Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Pawfile is a pet community platform that lets users create pet profiles, keep diary entries and memories, share a pet's care with family and pet-care professionals, record walks, discover pet-friendly places and pet-care professionals, find pets looking for a home, and message other users. For privacy-related inquiries, use the in-app feedback form or visit our Support page.

2. What Data We Collect

2.1 Account Information

When you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive from those services:

• Your name and email address (Apple shares these only on first sign-in, and you may choose to hide your email)
• A unique account identifier used to link your account to your sign-in provider
• Your profile picture, if the provider supplies one

2.2 Profile Data

Information you choose to add to your profile:

• Display name, bio, title, and work location
• Profile photo and cover photo
• Social media links and a website
• If you offer pet services: your service role, a short professional bio, a phone number, a website, and a workplace (a place you pick, with its address and map position)
• Your country, set when you register from your device's time zone, your IP address, or your device language
• Your language and notification preferences

2.3 Pet Data

Information you add about your pets:

• Pet name, species, gender, birthday, photos, personality, likes and dislikes
• Medical records: vaccinations, medications, conditions, health logs, and weight history
• Microchip number, if you add one
• Appointments, reminders, and the care guide (such as feeding, routines, and allergies)
• Diary entries (memories) with photos, videos, text, and links
• An approximate home area for each pet, estimated from your IP address when you add the pet. It is used to show distances such as “pets near you”; its coordinates are never shown to other users, and distances are rounded
• Adoption status (Looking for a home, On trial, or Adopted) and who a pet was handed over to
• Activity counters, such as likes and comments, and the time of the latest diary entry (used to rank pets in Discover)

2.4 Content You Create or Share

• Diary entries, and tags of people or pets in them
• Comments, likes, follows, and Paws of approval endorsements
• Direct messages and photos sent in messages
• Pet-friendly places, tags, ratings, and reviews you add to the map
• Walks: the recorded route, duration, distance, the pets on the walk, and places you mark as visited
• Events you create
• Care team invitations, role changes, and pet handovers
• Reports you file and feedback you send

2.5 Location

Pawfile uses your device location only with your permission, and only for these features:

• Maps: to centre the map on you and show places, walkers, and events nearby. The map's centre point (not your exact position) is sent to OpenStreetMap to look up which country it is in.
• Discover: if you have already granted location permission, your approximate position (rounded to about 1 km on your device) is used to order pet-care professionals by distance and to show pets reported lost near you. Discover never asks for permission on its own.
• Adding a place, an event, or your workplace: to suggest places near you.
• Walks: while a walk is active, we record your GPS position to draw the route, including while the screen is off. On iOS this uses background location; on Android it uses an ongoing “recording your walk” notification instead. Recording stops when you end the walk.

Sharing your live location on a walk is optional and chosen per walk. If you share, other users nearby see an approximate pin for you (deliberately imprecise, snapped to a grid of roughly 100 metres), together with the photos and names of the pets on the walk that they are allowed to see, or that you choose to show for that walk. You can record a walk without sharing, or stop sharing at any time. Completed routes are not public unless you choose to share them; a shared route is shown in full, including where it started and ended.

Walks with a pet are part of that pet's record. When you start a walk, the app tells you if the pet's family will see it. A completed walk with a pet (its route, time, duration, distance, and the places you mark as visited) is then visible to that pet's owner and co-owners, whoever walked it. A walker or sitter sees only the walks they recorded. Walks recorded before this feature, or on an app version that did not show that notice, stay visible only to you. Only the person who recorded a walk can delete it, and deleting it removes it for everyone. A walk that is still in progress is not shown this way, with one exception: when a walker or sitter on the pet's care team takes the pet out, the app tells them before they start that the pet's owner and co-owners will be notified when the walk starts and ends and can follow it live. During that walk, the owner and co-owners can see the walker's current position and the route so far. This stops when the walk ends, or at once if the walker leaves the care team.

Walk medals. Each pet has a running total of how far it has walked and medals for milestones (such as 100 km, or 10 walks), with the day each was reached. They count every walk the pet was on, whoever recorded it, and are shown on the pet's profile to anyone who can see the pet. How many walks a pet has had is shown only to its owner and co-owners. On someone else's shared walk, strangers see how many pets were on it but not which pets, and not who walked it.

A place name for each walk (such as a neighbourhood) is derived on your device from the walk's starting point. If you turn on calendar sync, appointments are written to your device calendar and stay on your device.

2.6 Push Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store a push token for your device so we can send alerts about your account activity, such as follows, care team requests, comments, appointments, handovers, and messages. You can choose which kinds of alerts you receive in Settings.

2.7 Usage Analytics and Crash Reports

We use PostHog to understand how the app is used and to find errors. PostHog receives:

• An internal account identifier (never your name or email)
• Which screens you open, including the identifier of the pet, profile, or conversation on that screen, and which features you use (for example creating a pet, liking, following, or searching — for searches, only the length of the search, not the words)
• When the app is opened and closed
• Your device model, operating system, and app version
• Error and crash reports (the error message and where in the app it happened)
• Your IP address, which PostHog uses to estimate a city or country

You can turn this off in Settings → Privacy → Share usage analytics. The choice applies to the device you change it on. Apple and Google may also give us aggregated crash statistics, subject to your device settings.

To set your country and a starting map position, the app may send your IP address to ipapi.co, which returns an approximate country and location.

