privacy policy

hello :)

in case you’re not familiar, peer is an app that makes it fun and easy to find things to do, know what your friends and family are up to and preserve memories of your real life interactions. traveling to a new country? show off how much of the world you’ve explored? lost your friends at a festival, on the beach, or on the slopes? we’ve got you covered! peer helps you keep up with the people you care about the most,  organize your experience, create a personal diary of where you've been, and showcase all the places you've visited. peer is your people, your places, your world. let’s go!

important information

before you read on, we would like to highlight important information

• when you use our services you share information with peer and companies within our corporate family. peer inc. is the data controller and responsible for processing your data
• to create your account we only require a name, birthday and phone number. the name is used to identify you on peer, your birthday ensures you’re old enough to use the app, and your phone number is used to authenticate your account. if you get a different phone number, let us know so we can port your account
• your peer account profile information is public to make it easy to find friends and connect with others
• peer is a location based application. in order to provide the services to you we need to access, store your location data and showcase check-ins at places. none of this information will be sold to third parties
• at times we may need to transfer your information to third parties. any change to what we do with your information will be communicated to you via the email you’ve provided
• you can always email us at support@peer.inc if you have questions about our privacy policy, if you want access to your data, if you want us to correct your data, or if you want us to delete it. your information, your data belongs to you
• we have a data deletion and retention policy in place that details how long we store your information. as a general rule, we store the information we collect as long as you are actively using the peer app. if you haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete your account.
• if you’re based in the eu, you can always file a complaint with the supervisory authority in your member state. for example, if you’re based in france you can file a complaint with the cnil
• you have the right to provide us with instructions on how to handle the deletion and retention of your personal data after your death

information we collect

there are three categories of information we collect:

• information you provide
• information we may get when you use peer
• information we collect from third parties

information you provide

when you interact with our services, we collect information that you choose to share with us

• registration. when you register through the app you provide us with a name (which could be your first and/or last name, or a pseudonym… it’s totally up to you), birthday and phone number. during registration we will send you a verification code via text message which will enable us to verify your account (we find it easier and more secure than remembering a password). if you don’t receive a verification code you can also request a good, old-fashioned phone call
• profile picture. if you want, you can also add a profile picture to make it easier and more fun to interact with your friends. of course, you're free to change your photo and display name anytime you’d like: just go to settings in the app 📸
• address book. we also allow you to share your address book to easily find friends that are already active on peer. sharing your address book also makes it easy to invite friends to peer and share the love! 💕 note that we only upload the phone numbers of your contacts (not their names!) and all data is salted ’n hashed. that’s a technical way of saying we keep address book data secure in a scrambled kind of way so even we can’t make a lot of sense of it 🍳
• location. peer is a location based service. in order for the app to fully function we require your precise location and need to store your location history. you provide us with your location through the permission settings on your phone. we collect your location using methods that include gps, wireless networks, cell towers, wi-fi access points, and other sensors, such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, and compasses. we use this range of data sources to give your friends the most accurate picture of where you are and what you’re up to (so they know if you’re available to hang out!). your location information is always associated with a timestamp, without the timestamp we would not be able to provide the features that are part of our services. for example, without a timestamp we would be unable to accurately compute the time you spent with your friends, provide a history of the places you’ve visited or create cool new features that require historic data. if, for whatever reason, you're letting someone else use your phone you can disable location sharing to keep their location private as well as prevent any misunderstandings about your own location
• places. when you or your friends use features that offer check-ins to places, we will keep a list of those places that you’ve checked in at or were checked-in at, until you decide to remove them
• communications. you also provide us with any other information you send through our services, such as messages, images, videos, emojis and other media to your friends. we also keep track of metadata of communications, such as the time and date when you sent messages
• support. information you provide to our care team (support@peer.inc). just so you know, we love receiving heart and pizza emojis 🍕💖

information we may get when you use peer

when you use our services, we collect information about how you use those services so we can provide you with a better experience. here are some examples:

