HelloMe is a presence-sharing app for a small, mutually-confirmed circle of people you actually know. You sign in with your phone number, share a simple availability status (free / text / busy) with people who have accepted you into their circle, and reach them through your phone's own apps (call, SMS, FaceTime, WhatsApp). There are no ads, no advertising SDKs, no behavioural or product analytics, and no cross-app or cross-site tracking in HelloMe. The one exception to that shape of processing is crash and error diagnostics, which exist so we can find and fix bugs — what they contain, and what we strip out of them first, is in Section 3.

This policy explains exactly what HelloMe collects, why, who processes it on our behalf, how long it is kept, and how you can delete everything yourself from inside the app.

If you have any question about this policy or your data, contact privacy@hellome.us.

HelloMe ("we", "us") provides the HelloMe mobile app. We are the data controller for the personal data described below. Contact: privacy@hellome.us.

We collect only what the app needs to function. We do not sell your data and we do not use it for advertising or tracking.

We do not collect your precise or coarse location, your browsing history, your message content, your call logs, your health/financial data, or any advertising identifier.

Camera and photo library

If you set a profile photo, the app asks permission to use your photo library or camera (iOS prompts: "HelloMe uses your photos to set your profile picture." / "HelloMe uses the camera to take your profile picture."). The image is used only as your avatar. We do not scan your library or access photos you don't choose.

We use a small number of service providers ("processors") to run the app. They process data only on our instructions, to provide their service to us:

We do not share your personal data with advertisers, data brokers, or any other third party for their own purposes.

• Account data (profile, display name, phone number, avatar, presence, reach-out preferences) is kept for as long as your account exists. When you delete your account (Section 5), it is removed.
• Push tokens are removed when you sign out on a device, and when you delete your account.
• Circle relationships, friend requests, and blocks are removed when you delete your account (in both directions — rows you created and rows that reference you).
• SMS OTP codes are short-lived and managed by Supabase Auth / the SMS provider.
• Crash diagnostics follow Sentry's retention configuration and contain no advertising identifiers.

We do not keep backups of an account beyond what is necessary to operate the service reliably; routine operational backups age out on a rolling basis.

You can permanently delete your HelloMe account from inside the app — you do not need to email us.

How: open the app while signed in and use the Delete account action in your profile/settings. Confirm when prompted.

What happens, technically:

1. The app first removes your avatar image(s) from Storage.
2. The app calls the server function delete_account, which: - deletes your circle edges (both directions), - deletes your friend requests (sent and received), - deletes your blocks (both directions), - deletes your profile row, and - deletes your authentication identity (auth.users), which cascades your sessions and tokens.
3. You are signed out on the device.

This is irreversible and is scoped strictly to your own account — the function takes no target parameter and acts only on the signed-in user, so no one can use it to delete anyone else.

If you ever cannot use the in-app deletion (e.g. you've lost access to the device), email privacy@hellome.us and we will delete your account on request after verifying your identity.

HelloMe is built so that presence is never visible without mutual consent:

• Mutual consent always. Connection is request → accept → presence. A pending request never reveals your status. You see someone's live status only after you have accepted a connection with them.
• Row-Level Security (RLS). The database enforces that you can read a profile's status only if it's your own profile, or there is an accepted circle edge from you to that person. This is enforced at the database layer — not just in the app UI — and Realtime presence updates are filtered by the same rule, so a status change is delivered only to people in that user's circle.
• Minimal disclosure on lookup. Looking someone up by phone number (or, in future, by contact match) reveals only whether they are on HelloMe and your relationship state — never their name, photo, phone number, or status until they accept you.
• Blocks are invisible. A blocked relationship is simply omitted from results, so a block is never revealed to either party.
• Transport security. Connections to our backend use standard HTTPS/TLS. Your login session token is stored on-device in the platform's protected app storage (UserDefaults / Keychain-backed app storage via the OS).

No system is perfectly secure, but we design HelloMe to disclose the minimum and to make the privacy boundary a property of the data layer.

HelloMe is not directed to children. You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum digital-consent age in your country, if higher — e.g. 16 in parts of the EU) to use HelloMe. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below that age. If you believe a child has provided us data, contact privacy@hellome.us and we will delete it.

If you choose to find people from your contacts, HelloMe matches your phone contacts against existing HelloMe users. It works as follows:

• Matching happens only after you grant contacts permission — it is entirely optional, and adding people by phone number works without it.
• Your device normalizes each contact's phone number and sends the numbers, in capped, rate-limited batches, over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection.
• The server compares them against registered users and returns only which of your contacts are on HelloMe and your relationship state — never a matched user's status, and nothing about people who are not on HelloMe.
• Your contacts' numbers are matched transiently and never stored, and are never sold or shared. We do not retain your address book or build a social graph from it. The only thing we keep is a one-way (md5) hash of each submitted number, retained for at most 24 hours and tied to your account, used solely to rate-limit the feature and prevent abuse — never to identify or contact anyone, and never shared.

You can revoke contacts permission at any time in your device's settings.

Our processors (Supabase, the SMS OTP provider, Expo, and Sentry) may store and process data on servers located outside your country, including in the United States. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards (such as the processors' standard contractual clauses) for these transfers. By using HelloMe you understand your data may be processed in these locations.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can edit your profile and delete your entire account from inside the app at any time (Section 5). For any other request, contact privacy@hellome.us.

If we make material changes, we will update the Effective date above and, where appropriate, notify you in the app. Continued use after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Questions, requests, or concerns: privacy@hellome.us.