3. How We Use Your Data

We use the information we collect to:

• Create and manage your account
• Show your profile and your pets to other users, according to your privacy settings
• Run the app's features: care teams, diary entries, comments, likes, tags, follows, blocks, messages, walks, maps, events, adoption, and handovers
• Show pet-care professionals, lost pets, places, and walkers near you
• Rank pets in Discover by recent activity
• Send the notifications you have allowed
• Show the app in your chosen language
• Find and fix errors, and understand which features are used
• Enforce our Terms & Conditions, review reports, and prevent abuse

4. Your Privacy Controls

In Settings → Privacy you can:

• Private Profile: only people you accept as followers see your bio, cover, title, and links; everyone else sees your name and photo. A private profile is not listed in Discover → Services.
• Private Pets: only your followers can see the pets you own. A pet you co-own follows its main owner's setting.
• Private Events: only your followers can see your events.
• Hide your follower count or the follow button
• Turn off incoming direct messages or care team invitations
• Turn off usage analytics on this device
• Block users (a block hides each of you from the other and removes follows both ways), and report users or content

When a profile or pets are private, other people must send a follow request, which you can accept or decline.

Medical records are visible only to the pet's owner, co-owners, and a connected veterinarian. Appointments are visible only to the owner and co-owners. Owners and co-owners also see every completed walk taken with the pet (see section 2.5). Other care team members (such as sitters, walkers, trainers, and groomers) can read the care guide and write diary entries, and sitters and walkers see the walks they record themselves; when a sitter or walker takes the pet out, the owner and co-owners are notified and can follow that walk live. These rules are enforced on our servers.

Diary entries are visible to anyone who can see the pet. The latest entry by the owner or a co-owner may appear on the pet's card in Discover, with the name of the person who wrote it. Tagging someone who is not on the pet's care team, or their pet, needs their approval.

5. Data Sharing

We do not sell your personal data. We share data only in these cases:

• With other users: your profile, your pets, diary entries, comments, shared walks, places, reviews, events, and service card, according to your privacy settings.
• On the web through share links: a public pet or event can be viewed at pawfile.love by anyone with its link, and such pages may be indexed by search engines. Private pets and events are not shown there.
• With service providers listed in Section 6, only to operate the app.
• For legal reasons: if required by law or a court order, or to protect the safety of users or the public.

6. Service Providers

Pawfile uses the following services, each with its own privacy policy:

• Clerk — sign-in and sessions (clerk.com/privacy)
• Apple Sign In / Google Sign In — account sign-in
• Convex — database and server functions (convex.dev/privacy)
• Cloudflare R2 — storage for photos and videos (cloudflare.com/privacypolicy)
• Google Maps Platform — place search and details, and map display on Android (policies.google.com/privacy)
• Apple Maps — map display on iOS
• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) — looking up the country of the map area you are viewing
• ipapi.co — estimating your country and a starting map position from your IP address
• Expo push service, Apple Push Notification service, and Firebase Cloud Messaging — delivering notifications to iOS and Android devices
• PostHog — usage analytics and crash reports, processed in the United States (posthog.com/privacy)

7. Data Retention and Deletion

We keep your data while your account is active.

Deleting individual items: when you delete a pet, a message, a comment, or a notification, it is hidden from everyone straight away. Deleted pets' photos are removed from storage at once; the rest of a deleted item is kept, hidden, until your account is deleted.

Deleting your account (Settings → Delete Account) removes, in stages that usually finish within minutes and at most 30 days: your profile, the pets you are the main owner of (including pets that have co-owners — hand them to a co-owner first if you want them to stay), their photos and records, your diary entries, comments, likes, follows, messages and message photos, walks and routes, notifications, and your care team links on other people's pets.

We deliberately keep, without your profile attached:

• Medical records and appointments you entered on another person's pet, because they are part of that pet's history
• Places you added to the map, because they are shared community places
• Reports you filed about others, because they are moderation records

Usage analytics already sent to PostHog are kept according to PostHog's retention and are linked only to an internal identifier. Photos sent in messages are stored at unguessable web addresses; anyone given such an address could open it until the photo is deleted.

While we take reasonable care of stored media, we cannot guarantee against loss caused by third-party infrastructure. Keep your own copies of anything important to you.

8. Your Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• Access the data we hold about you and receive a copy
• Correct inaccurate data, in the app or by contacting us
• Delete your account and data, in Settings or by contacting us
• Object to certain processing, such as usage analytics (which you can also turn off in Settings)

To exercise these rights, use the in-app feedback form or our Support page. We will respond within 30 days.

9. Children

Pawfile is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. Users under 18 should use Pawfile with the permission of a parent or guardian. Pawfile includes direct messages between users and optional location sharing on walks. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, contact us and we will delete it.

We also believe children and teenagers benefit most from real-world time with people and animals, and we encourage younger users to put that first.

10. Data Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your data. All data is sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS/TLS), and access rules such as private pets and medical records are enforced on our servers. No system is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

11. International Transfers

Pawfile is used worldwide, and your data may be processed and stored outside your country, including in the United States, by the providers in Section 6. By using the app, you consent to this transfer.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy. The date at the top shows when it last changed. For significant changes we will also let you know in the app where practical. Continuing to use Pawfile after a change means you accept the updated policy.

13. Contact Us

Questions or requests about this policy or your data: use the in-app feedback form or our Support page.