Privacy Policy

Last updated September 8, 2026

Circle is a social app for making plans with people you know. This policy describes what the Circle apps and service collect, why, who else sees it, and what you can do about it. It is written to match what the software actually does.

Passages in square brackets are values that must be confirmed before this policy is published.

1. Who we are

Circle is operated by [TO CONFIRM: registered legal entity name and address]. That entity is the controller of the personal data described here.

Privacy questions and requests: support@thecircleapp.us.

[TO CONFIRM: whether an EU or UK representative, or a data protection officer, is required and who it is.]

2. Information you give us

When you create an account. Your name, a username, your email address, your date of birth, and a password. You may also give a phone number, a gender, a profile photo, a short bio, and links to your Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, or Snapchat profiles. Organisation accounts give a business name instead of a date of birth.

If you sign in with Google instead, we receive your email address, your name, and your Google profile picture from Google, and store them as your account.

When you use Circle. Events you create or join, Circles you create or belong to, connections and follows, direct messages and event chat messages, photos and videos you send, interests you select, places you save, the radius you set for each place, RSVPs, and reports you file.

Private tags. Notes you attach to another person’s profile are stored against your account and that person’s identifier. They are visible only to you.

3. Information collected automatically

Approximate location. Circle asks for your device location when the app starts. See section 5, which describes exactly what happens to it.

Notification tokens. If you allow notifications, we store a push token for each device you sign in on, along with whether that device is an iPhone or an Android phone.

Presence. Whether you are currently online, and when you were last active.

Error reports. If the app or the service hits an error, a technical report goes to Sentry. It is configured not to attach personal information, and no performance traces are collected.

Android only: Google Analytics for Firebase. The Android build of Circle includes Google’s Analytics library. It collects an app instance identifier, screen and session events, device model, and an approximate location derived from your IP address. The iOS build does not include it. [TO CONFIRM: whether this stays. If it is removed from the Android build, this section and the Play Data Safety form both change.]

We do not use advertising or tracking SDKs. There is no ad network, no attribution SDK, no advertising identifier, and no cross-app tracking in Circle.

4. What we do not collect

We do not read your address book. Circle has no contacts permission on either platform. The “add from phone contacts” button opens your phone’s own Contacts app; nothing is read and nothing is uploaded.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

5. Location, in detail

This is the part people ask about, so it is set out step by step.

1. When you open Circle, the app asks your device for your current location at high accuracy. On Android the app will keep asking until permission is granted and location services are on.
2. That precise coordinate is sent to Nominatim, a public geocoding service operated by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which turns it into a place name.
3. Only the place name, for example “Austin, United States”, is sent to Circle and stored on your profile. The precise coordinate is not stored by us. If the lookup fails, the coordinate rounded to four decimal places is stored instead.
4. That place name is visible to other signed-in Circle users who can see your profile.

Separately, when you save a place to your profile or set a location on an event, you pick it from Google Places search. We store the coordinates Google returns for that place, so that events can be matched to your places by distance. Those coordinates describe the place, not your device.

[TO CONFIRM: whether Nominatim remains the geocoder at launch. It is a volunteer-operated public endpoint and no data processing agreement is possible with it.]

6. What other people can see

Other signed-in Circle users can see: your name, username, profile photo, business name, bio, whether your account is private, your verification status, your social links, your current place name, and when you joined.

Your date of birth, age, gender, phone number, and email address are not shown to other users.

Content you post is visible according to where you post it: events to their audience, Circle messages to that Circle’s members, direct messages to the person you sent them to.

7. Photos, videos, and files

Files you upload are stored in Google Cloud Storage. Images are resized and re-encoded before storage.

Every image you upload is sent to Google Cloud Vision for safety screening before it is stored. Video is not screened.

Uploaded files, including images sent in direct messages, are served from web addresses that contain a random identifier. Those addresses are not guessable, but they are not access-controlled either: anyone holding the exact address can open the file. The one exception is evidence attached to a report, which is private and only reachable by moderators through a short-lived link.

[TO CONFIRM: whether direct message media moves to access-controlled links before launch.]

8. Content safety

Public text, meaning event text, profile text, and public tag names, is sent to Google Cloud Natural Language for moderation screening. Direct messages and Circle chat are deliberately excluded from this and are not screened.

When someone files a report, a copy of the reported content, for example the text of the reported message or the title of the reported event, is stored with the report so moderators can act on it. Moderators can read reported content.

9. Notifications

If you allow them, we send push notifications through Apple’s and Google’s push services for things like connection requests, event invitations, messages, and event reminders. Each notification is also stored in your in-app notification list. You can turn individual notification types off in the app.

A push token identifies a device, not a person. If you sign in to a device that was previously used by someone else, the previous account’s token record for that device is deleted so that notifications do not follow the device to the wrong person.

10. Who your information goes to

We use the following service providers. They process data on our instructions.

We also disclose information where we are legally required to, where it is necessary to investigate a violation of our terms, or to protect someone’s safety.

[TO CONFIRM: which of these providers have signed data processing agreements.]

11. Where your information is held

Circle runs on Google Cloud. [TO CONFIRM: the region of the Firestore database, the file storage bucket, and the API service, and whether any transfer mechanism such as standard contractual clauses is required.]

12. How long we keep it

13. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings in the app, or by emailing support@thecircleapp.us from the address on your account. See the deletion page for what is removed, what may remain, and how to ask without having the app installed.

Deleting is permanent. Deactivating, which hides your account until you sign in again, is the reversible option.

14. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to how we use it, or receive it in a portable form. You can also withdraw permissions like location and notifications at any time in your device settings.

To exercise any of these, email support@thecircleapp.us. We will verify that the request comes from you before acting on it.

[TO CONFIRM: there is no automated data export today. Access and portability requests are served manually.]

If you are in the EEA or the UK you may also complain to your local data protection authority.

15. Children

Circle is for people aged 17 and over. We ask for your date of birth at sign-up to check this. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 17. If you believe a child has created an account, email support@thecircleapp.us and we will remove it.

16. Security

Passwords are stored hashed, never in readable form. Sign-in tokens are held in your device’s secure keychain rather than ordinary app storage. Access to production data is limited to people who need it.

No service is perfectly secure. Please use a password you do not use anywhere else.

17. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app before the change takes effect.

18. Contact

support@thecircleapp.us [TO CONFIRM: postal address of the operating entity.]