Privacy Policy

1. Information you give us

Account information: when you sign up, we collect your email address, a password (stored securely by our authentication provider, never visible to us as plain text), and your date of birth, which we use to confirm you meet the 18+ minimum age for sugarFRUIT.

Profile information: nickname, photos, About Me text, prompt answers, and other details you choose to add to your profile.

Content you create: messages you send, Group posts and replies, Event submissions, and reports you file about other content or members.

Settings and preferences: things like your Who's Online visibility, Discover visibility, profile-gesture preference, light/dark theme choice, and which mobile app notifications you want.

2. Information collected automatically

Like most web services, our hosting and security infrastructure processes ordinary technical information as part of serving each request — things like IP address, browser/device type, and request timestamps, in standard server logs. We don't use this to build advertising profiles.

Account security records: to protect accounts and the community, we record the IP address a request came from when you create an account or sign in with your password (on the website or in the mobile app), when you reset your password or change it on the website, and when someone tries to sign in with your email address and gets the password wrong. With each record we note the time and whether it came from the website or the mobile app. For a failed sign-in we don't keep the email address that was typed, only a scrambled (hashed) form of it, and we don't attach the attempt to an account. We never record passwords, and we don't record IP addresses for ordinary browsing, the pages you visit, or your location.

sugarFRUIT staff use these records only to look into account security problems, suspected duplicate accounts, people returning after a ban, and harassment or other safety concerns. Only staff can see them, and each time staff look at someone's records is itself recorded. Many unrelated people share IP addresses (on mobile networks, at home, at a venue), so a shared address is never treated as proof of anything on its own, and we don't ban or block anyone automatically because of an IP address. Records linked to your account are deleted automatically after 90 days, and when you delete your account. Failed sign-in records aren't linked to any account, so they're deleted only once their 90 days are up. The record of staff looking at someone's information is kept for one year. The exception is the limited record we keep about banned accounts, described in Section 8.

If you accept optional analytics cookies (see Section 4), we also receive aggregated, privacy-conscious usage information through Google Analytics, described below.

Separately from Analytics, and regardless of your cookie choice, we keep a basic record on your account of when you were last active on sugarFRUIT. This is first-party operational information our team uses internally to understand overall site usage — it's never shared, and never used for advertising.

Your phone's location, only when you use Near Me: the sugarFRUIT mobile app has an optional Near Me button on Events, Local and Profiles. Only when you tap it (and allow location access) does the app read your phone's approximate location, once, while you're using the app. Our server uses it only to work out the general area you're in (to within a few kilometres), then shows what's within 50 km of that area. We don't save your location, don't add it to your account or profile, and never show it or share it with other members. Your phone keeps only a coded reference to that general area, which only our server can read, in memory for up to 6 hours. The app never tracks your location in the background. Other members appear in Near Me results only by the city or town they chose for their own profile, never by where their phone is. You can turn location access off at any time in your phone's settings, and you can always browse by city or region instead. On the website, the Events page has the same button, called Nearby, with the same rules: only when you press it (and allow location access in your browser) does the site read your approximate location, once, for that search. The open page keeps only the coded reference, and only until you leave or reload it. The website doesn't use your location for anything else.

Mobile app notifications, only if you turn them on: the app asks before sending notifications, and works fully without them. If you allow them, we store your phone's push token (an address your phone's operating system issues so notifications can reach this copy of the app), whether it's an Android or iPhone device, the app version, and a scrambled (hashed) form of a random code your phone uses to remove its own registration later. This is linked to your account so notifications reach the right person. Logging out of the app removes that phone's registration, and deleting your account deletes all of them. Notifications tell you about new messages, message requests, Smiles, Winks and Kisses, and Events you've RSVPed to. A notification about another member can show their nickname and, on Android, their profile photo, but never the text of a message.

3. Necessary cookies

sugarFRUIT uses one category of cookie that's always on: authentication/session cookies set by our authentication provider (Supabase), which keep you signed in and let the site tell your browser apart from an anonymous visitor's. These are required for login and any signed-in feature to work at all, so they aren't something you can opt out of while remaining signed in — declining optional analytics (below) never affects them.

We don't set any other necessary cookie today — no separate preferences cookie, no first-party tracking cookie. Your theme (light/dark) choice, if you're signed in, is stored on your account, not in a cookie.

4. Optional analytics: Google Analytics

We'd like to use Google Analytics to understand, in aggregate, how sugarFRUIT is used — which pages get visited, how often, and roughly how — so we can improve the site. This is entirely optional and off by default.

