privacy policy

This Privacy Policy describes how kwyd, LLC (“kwyd,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, uses, and shares information when you use the kwyd mobile application and related services (collectively, the “Service”).

kwyd is built to be a small, private space for close friends. There is no public feed, no follower count, and no advertising. We try to collect as little as we need to run the Service, and we do not sell your personal information. By using the Service, you agree to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

No advertising identifiers. kwyd does not use the Apple advertising identifier (IDFA), the identifier for vendors (IDFV), or any advertising or attribution SDK. We do not track you across other companies’ apps or websites, and we do not ask for App Tracking Transparency permission because we have nothing to track you with. We also do not request access to your contacts or your health data.

If you have questions, contact us at legal@kwyd.co or by mail at the address in the Contact Us section below.

Who This Policy Applies To

The Service is intended only for people 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. See Section 10 — Children’s and Minors’ Privacy for more.

Information We Collect

We collect information in the following ways.

2.1 Information you provide directly

• Account information. When you create an account using Sign in with Apple, we receive a unique account identifier and, depending on your Apple settings, your name and an email address (which may be a private relay address provided by Apple). We use this to create and secure your account.
• Profile information. Your display name, username, profile photo, and bio, which you choose and which are visible to others as described below.
• Date of birth / age. We collect your date of birth once, during onboarding. We use it to confirm that you meet our minimum age requirement, to operate birthday features, and to group accounts for the aggregate measurement described in Section 5 — Analytics and Measurement. Your date of birth itself is never sent to our analytics provider.
• Content you create. The posts (“kwyds”), moods, poll votes, locations, photos, direct messages, reactions, RSVPs, and other content you create or add within the Service (your “Content”). This includes photos you add to your door and drawings you make on a friend’s whiteboard.
• Your connections. Information about the friend connections you make and the requests you send or receive, which we use to operate the Service’s core social features.
• Invite information. If you join through an invite link, we record which invite you used so we can connect you to the person who invited you. See Section 2.8.
• Communications. If you contact us for support, report another user, or otherwise communicate with us, we collect the information you choose to share.

2.2 Information collected automatically

• Device and app information. Basic technical information necessary to operate the Service, such as device model, device type, operating system name and version, app version and build, how the app was installed (App Store or TestFlight), screen dimensions, language and locale, time zone, network connection type, and a notification token if you enable push notifications.
• Usage information. Limited information about how you interact with the Service, used to operate, secure, and improve it and to detect and prevent abuse. Section 5 — Analytics and Measurement describes exactly what this is and what it deliberately excludes.
• IP address and approximate location. Like any internet service, our servers and our analytics provider receive the IP address your device connects from. Our analytics provider uses it to estimate an approximate location — typically country, region, and city — which is attached to your analytics profile. This is separate from, and much less precise than, the location features described in Section 2.3, and it happens even if you never grant location permission.
• Log and diagnostic information. Information generated when the app encounters an error or behaves unexpectedly, used to diagnose and fix problems.

2.3 Location information

With your permission, the Service can access your device location so you can add locations to your posts. We request location access only after you grant the corresponding system permission, and you can change or revoke this permission at any time in your device settings. If you decline or revoke location access, you can still use the Service, but location-based features may be limited or unavailable.

We ask only for “while using the app” location access. We never request always-on or background location, and the app does not collect your location when it is not open. We use the least precise location that will do the job, and ask for a more precise one only while you are actively picking a place.

A location you attach to a post is stored with that post and shown to the friends you share it with. We do not send coordinates, addresses, or place names to our analytics provider.

2.4 Push notifications

If you enable push notifications, we use a device-specific notification token to deliver them. You consent to push notifications through your device, you can choose which categories of notifications you receive within the Service, and you can disable them at any time in the Service or in your device settings.

Push notifications are delivered through Apple’s Push Notification service, which means the contents of a notification pass through Apple’s systems on the way to your device. Some notifications include content: a direct-message notification includes the sender’s username and the beginning of the message, and a whiteboard notification includes the name of the friend who drew on your board. Daily reminders contain no personal content.

2.5 Camera and photos

With your permission, the Service can access your device’s camera so you can capture photos (“prints”), add photos to your door, and set a profile photo. Photos you capture or select and choose to share are uploaded to and stored by our infrastructure so they can be shown to the friends you choose. Every photo is checked automatically on our servers before it is stored, as described in Section 2.6. We request camera and photo access only after you grant the system permission, and you can revoke it at any time in device settings.

We strip photo metadata before upload. Photos are re-encoded on your device before they leave it, which removes EXIF metadata — including any GPS coordinates the camera recorded — from the file we receive and store.

Photo authenticity check. So that prints and door photos are real camera shots rather than screenshots or saved images, the app checks the photo you pick and declines ones that do not qualify. This check happens on your device. If the photo is stored only in iCloud, selecting it may cause your device to download the original from Apple, as it would in any photo app.

2.6 Automated photo screening

When you upload a photo to kwyd — a photo for a kwyd, a photo for your door, or a profile photo — the image is checked automatically before it is stored. The check runs on our servers: the image is sent to OpenAI’s moderation service, which scores it for sexual content, graphic violence, and self-harm, and returns only those scores. Nothing else about you travels with the image — no name, no account identifier, no session — and OpenAI does not use content submitted to that moderation endpoint to train its models. If the check finds that the photo breaks kwyd’s rules, the upload is refused: the photo is never stored, never shown to anyone, and you see a screen telling you it could not be posted. If the check finds nothing, the photo is stored as normal. No one at kwyd reviews your photo as part of this check, and no report is filed as a result of it.

2.7 Direct messages

Direct messages are stored on our servers so they can be delivered and so you can read them again later. They are encrypted in transit and at rest and access to them is restricted, but they are not end-to-end encrypted: we can access message content where the law requires it or where we are investigating a report of abuse. Please keep this in mind when deciding what to send.

If someone sends a link in a message, your device may fetch a preview of that link — its title and image — directly from the website in question, as messaging apps commonly do. That request comes from your device, which means the website can see that someone visited it. kwyd does not fetch the preview for you.

2.8 Invite links

When someone opens a kwyd invite link, our website records limited technical information about that visit — which may include information derived from your IP address — so that we can connect a new account to the person who invited them and understand how far an invite reached. We do not store the IP address itself, and what we do store cannot be used to identify you outside kwyd. We use it only for invite attribution and to prevent abuse of invites — never to build a profile of you, and never for advertising.

Because this happens on our public website, it can happen before you have a kwyd account, and even if you never install the app. We keep these records only for as long as they are useful for the purposes above, and delete them when they are not.

2.9 Clipboard

So that an invite still works after you install the app from the App Store, an invite code may be passed through your device’s clipboard. The app reads your clipboard only after you tap to confirm on a screen explaining why, and only to look for a kwyd invite code. Anything else on your clipboard is ignored and left alone, and we never store or transmit clipboard contents that are not a kwyd invite code.

How We Use Information

We use the information we collect to:

• create, operate, maintain, and secure your account and the Service;
• authenticate you and keep your account safe;
• enable the Service’s core features, including creating and sharing Content with the friends you choose;
• deliver push notifications you have enabled, and let you control them;
• provide location-based features when you grant location access;
• respond to your requests, reports, and support inquiries;
• detect, investigate, prevent, and address fraud, abuse, security incidents, violations of our Terms of Service, and other harmful, illegal, or prohibited activity;
• enforce our Terms of Service and other policies;
• understand how the Service is used so we can fix problems and improve it, and measure how invites and friend groups grow, as described in Section 5 — Analytics and Measurement;
• decide which product features to switch on for which users while we are testing them; and
• comply with applicable law and legal obligations, and protect the rights, safety, and property of kwyd, our users, and the public.

We do not use your private Content to serve third-party advertising, and we do not sell your personal information.

How Information Is Shared

We share information only as described below.

4.1 With other users

The Service is social by design. The following information is visible to other users, and some of it is public-facing:

• Your display name, username, profile photo, and bio are public-facing and may be visible to other users of the Service, including people who are not your confirmed friends. Do not include sensitive personal information in these fields.
• Content you share is visible to the friends or recipients you choose to share it with, according to the Service’s features and your settings. This includes your door and the photos on it, and your semester bin, which keeps past slides where your friends can look back at them.
• If you allow it, friends can draw on your whiteboard. A drawing a friend makes is visible to the people who can see your door, and we tell you who drew it. You can turn this off, remove any drawing, and block a user to remove theirs.
• Friends you have accepted may also see activity connected to your account, such as likes and reactions, RSVP responses, poll votes, message read status, and whether you are currently active.

Please think carefully about what you choose to make visible. Information you share with others may be re-shared, copied, or stored by them outside of our control.

4.2 With service providers

We share information with trusted third parties that perform services on our behalf — for example, cloud hosting, infrastructure, security, analytics, and customer support providers. These providers are permitted to use the information only to provide services to us and are bound by obligations to protect it.

The providers we use are:

• A cloud hosting and database provider, which operates the infrastructure the Service runs on and holds your account and your Content. That data is stored in the United States, in Amazon Web Services’ us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) region.
• Cloudflare, which stores and delivers photos and other media through kwyd’s own media service.
• OpenAI, which performs the automated photo moderation described in Section 2.6. It receives the image only — no name, account identifier, or session — and does not use it to train its models.
• PostHog, our product analytics provider, described in Section 5 — Analytics and Measurement.

4.3 With Apple

We use Sign in with Apple for authentication and Apple’s services to deliver push notifications and distribute the app. Your use of these features is also subject to Apple’s privacy policy. Specifically:

• Sign in with Apple. We request your name and email. Your full name stays on your device; the email address — which may be one of Apple’s private relay addresses — reaches our servers.
• Push notifications. Delivered through Apple, including notification content as described in Section 2.4.
• Maps and place search. When you pick a location, your approximate coordinate is sent to Apple’s mapping services to search for nearby places, to turn a coordinate into a place name, and to fetch the map image shown on a slide.

Photo screening does not involve Apple. It runs on our servers, as described in Section 2.6.

4.4 For legal, safety, and security reasons

We may disclose information if we believe in good faith that it is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with applicable law, regulation, legal process, or a governmental request; (b) enforce our Terms of Service and other agreements; (c) detect, prevent, or address fraud, security, abuse, or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property, or safety of kwyd, our users, or the public, including to prevent imminent harm.

4.5 Business transfers

If kwyd is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, sale of assets, or similar transaction, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will take reasonable steps to ensure your information remains subject to appropriate protections.

4.6 With your direction or consent

We may share information in other ways at your direction or with your consent. The clearest example is sharing to Instagram Stories: if you choose to share a kwyd to Instagram, your device composes the image and hands it to Instagram, which then opens so that you can post it. kwyd never posts on your behalf, and the composed image is not uploaded to us. What happens once the image is in Instagram is governed by Meta’s terms and privacy policy.

Analytics and Measurement

We use a product analytics service to understand how kwyd is used so we can fix what is broken and decide what to build. Our provider processes this information on our behalf under a contract that restricts it to providing the service to us. We do not use analytics for advertising, and we do not sell or share this information for cross-context behavioural advertising.

5.1 How you are identified

Once you sign in, analytics events are associated with your kwyd account identifier. Before you sign in, they are associated with a random identifier generated on your device — not an advertising identifier and not your device’s serial number or vendor ID. When you sign out, that association is reset.

5.2 What we measure — and what we cannot measure

We record a fixed list of product events: that a kwyd was posted, that a friend request was accepted, that a photo failed screening, that a screen was opened, and so on. Each event can carry only three kinds of detail: a yes/no flag, a count, or a value chosen from a fixed list of options.

This is a built-in limit, not just a policy. The app has no way to attach free-form text to an analytics event. A username, the words in a kwyd, a message, a place name, an address, or a coordinate cannot be expressed in our analytics at all. So while we can see that you posted a kwyd with a location attached, we cannot see where, or what you wrote.

Our servers also send a small number of events when something happens without you — for example when a slide ends or a kwyd expires. These carry the identifier of the item involved, not its contents.

5.3 Information the analytics software adds automatically

Alongside anything we send deliberately, the analytics software attaches standard technical context to each event: app version and build, how the app was installed, device model and type, operating system and version, screen size, language and locale, time zone, network connection type, the analytics library version, a rotating session identifier, and which product features were switched on for you. It also records when the app is installed, updated, opened, and sent to the background.

Because your device connects to our analytics provider directly, that provider receives your IP address and derives an approximate location (typically country, region, and city) from it. This happens on connection, so it can occur even if you take no action in the app.

5.4 What we deliberately do not collect

We have turned off several things this software is capable of. kwyd does not use session replay or screen recording, does not automatically capture your taps or the labels of buttons you press, and does not automatically capture the contents of screens you view.

5.5 Information about your friend circle

Once a day, we calculate a small set of summary figures about how you use kwyd and attach them to your analytics profile: how many friends you have, whether your account is active, how many kwyds and slides you have posted in total, the week you signed up, how interconnected your friends are with one another, and an identifier for the friend group you belong to, which is shared with the others in that group.

These are summary figures about your friend circle, not its contents. They do not include names, usernames, or the identities of your individual friends. We use them to understand how friend groups form and grow on kwyd.

We use your age to decide whether your account is included in these aggregate figures, so that they describe our intended audience. Your date of birth itself is never sent.

Data Retention

We retain personal information for as long as your account is active and as long as reasonably necessary to provide the Service, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, prevent abuse, and enforce our agreements. When information is no longer needed, we take reasonable steps to delete or de-identify it. Some information may persist in backups for a limited period or where retention is required by law.

kwyd is ephemeral in your feed, not in our records. A kwyd leaves your friends’ feed after 24 hours, or when you post a new one. We keep the post itself, so that your semester bin and your own history stay intact. You can delete any kwyd at any time, and doing so removes it.

More specifically:

• kwyds, moods, polls, and locations — kept after they expire or are replaced, so that your history and semester bin work. You can delete any of them at any time.
• Photos, including prints and door photos — kept until you delete them or delete your account.
• Whiteboard drawings — genuinely temporary. They are permanently deleted every week, and immediately if either person blocks the other or if either account is deleted.
• Direct messages — kept until you or the other person deletes them, or until an account is deleted.
• Notifications — read notifications are permanently deleted after 90 days.
• Invite-link records — as described in Section 2.8.
• Analytics — the daily summary figures described in Section 5.5 are kept for as long as your account exists. Analytics information is not kept longer than we need it for the purposes described in Section 5.

If you delete your account, we will delete or de-identify your personal information within a reasonable period, except where we are permitted or required to retain it. Deleting your account removes your profile, your Content, your photos, your messages, and any whiteboard drawings involving you.

Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational measures designed to protect personal information against unauthorized access, loss, misuse, and alteration. However, no method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You are responsible for keeping your device and account credentials secure.

Your Choices and Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have some or all of the following rights regarding your personal information:

• Access and portability — request a copy of the personal information we hold about you.
• Correction — request that we correct inaccurate information; you can also edit much of your profile directly in the Service.
• Deletion — request that we delete your personal information, or delete your account.
• Objection and restriction — object to or request that we limit certain processing.
• Withdraw consent — where we rely on consent (such as for location or push notifications), withdraw it at any time, without affecting prior processing.
• Non-discrimination — we will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.

To exercise these rights, contact us at legal@kwyd.co. We may need to verify your identity before responding. You can manage many choices directly in the Service or your device settings, including:

• your profile information, which you can edit at any time;
• which categories of notification you receive, and whether you receive them at all;
• whether friends can draw on your whiteboard, and removing any drawing;
• blocking and reporting other users;
• location and photo permissions, in your device settings; and
• deleting individual Content, or deleting your account entirely, from within the app.

Analytics. The measurement described in Section 5 is part of how the Service operates and there is currently no separate switch for it in the app. It carries no advertising identifier and is not used to track you across other apps or websites.

California residents. We do not sell or “share” personal information as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act (as amended). California residents may exercise the access, deletion, correction, and non-discrimination rights described above.

Users in other jurisdictions. If you are located in a jurisdiction with specific data protection laws, you may have additional rights under local law. Where applicable, we process personal information on the legal bases of providing the Service you request (contract), your consent, our legitimate interests in operating and securing the Service, and compliance with legal obligations.

Third-Party Services and Links

The Service relies on or links to third-party services — including Apple’s services, our hosting provider, our media storage and delivery provider, our photo moderation provider, our analytics provider, and Instagram when you choose to share to it. This Privacy Policy does not apply to those third parties, and we are not responsible for their privacy practices. We encourage you to review their policies.

The Service also links to outside safety resources — such as the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s Take It Down service, CyberTipline, StopNCII, and the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline — where those resources may help. Opening one of those links takes you to a website we do not operate.

Children’s and Minors’ Privacy

The Service is intended only for users 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18, and we do not direct the Service to children.

We collect your date of birth during onboarding and use it to verify that you meet this minimum. If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone under 18, we will take steps to delete that information and terminate the associated account. If you believe an underage person has provided us personal information, please contact us at legal@kwyd.co.

Because the Service is for adults, we do not offer it in the App Store’s Kids Category and it is not designed for or directed to children.

International Users

kwyd is based in the United States and the Service is operated from the United States. Your account and your Content are stored in the United States, in Amazon Web Services’ us-east-1 (Northern Virginia) region. If you access the Service from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to, stored, and processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country.

Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will take reasonable steps to notify you, such as by posting the updated policy in the Service or on our website and updating the “Last Updated” date above. Your continued use of the Service after the changes take effect means you accept the updated policy.

Contact Us

If you have questions or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or your personal information, contact us at:

kwyd, LLC
1449 S Michigan Ave STE 13266
Chicago, IL 60605
United States
Email: legal@kwyd.co