FavourJar Privacy Policy

FavourJar is operated by FavourJar Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 94577040), Unit D, Broadways Farm, Newton Road, Drayton Parslow, Milton Keynes MK17 0JZ, United Kingdom ("FavourJar", "we", "us"). We are the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

If you have any questions or requests about your data, contact us at support@favourjar.com.

Our approach, in plain terms

FavourJar is built around a simple privacy stance, and the rest of this policy is the detailed version of these four commitments:

Your identity exists in FavourJar for one purpose: connecting you with people you already know. We store your phone number so your friends and family, people who already have your number in their phones, can find you and share jars with you. We do not use your identity to profile you, score you, or target you.

Favour content is separated from your identity before it is used for anything else. When our systems interpret a favour to suggest gift ideas or select a relevant ad, they work from the favour's text and context, not from who you are. What travels to those systems is the wish, decoupled from the person.

Our advertising is contextual, not tracking-based. Ads on FavourJar are matched to what a favour is about, in the moment it is viewed. We do not build advertising profiles of you, we do not track you across other apps or websites, we do not use third-party advertising or tracking SDKs, and we never sell your personal data. Advertisers never receive your identity, not your name, number, or any identifier.

Surprises stay surprises. When someone commits to fulfilling your favour, we deliberately do not tell you who. Commitment identity is withheld from favour owners by design, enforced at the database level.

What we collect

Account information. Your mobile phone number (used to sign in via one-time SMS code and as your identity for contact matching), your birthday day and month (the year is optional and never required), an optional profile photo, and an optional username. A username is only needed if you use public jars, and it is the only name-like identifier we ever attach to you.

Contacts you choose to sync. If you enable contact syncing, we receive the phone numbers and the names you have saved for your contacts. We use this to (a) show you which of your contacts are on FavourJar, (b) let you add them to jars, and (c) display people to you using the names you saved for them, FavourJar itself has no directory of real names. Numbers belonging to people who are not on FavourJar are used only for matching if they later join and for the jar features you configure (for example, exclusion lists on public jars).

Content you create. Jars, favours (titles, descriptions, links, photos and videos you attach), thoughts (comments), and commitments. Media you upload is stored so it can be shown to the people your jar settings allow.

Approximate location. With your permission, we use your city-level location to make recommendations local (for example, suggesting nearby venues for an experience favour) and to decide whether a location-limited ad is relevant. We do not keep a history of your movements.

Device and notification data. A push notification token for your device so we can deliver notifications, and basic technical information needed to run the app reliably.

Support communications. If you email us, we keep the correspondence so we can help you.

We do not use third-party analytics or advertising SDKs in the app.

How we use your data

We use your data to operate FavourJar: authenticating you by phone number, matching contacts so jars can be shared, delivering the content of jars you belong to, sending notifications you'd expect (new favours, thoughts, jar invitations, access requests, reminders), keeping commitments anonymous to favour owners, and maintaining the security and integrity of the service. The lawful basis for most of this is performance of our contract with you; for contact matching and service improvement we rely on our legitimate interest in providing a contacts-based social app in the least intrusive way we can, and for anything requiring a device permission (contacts, location, camera, photos, notifications) we act on the permission you grant, which you can withdraw in your device settings at any time.

Recommendations and favour interpretation

When you post a favour, its text may be processed by AI language-model services and web-search services to understand what is being wished for and to find suggestions that could fulfil it. What is sent is the favour's content and, where relevant, a city, not your identity. Recommendation lookups are performed on the favour, and results are shown to the people viewing it. We use trusted infrastructure providers for this processing under contracts that restrict them to processing on our behalf.

Advertising — how it actually works

FavourJar shows a small number of ads alongside gift recommendations. This system is deliberately different from tracking-based advertising:

An advertiser describes what their ad is relevant to. When a favour is viewed, our system compares the favour's interpreted meaning (and, where the advertiser has set one, a location constraint) against ads, and shows an ad only if it is genuinely relevant to that wish. The matching input is the favour, decoupled from the person viewing or posting it. Your ad shows up when it's wanted, not because anyone was tracked.

This means: no advertising profile of you exists; no behavioural targeting, retargeting, or lookalike audiences; no tracking pixels or cross-app identifiers; and advertisers receive aggregate results (such as click counts they are charged for), never your identity or any way to reach you. Every ad is reviewed by a human and screened against Google's Web Risk threat lists before it can run.

Public jars and usernames

Jars are private by default: only people you add can see them. If you choose to make a jar public, any signed-in FavourJar user with its link can view it. On public jars, phone numbers are never shown to anyone who doesn't already have you saved as a contact, people are represented by their chosen username (or "Anonymous"). Creating a public jar, or posting favours or thoughts in one, requires setting a username, precisely so a phone number never has to stand in for you in front of strangers. You can remove your username at any time; if you do, your public jars are converted back to private.

Who we share data with

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers. We share data only with service providers who process it on our behalf under contract, as needed to run FavourJar: cloud database, authentication and storage (Supabase), SMS delivery for sign-in codes (our SMS provider), push notification delivery (Expo, Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, Apple Push Notification service), AI interpretation and web-search providers for recommendations (which receive favour content, not identities), image search services when you search for favour images (which receive your search query), link-preview fetching when you attach a product link, and payment processing for advertisers (Stripe — advertiser billing only; we never handle consumer payment details in the app). We may also disclose data if required by law, or as part of a corporate transaction, in which case this policy would continue to apply to it.

International transfers

Some of our providers process data outside the UK. Where they do, we rely on appropriate safeguards such as the UK's data bridge/adequacy decisions or the International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

How long we keep data

We keep your data while your account is active. Content you delete is removed from the app; jars, favours and related content are deleted with the structures that contain them. If you delete your account, we delete your personal data except where we must retain limited records to meet legal obligations or resolve disputes. Contact-sync data is refreshed as your contacts change and is deleted with your account; you can also disable contact syncing at any time in your device settings.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to access your personal data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to certain processing, and receive a portable copy of data you provided. You can exercise any of these by emailing support@favourjar.com, we respond within one month. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk), though we'd appreciate the chance to resolve any concern first.

Children

FavourJar is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

Security

We protect your data with encryption in transit, row-level access controls in our database (including the controls that keep commitments anonymous and phone numbers hidden on public jars), restricted internal access, and human review plus automated threat screening of all advertising. No system is perfectly secure, but access to your data is limited to what each feature genuinely requires.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app or by notification before they take effect, and update the effective date above.

Contact

FavourJar Ltd, Unit D, Broadways Farm, Newton Road, Drayton Parslow, Milton Keynes MK17 0JZ, United Kingdom · support@favourjar.com