The controller for everything described here is Vorster Consulting GmbH, Austria — the company named in full on the Imprint page. Write to privacy@yaphive.com about anything on this page.

We have not appointed a data protection officer and are not required to: YapHive's core activity is neither large-scale monitoring nor the processing of special categories of data.

Your account. The e-mail address and the name your Apple or Google sign-in hands us, and the handle you pick. We never see the password — signing in happens at Apple or Google and all that comes back is a signed token. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, the relay address is all we ever get.

Your personas. One per Hive: a display name, an optional bio, and the avatar and banner you upload. A persona is visible only inside its own Hive.

Personal information — only if you enter it, under Settings. Your first name, your last name and your date of birth, each of them optional. Your real name is shown to you and to the owners and admins of your Hives. Your date of birth is shown to you alone — except that a Hive where you switch your birthday on shows its members the day and month on its calendar, never the year and never your age. Clearing a field deletes it, and clearing the date switches your birthday off in every Hive.

What you write. Yaps and replies, the pictures, video and voice notes on them, polls and how you voted, events and whether you said you were coming, chat messages, reactions, the Yaps you saved and pinned, what you send to a Hive's Feedback Swarm, and any report you file.

Sessions and workouts, in a Hive that runs them. Which sessions you register for, and whether you are on the list or the waiting list — visible to everybody who can see the session. How many sessions you have attended, and the date of the last — visible to you and to the Hive's admins. And the results and notes you log against a workout, which nobody else in the Hive sees: not the coach, not the admins.

Where you belong. Which Hives you are in, the role you hold in each, when you joined, which Swarms you are in, and who you have blocked.

Push subscriptions — only if you switch notifications on in the installed web app. The push endpoint your browser mints and the two keys that go with it. Switching notifications off deletes the row.

Device tokens — only if you switch notifications on in the iPhone or Android app. The token your phone's push service issues to the app — Apple's on an iPhone, Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging on Android — which is what lets a notification find your phone. Switching notifications off in the app deletes it. So does signing out, and so does Apple or Google telling us that the token has stopped working — after the app is removed from the phone, for instance.

Server logs. The web server keeps ordinary access logs — IP address, timestamp, the address requested, the browser's user-agent string — for security and for working out what broke.

Diagnostics, which stay on your device. The app keeps a short log of what it just did so that a freeze can be described afterwards (Settings → Diagnostics). It is written to your own device's storage, it is never sent anywhere, and clearing it is one button on that screen.

What we do not hold: there is no advertising, no analytics, no tracking pixel, no third-party script, no cross-site identifier, no profiling and no automated decision-making anywhere in YapHive. We do not sell or rent anything about you.

To run the app you asked for — Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, performance of a contract. Your account, your personas, your memberships, everything you post and send, and delivering it to the people you addressed it to.

To keep Hives usable and safe — Art. 6(1)(f), our legitimate interest and every member's in a room that works: moderation and reports, blocking, invitation abuse, rate limits, backups, and the server logs above.

Where you have said yes — Art. 6(1)(a), consent. Push notifications, the camera, the microphone, the photo library — and from the library the app only ever receives the pictures and videos you pick. Your personal information, and your birthday on a Hive's calendar. Each can be withdrawn at any time in the app or in your device's settings, with no effect on anything done before the withdrawal.

Where the law requires it — Art. 6(1)(c), for instance a retention duty or a lawful order.

The other members of your Hive — which is the whole product. A Yap you post in a Hive is readable by that Hive, and narrower still if you addressed it to a Swarm. No Hive can see into another.

That Hive's admins, who additionally see any report you file there, and your real name if you entered one.

Everybody in that Hive's Feedback Swarm, which is everybody in the Hive who opens the Feedback screen — admins among them. What you write there carries your name and is read by all of them; it is a room, not a message to the management.

Us, as the platform's operators. Support can open a time-limited session to look at an account when something is broken, and every one of those is recorded.

Our hosting provider. The whole backend runs on servers we rent inside the European Union, under a processor agreement (Art. 28 GDPR). No analytics service, no advertising network and no content delivery network sits in front of the app.

Expo, for the phone apps only. The iPhone and Android apps ask Expo's update service whether a newer version of the app code is waiting — at launch, when you come back to the app, and every quarter of an hour while it stays open — and fetch it from there when there is one. The request carries what any web request carries — the device's IP address — plus which build it is running and a random identifier the app generates once and keeps, which lets Expo tell one installation from another. It carries nothing about you, your account or your Hives, and the browser version of YapHive does not make it at all.

Apple and Google, as the identity provider you chose. They learn that you signed in to YapHive; we learn nothing about you from them beyond the e-mail address and name described above. Their own privacy policies govern their side of that.

Your browser's push service — Apple, Google or Mozilla, depending on the browser — but only while push is switched on, and only for the message being delivered.

Apple or Google again, for notifications in the phone apps, and only while you have them switched on. Switching them on registers the app with your phone's push service: Apple Push Notification service on an iPhone; on Android, Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging, through a Firebase project we run (Firebase also creates an identifier for this installation of the app, which it needs to issue the token). Every notification then travels through that service to your phone, and the service sees what it says — the Hive, who, and what they did — but never the words of a chat message.

What we store about you is kept on servers inside the European Union. Two things leave it: a notification passes through your phone's or browser's push service on its way to you — Apple, Google or Mozilla — and the phone apps' update check goes to Expo. Apple, Google and Expo are based in the United States and take part in the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, which is what such a transfer rests on (Art. 45 GDPR). A notification to a browser is encrypted end to end, so its push service carries it without being able to read it. If anything else ever changes, this page changes before it does.

Your account and everything in it stay for as long as the account does — your personal information until you clear it.

Leaving a Hive removes the persona you wore there, and with it your likes, saved and pinned Yaps, follows and votes in that Hive, your session registrations, attendance and workout results there, and your birthday on its calendar. The Yaps and replies you left behind stay in the Hive with nobody's name on them, unless you rejoin and they find their author again — the conversations other people had around them are theirs, not yours to take away.

Leaving also takes your chat with it. Every message you sent in that Hive's chats goes, and a one-to-one conversation left with a single person in it is deleted outright — so the other person loses their copy of it too. That is deliberate, and it is worth knowing before you leave rather than after.

Deleting your account purges every membership the way an admin's erasure does — your Yaps, replies, chat messages, pictures and voice notes go with it — and then deletes the account itself. If you are the sole owner of a Hive you hand that Hive over first: deleting it out from under its members is not something to do by accident.

Picture and audio files stop being reachable the moment the row naming one goes: every read of a file is gated on that row, so nothing in the app can fetch it afterwards. The bytes themselves are then removed from the object store by a separate sweep, which runs on its own schedule rather than in the same instant.

Server logs exist to keep the service running and to investigate abuse; they are rotated and discarded on a short, fixed cycle and are used for nothing else.

Backups roll over on their own cycle. A deletion reaches a backup when the last one taken before it expires, and backups are never used to restore something a member deleted.

Under the GDPR you may ask for access (Art. 15), correction (Art. 16), erasure (Art. 17), restriction (Art. 18) and portability (Art. 20), and you may object to processing we base on our legitimate interests (Art. 21). Where we rely on your consent you may withdraw it at any time (Art. 7(3)).

Most of it you can do yourself, in the app: your handle, your persona, your personal information, your language and your notifications are all editable, a Yap or a message can be deleted where it sits, leaving a Hive is one button on the Settings sheet, and so is deleting your account.

For anything else, write to privacy@yaphive.com. We answer within one month, as the regulation requires.

If you think we have got this wrong you can complain to the Austrian data protection authority: Österreichische Datenschutzbehörde, Barichgasse 40–42, 1030 Vienna, dsb@dsb.gv.at.

YapHive is for people aged 16 and over. If you are younger, please do not use it. An account we learn belongs to somebody under 16 is deleted.

If what we do changes, this page changes first and the date at the top moves with it. We will not quietly apply a new version to data already collected under an older one.