1. Introduction
Welcome to FrndCircle (referred to as "we," "our," or "us"). FrndCircle is a social discovery community application that facilitates real-world interactions and group activities. We are committed to protecting your personal data and ensuring your privacy.
This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website, use our mobile application, or engage with our services. By accessing or using our services, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy.
Key Concept: We believe in minimal data footprint. We only collect information that is strictly necessary to match you with interesting real-life activities and verify members to keep our community safe.
2. Information We Collect
To provide our social activity discovery service, we collect personal data that falls into the following categories:
Account & Profile Information
When registering, you provide your name, phone number, date of birth, gender, profile photo, and biography. You can optionally link social accounts (e.g. Instagram) to verify your identity.
Geolocation Information
With your consent, we collect precise or approximate location details from your mobile device. This is vital to display local activities (e.g., coffee meetups, hiking trips) and ensure events are shown in your actual city.
Activity & Interaction Data
We collect information about the activities you host, join, or express interest in, as well as messages exchanged in group chat rooms dedicated to coordinate the real-life activities.
Device & Usage Data
Technical data including your IP address, device type, operating system version, app version, crashes, and platform activity logs are collected automatically.
3. How We Use Information
We process your information for purposes based on legitimate business interests, performance of contracts, compliance with legal obligations, and your consent. Specifically, we use it to:
- Facilitate account creation, user authentication, and profile verification.
- Connect you with other members hosting activities nearby in your city.
- Enable coordinate chats, activity reviews, and host approvals.
- Provide push notifications for status updates on activities (e.g. approved to join).
- Ensure member safety, moderate inappropriate behaviors, and prevent scams.
- Analyze usage statistics to improve FrndCircle's features and user experience.
- Perform legal duties, enforce our terms, and handle disputes.
5. Security & Retention
We implement appropriate technical and organizational security measures to protect your personal data from unauthorized access, loss, or alteration. All database and API communications are encrypted in transit using SSL/TLS protocols.
We retain your personal information only as long as you maintain an active account with FrndCircle. When you request to delete your account, we sanitize and delete your profile data, chat messages, and hosted activity records from our primary production databases within 30 days, subject to legal archiving laws.
6. Your Rights & Choices
Depending on your location, you may have statutory rights under local privacy laws (e.g., GDPR in the EU, CCPA in California). These rights include:
Access & Portability
Request a copy of the personal information we hold about you at any time.
Rectification
Update your details or request corrections to inaccurate profiles directly inside the app settings.
Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten")
Request full deletion of your account and related records in Settings > Delete Account.
Withdraw Consent
Toggle off precise location coordinates or disable push notifications in your system settings.
8. Children's Privacy
Our services are not intended for or directed to anyone under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. If you become aware that a child has provided personal details, please contact us, and we will take immediate steps to delete such accounts.
9. Policy Changes
We reserve the right to update this Privacy Policy. Any modifications will be posted directly to this page with an updated "Last Updated" date. We will provide explicit notice in the FrndCircle application if we introduce material changes to how we process your personal coordinates.
10. Contact Us
If you have questions, concerns, or feedback regarding your privacy, please get in touch with our team: