this page will show the new version and its date.
Who we are
ZoxoHome, the ZoxoHome Helper and this website are made by Zoxobit LLC, a Nevada limited liability company.
Questions
Email support@zoxobit.com, or see Support.