• usage information. we collect information with regard to your activity on peer. for example, how you communicate with your friends: names, usernames, times and dates of communications, the number of messages and emojis you exchange, your fave friends, the time at which you open messages, search results when you look for friends and places, when you take a screenshot, and so on. this helps us understand what you like, and what we should improve!
• device information. we collect a variety of device-specific information, such as the battery level, the bssids of wifi terminals, as well as the ssids (basically, the address of any wifi routers you’re connected to) but only in a temporary manner and for statistical purposes, whether or not headphones are connected, phone name, phone hardware model, operating system version, your phone’s advertising identifier, unique application identifiers, unique device identifiers, phone language, wireless network names, ip addresses, and general mobile network information (including the mobile phone number). this helps us protect your security, fix bugs, and improve the precision of your positions, for example
• location information. we collect location information so we can build useful, and fun, services and features for you. for example we can determine your most frequent locations based on your use of the app and its location data. we may then identify your home, school or work, or other locations. we do this mostly to let you know when one of your friends is available to do fun things…or when they’re still 20 minutes away from home and will definitely be late to the party 😜. we use location data to determine real time context about you: your friends may then decide to not call you because you’re driving...or still sleeping! we also store your location data to show you the areas you’ve uncovered, we call this footprints, a diary of your location history. if you want, you can check-in at and show off the places you’ve visited to your friends, public leaderboard and profile, or you can decide not to share your history at all and keep it to yourself
  information we collect from third parties
  we may obtain information from other companies that are owned or operated by us—or any other third-party sources—and combine that with the information we normally collect through our services. for example, we may obtain information from third parties to help identify points of interest. be sure we’ll never send them information about your precise position! we can then understand if you’re in an airport and about to fly somewhere, and while your icon will not move on peer for some time, still provide an eta. this also works if you’re riding to a party on your bike! in such case be ready to receive a lot of clock emoji if you are running late!

how we use information

our main goal is to offer the best possible location based service. specifically, we may use your information to…

• …develop, operate, improve, deliver, maintain, and protect our services
• …send you communications, including by email. for example, we may use email to respond to direct support inquiries (pro tip: it’s quicker and faster to use in-app support!) or contact you to check if you enjoy using peer
• …create statistical studies and monitor and analyze trends. for example:
• movement patterns. predict your movement patterns based on your location data, a methodology we’ve developed internally
• statistical studies. creating statistical studies on an anonymized basis. we will never disclose your identity. not even your name. for example, we may look for groups of users with similar movement patterns or habits to see if we can improve the user experience of peer
• registration statistics. determining which groups (e.g. country, users of different phone types, operating systems, etc.) are statistically relevant to the different studies that peer conducts on an aggregate basis
• movements over time. measuring and analyzing the movements of users over time. for example, by studying your weekly habits, we can guess how long your commute will be. so your friends will know how long it will take before you get home, and know when you’re ready to party on a friday evening🎉! and if you’re not moving for some time on the next saturday, we may guess that this is because the party was really intense and you’re probably still in the arms of morpheus 😴!
• communications. studying exchanges habits and communication between friends. did you know that ❤️ is the third most sent emoji on peer?
• …improve the way you can chat with your friends by processing and transcribing your voice notes 🎙
• …personalize the peer service. for example, suggesting friends or profile information or giving you an overview of where you’ve been and slept 🏝
• …contextualize your experience by displaying your best friends and favorite locations in the app. for example, your best friends appear bigger than others to make it easy to connect with them. we may also display an icon above your location to identify your home, work or school to help give your friends an idea of where you are
• … socialize the peer map by displaying an overview of places that you, your friends and other people in the peer community have checked-in at. for example, if you check-in at your local restaurant, you can tag your friends, and also see others who visit the place. remember, when you check-in you’re not just showing off to your friends, but to the entire peer community. so only check-in to places if you’re okay with that 🌎
• …suggest personalized features such as lenses. if we notice that you share a workplace with some people, we may suggest personalized features, such as lenses that display the best areas to hang out after work 🥳!
• …enhance the safety and security of our products and services, for example by detecting and preventing excessive friend requests. nobody likes spam! 👮🏻👮🏿
• …assess the success rate of our marketing campaigns, for example to see if you installed peer after seeing an ad for peer on another platform
• …send you push notifications to get updates when friends accept your requests, when friends receive messages, when friends add you to a widget, and interesting tidbits on your friends’ whereabouts. for example, when they’ve traveled to another country like monaco or fiji. ✈️ of course, if you don't want to receive push notifications, just turn them off in the settings or look at the peer notification preferences
• …verify your identity to prevent fraud or other unauthorized or illegal activity
• …enforce our terms of service and other usage policies
• …store some information locally on your device, so that you can open the app and view content faster

bases for using your information

as a us based company, we are only allowed to use your personal information when certain conditions apply. these conditions are called “legal bases” and, at peer, we typically rely on one of four:

