Your Kidfence ID

How Kidfence identifies you without an account

The short version

Your Kidfence ID is something like Peaceful-Loving-Otter. It identifies you to Kidfence support without a password, email signup, or username to remember. When you contact us, just tell us your Kidfence ID and we can find your family.

You'll find your Kidfence ID at the top of Settings → Account & Pairing. Your family has its own ID too (something like Mighty-Sunny-Cheetah) shown in the same place.

Three identifiers, three jobs

Kidfence has three different identifiers and each has one specific job. You'll only ever quote the first one out loud. The other two stay on your device or in the app's background.

1. Kidfence ID (handle)

• Looks like: Peaceful-Loving-Otter. Your family has its own (Mighty-Sunny-Cheetah), and each co-parent has their own too.
• What it's for: telling Kidfence support which family is yours, and verifying a co-parent who joins your family ("yes, that handle really is me"). It's the only identifier most parents ever say out loud.
• Where to find it: top of Settings → Account & Pairing.
• More detail: why two adjectives and an animal, and how it's derived.

2. Apple ID link (optional, owner-only)

• Looks like: a one-way cryptographic link to your Apple ID, stored on Kidfence's side. The only thing shown back to you is the Apple relay email (like xxx@privaterelay.appleid.com).
• What it's for: recovering your family if you lose every device and iCloud Keychain didn't preserve your key, and required to transfer ownership of your family to a co-parent. Sign in is only used to anchor recovery to your Apple ID. Kidfence does not maintain login credentials, passwords, or account profiles.
• Where to set it up: a prompt appears at the end of onboarding and after your first purchase. You can also link or unlink any time under Settings → Account & Pairing.
• More detail: recovery and ownership transfer.

3. Cryptographic keys (Device Key, Family ID, Diagnostic ID)

• Look like: long base64 strings.
• What they're for: internal cryptographic identity. Every command from your phone is signed with your Device Key and the server verifies that signature, so a leaked Kidfence ID alone can't be used to control your family. The Diagnostic ID is a separate per-device identifier used only when support needs to look up logs from a specific device.
• Where to find them: Settings → Account & Pairing → Technical details (collapsed by default) and at the bottom of the Mac app.
• More detail: under the hood.

Why two adjectives and an animal?

The shape is deliberate. An adjective + adjective + animal name like Cheerful-Gracious-Squirrel reads as a real name, something you can picture, say out loud, and remember without writing it down. Three random words from a dictionary would give you the same uniqueness, but you'd end up with handles like Cause-Dentist-Depth, which feels like one more random string, exactly what we were trying to get rid of.

You didn't pick your Kidfence ID, Kidfence generated it, so there's no naming hassle, no collisions to resolve, and no way to lose it. It's the same every time you open the app, even after reinstalls.

Why no password or email signup?

• Nothing to forget. No password to lose, no email to confirm, no captcha to solve.
• Nothing to phish. There's no login page to fake, no "reset password" flow to exploit.
• Nothing to breach. The server doesn't store passwords. Even if it were ever compromised, attackers couldn't impersonate any parent.
• Kid identity stays private. Your kid's name, avatar, and activity never touch the Kidfence server. They travel directly between your phone and their Mac via end-to-end encryption.

What if I lose access to my phone?

Your Kidfence ID lives in iCloud Keychain, so it follows you to a new iPhone, survives reinstalls, and works across all your Apple devices automatically. Your subscription is attached to your Apple ID and restores automatically too. You can verify iCloud Keychain status in Settings → Account & Pairing → iCloud Keychain Status.

Recovery: Link your Apple ID as the family owner

If you lose every device with the Kidfence app installed and your iCloud Keychain doesn't have your device key (rare but possible), iCloud Keychain alone isn't enough. For this edge case Kidfence supports an optional, strongly-recommended path: link your Apple ID to your family as a recovery anchor.

It's still no account: nothing to log in to, no password, no email signup. We just store the cryptographic link to your Apple ID so Apple can later confirm "yes, that's the same person" when you need to recover. You'll see a prompt after pairing finishes and again right after your first purchase. There's nothing to type. You can also link or unlink anytime under Settings → Account & Pairing.

Sign in is only used to anchor recovery to your Apple ID. Kidfence does not maintain login credentials, passwords, or account profiles. The only thing stored on our side is the one-way cryptographic link to your Apple ID, used to confirm it's you if you ever need to recover.

Linking your Apple ID is also required to transfer ownership of your family to a co-parent: both the current and incoming owner must have linked their Apple ID before the role can change hands. This makes ownership transfer something only you, on your devices, can do.

If you skip this step and later lose every device and iCloud Keychain didn't preserve your key, recovery isn't possible. That's the trade-off of the no-account proposition, and the prompt at the end of onboarding makes it explicit.

Under the hood

If you're curious how this works: each device generates an Ed25519 cryptographic key pair on first launch. Your Kidfence ID is derived from the public half of that pair, in three steps:

1. Hash. The public key is run through HKDF-SHA-256 with a version label (kidfence-handle-v2) so a future change to the scheme can't accidentally collide with today's IDs.
2. Pick three words. The hash output is split into three numbers. The first two pick adjectives from a hand-curated list of ~110 family-friendly words (derived from Docker's namesgenerator); the third picks an animal from Tailscale's open-source animal list of ~800 entries.
3. Join. Capitalize each, glue with hyphens, done.

Same key always produces the same words, so your handle survives reinstalls automatically. It's not stored on your phone, it's re-derived from the key in your iCloud Keychain. The Kidfence server stores the result on its end so support can look you up by handle alone. If a brand-new family ever hashes to the same handle as an existing one, the second family gets a numeric suffix (Quiet-Brave-Otter-2); the original keeps the unsuffixed form.

The public key (the actual base64 string that the math runs on) lives on the Kidfence server. The matching private key stays on your device and signs every command you send so the server can verify it really came from your phone. You can see the raw public key, the underlying family UUID, and your device's Diagnostic ID under Settings → Account & Pairing → Technical details. Support occasionally asks for the Diagnostic ID when looking up logs from a specific device, but for most questions just your Kidfence ID is enough.