Google Analytics does not load, and no Analytics cookie is set, until you choose "Accept analytics" in the cookie banner or in Cookie settings (footer link, any page). Choosing "Necessary only" means Analytics never loads for you.

Choosing "Necessary only" does not reduce your access to sugarFRUIT in any way — every feature works identically either way.

We've configured Analytics conservatively, for basic site-usage analytics only:

• We don't use Analytics for advertising or remarketing. Google Signals and ad-personalization features are turned off, and we don't run any advertising or cross-site marketing tracking on sugarFRUIT.
• We don't intentionally send names, nicknames, email addresses, account identifiers, profile content, Message or Group/Thread content, report or moderation content, or any other member-generated or private data to Analytics.
• Analytics never sees a pageview for private or member-only areas at all — Messages, Groups, Discover, Who's Online, Profile, Account, Admin, your own Event submissions, and the sign-up/login/password flows are excluded outright, not just hidden from search engines.
• For the public pages Analytics does see, we send a simplified page path and a fixed page label rather than the exact URL or page title your browser shows. An Event or Local/Organization detail page, for example, is reported as "an Event detail page in this region" or "an Organization detail page," not which specific Event or Organization you viewed.
• We never send URL query strings or fragments (search terms, filters, redirect targets, tokens) to Analytics — only the simplified page path described above.

You can change your analytics choice at any time from Cookie settings in the site footer. Switching from "Accept analytics" to "Necessary only" stops future Analytics collection and clears Google Analytics cookies in your current browser where we're able to, without affecting your sign-in session.

5. How we use information

We use the information above to:

• operate sugarFRUIT — accounts, profiles, messaging, Groups, Events, Local;
• keep the community safer — reviewing reports, enforcing our Community Guidelines and Terms, and blocking/moderation tooling;
• protect accounts and investigate account security problems, duplicate accounts and ban evasion, using the account security records described in Section 2;
• communicate with you about your account (verification, password resets, and similar service messages);
• send the mobile app notifications you've turned on; and
• understand and improve the site, using aggregate analytics if you've opted in.

6. Who we share information with

We don't sell your information, and we don't share it with advertisers. We use a small number of service providers to run sugarFRUIT:

• Supabase — our database, authentication, file storage, and real-time (Who's Online) infrastructure. Nearly everything described above is processed and stored through Supabase.
• Netlify — hosts and serves the sugarFRUIT website, and runs the service that sends mobile app notifications.
• Sentry — receives a report when the sugarFRUIT website hits an error, so we can find and fix it. A report contains limited technical information: the type of error, where in our code it happened, your browser and operating system, and the type of page involved. It doesn't include your profile, messages, account identity, uploaded images, what you type into forms, or your login details, and Sentry doesn't store your IP address. Sentry keeps these reports in the European Union (Germany).
• Resend — delivers transactional account email on Supabase Auth's behalf, such as verification and password-reset emails. Resend only receives what a given email needs — the recipient address, the email's own content, and ordinary delivery metadata — not your profile, messages, Groups, or any other sugarFRUIT content or database access.
• Expo — the push service our mobile app is built on. It receives your phone's push token and each notification we send, and passes the notification on to Google or Apple for delivery.
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (Android) and Apple Push Notification service (iPhone) — deliver notifications to your phone. Like Expo, they receive the push token and the notification itself (its text and, for some notifications, a link to a member's photo that expires after an hour), not your profile, messages or account. Firebase's notification component on Android phones also sends Google the technical identifiers it needs to deliver notifications, such as an installation ID and the app version.
• Google Analytics — only if you've accepted optional analytics, as described in Section 4.

Other members can see whatever your profile, settings, and participation choices make visible to them (for example, a message you send is visible to its recipient). That's the normal operation of a community platform, not third-party sharing.

We may also disclose information where reasonably necessary to comply with the law, or to protect the safety of members or the service.

7. International processing

sugarFRUIT's pilot community is based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, but our service providers (Supabase, Netlify, Sentry, Resend, Expo, Google and Apple for mobile app notifications, and, if you've opted in, Google Analytics) operate infrastructure in multiple countries. As a result, your information may be processed or stored outside Canada, including in the United States. We haven't made any specific certifications about international data-transfer frameworks, and this policy doesn't claim compliance with any particular country's data protection law.

8. Deactivating or deleting your account

We generally keep account and profile information for as long as your account is active. From Account settings, you can either deactivate your account or permanently delete it — these are different, and it's worth understanding the difference before choosing.