• contract. one reason we might use your information is because it’s necessary to provide our services to you as described in our terms of service. because peer is a location based application we need to access and store your location data to offer you our services. the app simply doesn’t work without this information. a lot of the social features on peer form an integral part of the service. for example, if we display your home, work or school or when you’re on the move
• legitimate interest. another reason we might use your information is because we have a legitimate interest in doing so. for example, we need to use your information to provide and improve our services, including protecting your account, delivering peer’s services, providing customer support, and helping you find friends. an important point to understand about legitimate interest is that our interests don’t outweigh your right to privacy. so we only rely on legitimate interest when we think the way we are using your data doesn’t significantly impact your privacy or would be expected by you, or there is a good reason to do so
• consent. in some cases we may ask for consent to use your information for specific purposes. if we do, we’ll make sure you can revoke your consent in our services or through your device permissions. even if we’re not relying on consent to use your information, we may ask you for permission to access data like contacts and location via your device permissions
• legal obligation. we may be required to use your personal information to comply with the law, like when we respond to valid legal process or need to take action to protect our users

how we share information

we may share your information in the following ways:

• with other peer users. specifically, we may share the following information:
• information about you, such as your name, username, friend list, number of friends, profile picture, places you’ve checked-in, battery status and phone number (only if they want to call you directly from your profile on peer). so when you create your profile, remember it’s public and can be viewed by the peer community
• your location, but only if the user is your friend and you’ve allowed them to view it, or if you explicitly opt-in you can also show parts of the world you’ve explored and places you’ve been to in the past with the peer community. we would also like to draw your attention to the fact that your friends may have access to your location regardless of theirs. this means that if a friend is traveling abroad they will still be able to see where you are, and vice versa. remember: you can always limit the sharing of your location in the app anytime
• information about how you have interacted with the service such as the day you joined, the day you became friends with another user, and messages and emojis you’ve both sent and received
• places you’ve checked-in. when you check-in at a place or get tagged at a place this information may be visible to other users who’ve checked-in at a place
• when you are sending a friend request, we will share your city, profile name, friends you have in common, and in some cases the school or work you share, so the receiver can make a better decision on whether or not to accept the friend request
• any other information you have consented for us to share. for example, when you let us access your device’s address book, we may share information about you with other users who have your name and phone number in their device’s address book
• this goes without saying, but if you send your friends a message, image, video or emoji, we will share this information with your friend or group of friends that you’ve selected
• with our affiliates. that means that we may share information with entities within the peer inc. family of companies
• with third parties. specifically:
• with service providers and partners. we may share information about you with service providers who perform services on our behalf and business partners that provide services and functionality, including partners who show peer ads on their platforms
• with third parties for legal reasons. we may share information about you if we reasonably believe that disclosing the information is needed to:
• comply with any valid legal process, governmental request, or applicable law, rule, or regulation
• investigate, remedy, or enforce potential terms of service violations
• protect the rights, property, and safety of us, our users, or others
• detect and resolve any fraud or security concerns.
• other third parties. we may also share aggregated, non-personally identifiable or de-identified information
• with the world 🌎. if you decide to publicly share information, for example if you decide to explicitly share your footprints using a web link
• with third parties as part of a merger or acquisition. if peer inc. gets involved in a merger, asset sale, stock sale, share sale, financing, liquidation or bankruptcy, or acquisition of all or some portion of our business to another company, we may share your information with that company before and after the transaction closes. things like this can happen in the wild world of tech!
• 🚨 also be aware that your friends may take screenshots of the app and/or share some information about their interactions with you on peer

third-party content and integrations

our services may also contain third-party links and include third-party integrations. through these links and third-party integrations, you may be providing information (including personal information) directly to the third party, us, or both. you acknowledge and agree that we are not responsible for how those third parties collect or use your information. as always, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of every third-party service that you visit or use, including those third parties you interact with through our services

