Ephyre Privacy Policy

Last updated 21 October 2026

Ephyre uses your location only to tell when you are inside an Active Zone, never shows it to anyone as a point on a map, and never stores chat messages in its database or backups. This policy explains what else we collect, why, and the rights you have under South Africa's Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA), the EU and UK GDPR, and the privacy laws where you live, including US state laws.

Who is responsible for your information

We have not appointed a separate data protection officer. The Information Officer handles all privacy questions and requests.

What we collect, why, and how long we keep it

We collect information only from you and your phone. The legal basis column uses GDPR terms; under POPIA section 11 the same grounds are performance of a contract, consent, legitimate interests and compliance with the law.

We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising.

What you must give us, and what is optional

No law requires you to give us information. Some of it is needed to run your account:

• Required: email address, first name, last name, username, date of birth, at least one photo, and your location when you check in. Without these you cannot create an account or check in to a zone.
• Optional: bio, interests, "Here for", prompts, extra photos and notifications. Leaving them out only means other people see less about you, or you are not notified while the app is closed.

Sensitive information

What you write in your bio, interests, "Here for" or prompts, and what your photos show, may reveal your sexual orientation, sex life, religion, ethnicity or health. POPIA and the GDPR call this special personal information.

• We use it only to show your card to people in your zone, never to profile you or for advertising.
• We ask for your explicit consent at sign-up before we save these details.
• You can withdraw that consent at any time by removing the details in Edit profile, or by deleting your account. Withdrawing does not affect what we did with your consent before.

Your location

• Ephyre asks for your location only while the app is open. It is used to find the Active Zones around you, to check that you are inside one when you check in, and to notice when you leave.
• Other people never see where you are on a map. They see only that you are in the same zone, and a rough distance range, such as "under 50 m", that is too coarse to pinpoint you.
• We do not keep a history of where you have been.
• The map comes from Mapbox, which receives the area of the map your phone loads. Mapbox's own location telemetry is switched off in Ephyre, so Mapbox does not collect your device location from the app.
• You can turn location off at any time in your phone's settings. Ephyre then cannot check you in.

Chats, notifications and reports

• Chats are held only in our server's short-term memory while they are live. They are never written to our database or its nightly backups, and they are deleted when the chat fades. After that, nobody can recover them, including us.
• Notifications say who it is from and what happened, such as "Alex sent you a message" or "Alex Sparked you". Message text is never passed to Google or Apple: the notification only wakes the app, which fetches the message from our server over an encrypted connection and shows a preview on your phone. You can turn previews off in Settings, and the app clears a chat's notifications when it fades.
• Reports are the one exception to fading. When you or the other person reports a chat, a copy of its recent messages is saved with the report so we can review it. That copy is kept as set out in the table above, and may be given to the police where the law requires or someone's safety is at risk.

What other people see

• People checked in to the same zone see your card: first name, age (never your date of birth), photos, bio, interests, "Here for" and prompts, a rough distance range, and how long you have been there.
• Your last name is never shown to anyone. Your username is shown only to people you have connected with, never on your card, and nobody can search for it.
• Someone you Spark sees your name, photo, the zone and your note.
• Someone you send a Second Chance ping to sees only the zone you were both in, until they accept it.
• Nobody sees you once you leave the zone, and nobody you have blocked sees you at all.

Who we share it with

We share information only with service providers that help run Ephyre, under contracts that limit them to that work, and when the law requires it, for example a court order or to protect someone in danger.

Sending your information abroad

Your information is stored in Germany and some providers are in the United States, so it leaves the country you live in. We protect it on each route as the law requires:

• Germany (Hetzner). Hetzner is bound by the EU GDPR, a law that gives protection substantially similar to POPIA, as section 72(1)(a) of POPIA requires. We also have a data processing agreement with Hetzner.
• United States and other providers. Each provider is bound by a written data processing agreement that limits it to our instructions and protects your information to a standard substantially similar to POPIA, including when it passes information on. For information covered by the GDPR, those agreements use the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, or the provider's certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards we rely on for any provider.

Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you can:

1. See and change your profile at any time in Edit profile.
2. Ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, including in a portable, machine-readable format.
3. Ask us to correct or delete it.
4. Ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our using it, including where we rely on legitimate interests.
5. Withdraw any consent you gave, at any time. This does not affect what we did with your consent before.
6. Complain to us first, and if you are not satisfied, to South Africa's Information Regulator (inforegulator.org.za), the data protection authority where you live (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office), or in the United States your state's attorney general. Under POPIA you may also go to court.

To use these rights, email hello@ephyre.app. We confirm requests through your account's email address, answer within 30 days, and never treat you differently for making one. Someone you authorise in writing can ask for you.

Deleting your account

Delete your account from the Profile tab, or without the app at ephyre.app/delete-account.

• Your profile, photos, tokens and account data are deleted within 30 days.
• Copies in our backups are overwritten within a further 7 days.
• We keep only what the law requires, such as purchase records, and reports for the period in the table above.

If you live in the United States

• What we collect: identifiers (email address, username, IP address), profile details including date of birth and photos, precise location while the app is open, chat messages until they fade, activity in the app (check-ins, Sparks, swipes, blocks, reports), purchase records, and device information and crash reports. The table above gives the purpose and retention of each.
• Sensitive information: precise location, and any sensitive details in your profile, are used only to run Ephyre, never to infer things about you or for advertising.
• No selling or sharing. We do not sell your personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and have not done so in the past 12 months, so there is nothing to opt out of.
• Your requests: whatever state you live in, and whether or not its privacy law applies to Ephyre, you can use the rights in "Your rights and choices". If we turn down a request, you can appeal by replying to our answer; we decide appeals within 45 days and tell you how to complain to your attorney general if you disagree.

Age, security and changes

• Age. Ephyre is only for people 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and delete an account as soon as we learn it belongs to a minor. Where an app store sends us your age category, we use it only to check you are an adult. Our Child Safety Standards explain how we keep children safe.
• No automated decisions. We do not make decisions about you based only on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects. Reports are reviewed by a person.
• Security. Information travels to and from our server encrypted (HTTPS). The server sits behind a firewall in a data centre in Germany. Sign-in codes expire after 10 minutes, and location is never stored as a history. No system is perfectly secure.
• Breaches. If a breach puts your information at risk, we will tell you as soon as reasonably possible, and report it to South Africa's Information Regulator and, where the GDPR applies, the relevant EU authority within 72 hours.
• Changes. If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.
• Contact. Questions about privacy, or a request to use your rights: hello@ephyre.app.