Privacy Policy

Waypacker is intended for users 18 years of age or older. By creating an account, you confirm you meet this requirement.

Account information: email address, display name, gender (used only to apply the same-gender matching preference you or a host has chosen — never shown publicly), and password (stored hashed by our authentication provider, never in plain text or visible to us).

Identity verification documents: a government-issued ID photo and a selfie, submitted voluntarily to unlock hosting and browsing features. They are used solely to confirm that you are the person on the ID. We do not sell them or use them for any other purpose.

Face images for identity verification: the selfie, and the photo on your ID, contain an image of your face. This is the only face data Waypacker collects, and only if you choose to verify. How it is handled:

• Use: a Waypacker staff reviewer looks at the selfie and the ID photo to confirm they show the same person, and approves or rejects the verification. No automated or AI face analysis is performed.
• Sharing: the images are not shared with any third party, are not sent to any AI service, and are never shown to other members. They are only stored with our storage provider, Supabase, as described below.
• No biometric identifiers:we do not create or store face templates, faceprints, or any other biometric identifier from these images, and we never use them to identify you anywhere else. Waypacker does not access Face ID or the iPhone’s TrueDepth camera data.
• Storage: the images are stored in private, access-controlled storage (Supabase), readable only through short-lived links generated for an authorized reviewer.
• Retention and deletion: both images are deleted 30 days after the verification decision, whether approved or rejected. Your verified status is kept after the images are deleted. If you delete your account, the images are deleted within 48 hours.

Location data:your approximate location is used to show nearby hosts, meetups, and travelers. Your precise location is never stored in a form visible to other users — listings and profiles only ever display a neighborhood-level area, deliberately blurred (“fuzzed”) to roughly 1km. If you opt in to Journey Timeline, we log GPS points to build your personal trip history; this feature is off by default and can be turned off at any time, which stops new points from being recorded.

Emergency contacts: names and phone numbers you choose to add, kept on your own profile for your reference. We do not contact these people or store them anywhere else, and you can remove them at any time.

Messages and activity: chat messages between you and other users, stay requests, meetup attendance, trips you post, and reviews, all needed to operate the core features of the app.

To operate the service: matching you with hosts, meetups, and travelers; verifying identity; enabling chat; and powering the optional AI travel concierge (your messages to the concierge are sent to our AI provider, Groq or OpenRouter, to generate a response). Face images are used only for identity verification and are never sent to an AI provider, as described in Section 2.

We do not sell your personal data to third parties, and we do not use your ID documents or precise location for advertising.

We use a small number of infrastructure providers to run Waypacker: Supabase (database, authentication, and file storage), Mapbox (map rendering and place search), Groq and OpenRouter (AI concierge responses only; they never receive ID documents or face images), Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications), and WhatsApp (only in the mobile app, when you personally choose to share a journey or meetup through it). Each processes data only as needed to provide their service to us, under their own privacy terms.

Account and activity data is retained while your account is active and deleted when you delete your account. Identity verification images (ID photo and selfie) are deleted 30 days after the verification decision, or within 48 hours of deleting your account if that comes first; the verification decision itself is kept so your verified status remains. You can request earlier deletion at any time (see Section 7).

Data access is enforced with row-level security policies at the database layer, so other users’ private data (raw location, verification documents, emergency contacts) is never directly queryable by other accounts. Verification documents are stored in private storage and only ever accessed via short-lived signed links generated for an authorized reviewer.

You can view and edit most of your data directly in the app (Profile page). You can delete your account at any time in the app (You tab → Delete account), which removes your profile, listings, messages, and verification images. You can also request a copy of your data or a correction by contacting us — see Section 9.

If we make material changes to this policy, we’ll update the date at the top of this page and, where required, notify you in-app.

Questions about this policy or your data, including access, correction and deletion requests: support@waypacker.com. See our contact page for everything else.