how long we keep your information

we store your information as long as necessary and as long as you’re a user of our service. we have different retention protocols in place depending on the information. as a general rule, we store the information we collect as long as you are actively using peer and in some cases, we only store information for a short period of time. if you haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete your account and the associated data. don’t want us to delete your data? don’t worry, we won’t remove data if you’re still using the app. for example, if you mainly use the peer app to record your footprints and check your account at least once a year we won’t delete your account. also note that we aggregate or anonymize information for certain purposes such as data analytics. once we've anonymized the data we retain it indefinitely

the following data is stored as long as you are actively using the peer app:

• your name, username and phone number
• your age and profile picture
• encrypted elements from your address book
• friend requests and friend list
• your chats, voice notes, transcriptions, emojis and images
• location data
• your device and usage information

of course, we also respect your requests for account deletion. the following section, control over your information, provides more information on how to delete your account

we take data deletion and retention very seriously and have created a dedicated page with more information on how data deletion and retention works at peer. as a basic principle, we only keep the data we need to provide you with our services

control over your information

it is very important to us that you have control over your information! here are some ways we establish just that:

• location. you can change the location that is visible to your friends at any time in the app settings. we allow you to share only limited location information with certain friends, or even hide your location from them altogether
• places. if you check-in at a place, you can always remove that place, this will also remove you from the leaderboard. the same goes for places others have tagged you in. don’t like the check-in, just remove it. if someone is spamming you, remember maybe they’re not your friend, and remove them from your friend list and report them from their profile
• access. we strive to let you access and update most of the personal information that we have about you. most of this can be done in the profile section of the app. if you need to access, update, or delete any other personal information that we may have, you can contact support@peer.inc. note however that, we may ask you to verify your identity or provide additional information before we can provide access to your information
• correct. you can also request us to correct your data. for example, if you think your home or work location is inaccurate, you can send a request directly in the app
• deletion. you can easily delete information in the application, for example any messages you’ve sent (including media like images and videos) or friends you’ve added. if you want to delete your location history, you can do this by deleting your account. because the entire application relies on location history, it is not possible to just reset your location data
• account deletion. we don’t like seeing you leave us but if, for some reason, you want to delete your account you can always contact us at support@peer.inc to request account deletion
• account un-deletion. if you’ve asked us to delete your account…and then you changed your mind and totally want it back you will have up to 30 days to restore your account before we delete your information from our servers. during this period, your account will not be visible to other users 😎
• right to object. you have the right to object to our use of your information. 😊 for some types of data (e.g your username), you can simply delete it from peer and it won’t be processed anymore. for other types of data that are crucial to the functioning of peer, you can delete your account to stop us from processing your information. this can be done from within the app, or you can drop a note to support@peer.inc and we can talk you through the process

transfers outside the european union

if your friends are outside the european union, your information—including your location—will be available to them. similar to our transfer of your data to third parties as described in how we share information, your data may be transferred and be accessible to third parties and users outside of the european union, including to countries that may not have the same level of protection of your information as those within the european union. whenever we share your information outside the european union with third parties we make sure adequate mechanisms are in place to protect your data, such as the standard contractual clauses. we’re always happy to answer any questions you may have about data sharing to countries outside the european union. if you do have any questions simply let us know at support@peer.inc

complaints? If you’re in the united states, you can always email us. if you’re based in the eu, you can always file a complaint with the supervisory authority in your member state. for example, if you’re based in france you can file a complaint with the cnil

users in the republic of korea

if you are based in the republic of korea, there is some additional information we would like to bring to attention, please check it out at community.peerclub.com 

children

our services are not intended for—and we don’t direct them to—anyone under 9. and that’s why we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 9. additionally, you must be old enough to consent to the processing of your information in your country

revisions to the privacy policy

we may change this privacy policy from time to time. when we do, we’ll let you know one way or another. sometimes, we’ll let you know by revising the date at the top of the privacy policy (which is available on our website and in our app). other times—especially if there is a major change—we’ll provide you with additional notice, such as adding a statement to our websites’ homepages or providing you with an in-app notification

that’s all for now

if you have any questions feel free to let us know at support@peer.inc

see you on peer! 😘