This policy explains what SocialCoffee collects, why, who we share it with, and how long we keep it. It applies to everyone who uses the app, in any country, and is written to meet Brazil's General Data Protection Law (LGPD, Law 13.709/2018) and the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
If anything here reads as vague, that is our failure. Write to support and we will fix the text.
What we collect
Only what the app needs in order to work. There is no collection "just in case".
- Your account: email, identifier, handle, display name, profile photo, bio, language and country — and, if you have more than one account on the same e-mail, the link between them, which only you can see; and, if you sign in with Apple, the identifier Apple gives us.
- Your date of birth, used only to confirm the minimum age of 13. It is never shown to anyone, and the app displays your age nowhere.
- What you post: photos, captions, comments, stories, coffee ratings, recipes and the coffee pages you register (name, photo and description).
- Your private messages, including posts you forward in a conversation.
- Your activity: who you follow, what you liked, what you saved, which stories you viewed and which labels you scanned.
- Who you blocked and the reports you filed.
- Access logs — date, time and IP address of each sign-in — kept because the Brazilian Internet Civil Framework (Law 12.965/2014, art. 15) requires providers to retain them for six months.
- Your device's address for notifications (the push token), stored when you turn on notifications on your phone and deleted when you sign out.
What we do not collect
- Your password: there is none. Sign-in uses a six-digit code sent to your email, or your Apple account.
- Your background location. The app only asks for location when you look for coffee shops near you: when you tap "Near me" under Coffee shops in the Search and Ranking tabs, or "Use my location" on the coffee shops screen. It lets the app find the places around you and show how far away they are — and the coordinate is used at that moment and discarded. No column stores where you have been.
- Your payment details. No card, Pix key or acquirer token is stored.
- Advertising identifiers. There are no ads, no cross-app tracking, no pixel and no tool that analyses what you do in the app.
- The GPS coordinates embedded in your photos. Every image is re-encoded on your device before upload, and the EXIF data — location included — is discarded in the process. The original never leaves your phone.
Why we collect it
Every piece of data has a purpose and a legal basis (LGPD art. 7; GDPR art. 6):
- Performance of a contract: account, content, messages and activity exist because without them the app does not work.
- Compliance with a legal obligation: access logs, age verification, and anything that must be preserved under a court order.
- Legitimate interest: reports, blocks and moderation records, which exist to keep the place usable — App Store guideline 1.2 and Google Play policy require these mechanisms of any app with user content.
Who we share it with
Nobody who sells or profiles your data. Database, authentication and file storage infrastructure (except videos) is operated by Supabase Inc., acting as a processor and handling data only to provide us that service. Videos are stored in Cloudflare, Inc.'s object storage (R2), acting as a processor. Supabase's servers are in São Paulo, Brazil; videos are on Cloudflare's servers in the United States, which constitutes an international data transfer (LGPD art. 33; GDPR ch. V).
On Android, the label reader uses ML Kit, a Google library that reads the barcode and the text on your device: the photo and what is read from it are not sent to Google. The library sends Google technical data about its own operation — device model and operating system, app version, response time, event type and error codes —, with a per-installation identifier that is not linked to your account. Google uses this data to maintain and improve the library and to detect abuse, and states that it does not pass it on to third parties. This cannot be turned off; the traffic is encrypted, and it may also amount to an international transfer. On iPhone, reading uses the operating system's own features, and none of this is sent.
Push notifications go through Expo's delivery service and, depending on the device, Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google) or the Apple Push Notification service (Apple), which receive your device's address and the notification's sentence — never the content of posts or messages.
If you sign in with Apple, we receive from Apple a unique identifier for your Apple account, your email — or, if you choose to hide it, a forwarding address that Apple creates for you — and, only the first time, your name. No password ever reaches us. Apple acts as the identity provider and, at that moment, knows that you signed in to the app.
We also share when the law requires it: a court order, a lawful request from a competent authority, or the defence of rights in legal proceedings.
What is public
Your profile, posts, comments, stories, ratings, the coffee pages you register and your approved recipes are visible to anyone using the app. There are no private accounts in this version. Your private messages, your saved items and your reports are not public.
A recipe you write on someone else's coffee is visible only to you and to whoever signs that coffee, until they approve it. Once approved, it is visible to anyone. If declined, it stays visible to you and to whoever signs the coffee, with the reason. The decision reaches you as an in-app notification and, when declined, also as a message from whoever signs the coffee, in your inbox. A recipe on a coffee nobody signs is approved or declined by the app team, and in that case the decision reaches you only as an in-app notification.
Whoever signs a coffee sees the pending and declined recipes on that coffee, with the handle of the person who wrote them.
The social network has no borders: people in other countries see content from Brazil, and the other way round. Nothing is hidden by language or by country, and the app never translates what you wrote unless someone asks.
How long we keep it
- Your content and account: as long as the account exists.
- Account started and not completed — when you sign in with Apple and do not finish signing up: seven days, and then it is deleted. If you joined the waitlist, it is kept until your turn.
- Stories: they stop being shown to other people 24 hours after posting and move to your personal archive, visible only to you. They remain stored until you delete them or close the account.
- Access logs: six months, as the Internet Civil Framework requires.
- Export requests: the generated file is available for 30 days and then deleted.
- After an account is permanently closed, we keep a minimal record — identifier, the handle that existed, dates, accepted terms versions, and report and moderation history — without your content. It exists to answer authorities and to stop someone who was banned from returning as if nothing had happened.
Deactivating and closing your account
These are two different things, and both live in Settings.
The accounts on one e-mail are linked to each other only for you: nobody can see they belong to the same person. Closing can be one account or all of them; exporting your data brings every account.
- Deactivating is reversible: your profile, posts and stories disappear from the app for everyone, and come back intact when you sign in again. Messages you already sent stay in the conversations of the people who received them — that copy is theirs.
- Closing is permanent. You have 30 days to change your mind: within that period, simply sign in again and cancel the request. After the deadline, your content leaves the app and stays for up to 90 days in separate storage, inaccessible to other people, before being deleted for good. After that the account cannot be recovered by anyone, including us.
One exception: if there is a court order or legal requirement in force regarding your account, deletion is suspended for as long as that obligation lasts (LGPD art. 16, I and III). Otherwise, the deadline is as written above.
Your handle is not reserved after closure. It becomes available again, and an old link may end up pointing at someone else.
Your rights
The LGPD (art. 18) and the GDPR (arts. 15–22) guarantee that you can know what we hold about you, correct it, take it with you and erase it. In the app:
- Correct: Settings → Your profile.
- Take it with you: Settings → Download my data. We generate a file with everything you wrote and everything we collected about you, in an open format.
- Erase: Settings → Close account.
For anything the app does not resolve — including withdrawing consent, objecting to a processing activity, or complaining about what we did — write to support. You may also complain to the Brazilian data protection authority (ANPD) or to your national data protection authority in Europe.
Children and teenagers
SocialCoffee is not for people under 13, and age is checked at sign-up. In countries whose law requires a higher age to consent alone, that age applies. If we find an account below the minimum age, it is closed.
Security
Access to each row of the database is enforced in the database itself, not only in the app: the rules state who may read and write what, and they hold even if someone goes around the app. Traffic is encrypted. Even so, no system is infallible — if an incident poses a relevant risk to your data, we will notify you and the authority, as the law requires.
Changes to this policy
When the text changes materially, the version goes up and we ask you to read and accept it again before continuing. The version and date of this page are in the footer.
How to reach us
The contact address for privacy matters is in Settings, under About.