To delete your account, sign in at sugarfruit.ca and go to Account › Delete account. You don't need the mobile app to do this; in the app, Account › Delete account opens the same page.

Deactivating hides you from Discover, Who's Online, and new Buddy/gesture/message requests, and signs you out of the app until you reactivate. Nothing about your account, profile, or content is deleted or changed — deactivating is fully reversible, any time, by signing back in and choosing to reactivate.

Deleting your account is permanent and cannot be undone. When you delete your account:

• Your profile, photos, account details, and personal preferences (Favourites, Buddies, blocks, and similar private lists) are permanently deleted.
• The content of private messages you sent is permanently removed — the recipient sees a neutral notice that the message was removed because you deleted your account, rather than your original message text. Messages sent to you by someone else are unaffected by your deletion.
• Posts and messages you left in shared Groups (Group Chat messages, Threads, and replies) may remain visible to other members of that Group, since they're shared community content other people are actively part of — but they are no longer linked to your account, and are shown as posted by "Deleted member" instead of your nickname. If you were the sole owner of a Group, that Group becomes inactive.
• Public Event listings you submitted remain published as they were, since that content was never tied to your identity in the first place — only the internal record of who submitted it is removed.
• Your nickname becomes permanently unavailable for any other account to register, so it can't be immediately reused by someone else. We keep only the nickname itself for this purpose — no other information about your account is retained alongside it.
• Reports you filed, reports filed against you, and related moderation history may be retained in anonymized form — the record of what happened and why is kept for community-safety and abuse-prevention purposes, but it is no longer linked to your account or identity once deleted.

Account security records and banned accounts. The account security records described in Section 2 are deleted with your account. The one exception is an account that staff have banned: we keep a separate, limited record of the account's nickname, a scrambled (hashed) form of its email address, the IP addresses it used, the reason for the ban, and who made it and when, so we can recognise attempts to return after a ban and protect members from repeated harassment. That record is kept while the ban stays in place, even if the banned account is deleted. Staff must review it at least every 12 months and either note why it's still needed or delete it; a record that isn't reviewed is deleted automatically. If the ban is lifted, the record is deleted. We keep it longer only when the law requires us to preserve it (for example, a preservation request from police), and only until that requirement ends. A suspended or banned account can't be deleted from Account settings; contact us (Section 11) and we'll handle the request, including this record, in line with this section.

Deletion removes what Sugarfruit itself stores about you. It doesn't reach backups, logs, or records our infrastructure providers (Supabase, Netlify, Sentry, Resend, Expo, Google and Apple for notifications, and, if applicable, Google Analytics) may independently retain for a limited time as part of their own operational, security, or legal processes — we don't control those providers' own retention schedules and don't claim they delete something the moment we do.

Some information — including anonymized reports, moderation records, and content connected to a safety or Terms investigation — may be retained for longer than the rest of an account's data, or survive account deletion in anonymized form, where reasonably necessary for community safety, fraud prevention, or legal obligations, consistent with our Terms of Use. We don't commit to a specific retention period beyond that, because we don't currently enforce one mechanically.

9. Your choices

Analytics: accept or decline at any time via Cookie settings in the footer.

Profile and visibility: Account settings let you control whether you appear in Who's Online and Discover, and whether profile gestures are enabled.

Mobile app notifications: choose which kinds you get in the app's Account › Notifications, or turn them off entirely in your phone's settings.

Blocking and reporting: you can block another member or report content/accounts that violate our Community Guidelines directly from the relevant profile, message, Group, or content.

Deactivate or delete your account: from Account settings, you can deactivate your account (reversible) or permanently delete it (not reversible) — see Section 8 above for exactly what each one does.

If you have a request about your information that isn't covered by an existing setting, contact us as described in Section 11.

10. Children's privacy

sugarFRUIT is not directed at, and does not knowingly collect information from, anyone under 18. Account creation requires confirming you meet that minimum age.

Our Child Safety Standards explain how we handle child sexual abuse and exploitation, and how to report a concern.

11. Contact

Questions or requests about your information, or about this policy, can be sent to hey@sugarfruit.ca.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as sugarFRUIT evolves — especially as we add or change service providers, like introducing Google Analytics itself. The date at the top of this page shows when it was last updated. For significant changes (for example, a new required cookie, or a new category of data we collect), we'll take reasonable steps to make that visible rather than relying solely on this page's date.