Privacy Policy

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Account and profile information

• Name, email address, phone number, and city/state/postal code. Postal code is used to power proximity-based search (a ZIP-based distance filter) so Buyers can find animals near them.
• For Sellers specifically: business or kennel name, years of experience breeding, and — for Shelters and Rescues — EIN and nonprofit status.
• For Sellers receiving payouts: Stripe Connect onboarding information (such as identity verification and bank account details), which is collected directly by Stripe and is not stored on FriendaPet's own servers.

1.2 Listing content

Pet details, photos, and videos that a Seller uploads to a Listing. This content is public — it is stored in a public storage bucket and is visible to any visitor to the Platform, including visitors who are not logged in.

1.3 Messages

Private messages between Members, including any photo or video attachments. Messages are retained permanently to support dispute resolution and are never deleted. Attached media in a conversation is automatically recompressed to a lower, archival-quality resolution (not deleted) after approximately 75 days of conversation inactivity following order completion, in order to manage storage costs; the underlying files remain available as dispute evidence.

1.4 Order and transaction records

Records of each Order, including amounts paid, fees charged, and any "proof of receipt" photo a Buyer submits to confirm delivery of an animal. These records are retained permanently as dispute evidence.

1.5 Reports and blocks

If you block another Member, we record that block platform-wide. If you report a conversation, we record that report along with your account information. Listings can also be reported by visitors who are not logged in; because no account is required to report a Listing, the reporter's contact information is optional and self-supplied, and we do not verify it.

1.6 Newsletter signup

If you submit your email address through the footer signup, we store that address in our database. As of this policy's drafting, this address is not yet used to send any marketing email — we have not yet connected an email marketing platform.

2. How We Use Information

• To operate the Platform, including account creation, authentication, Listings, messaging, and proximity search.
• To process payments and payouts through Stripe, and to detect and prevent fraud.
• To communicate with you, including transactional emails such as signup confirmation and password reset, which are currently sent through Supabase Auth's built-in email system.
• To moderate content and investigate reports, blocks, and disputes.
• To comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

FriendaPet does not currently use any third-party advertising or analytics tracking technologies (such as ad pixels or third-party analytics cookies). If that changes in the future, we will update this Privacy Policy — and, where required by applicable law, obtain your consent or provide an opt-out — before deploying any such technology.

3. Automated Content Monitoring

To help keep Buyers and Sellers safe and to encourage transactions to stay on-platform (which also supports dispute resolution and our fee model), FriendaPet uses automated detection to scan messages for patterns that resemble off-platform contact information, such as phone numbers or email addresses, and may warn users when this is detected. This is a form of automated content monitoring. It is not used to read or act on the substance of your conversations beyond this detection purpose, though FriendaPet staff may separately review conversation content for moderation and dispute-resolution purposes as described in Section 4.4.

4. How Information Is Shared

4.1 With other Members, to facilitate a transaction

When you inquire about a Listing or complete an Order, certain information (such as your name and messages) is shared with the other party to help complete the transaction.

4.2 With service providers

See Section 6 for the specific service providers we use and what each one does.

4.3 For legal and safety reasons

We may disclose information if required by law, legal process, or government request, or where we believe disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of FriendaPet, our Members, or the public.

4.4 Internal moderation and dispute review

FriendaPet staff and admin accounts have read-only access to conversation and order records for the specific purposes of content moderation and dispute review. This is not general access to Member data — it is limited to these purposes.

4.5 We do not sell your personal information

FriendaPet does not sell your personal information to third parties, and — because we do not currently use third-party advertising or analytics trackers — we do not currently "share" personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as that term is used under the CCPA/CPRA.

5. Public Information

Listing content (photos, videos, and descriptions) is public and visible to anyone browsing the Platform. Certain parts of your public profile may also be visible to other Members. Private messages, order records, and account details that are not part of a public Listing are not publicly visible.

6. Third-Party Service Providers (Subprocessors)

FriendaPet uses the following service providers to operate the Platform:

• Stripe — payment processing, and Stripe Connect identity verification (KYC) / onboarding for Sellers who receive payouts.
• Supabase — database hosting, user authentication, and file/media storage.
• Vercel — application hosting.

No third-party analytics or advertising trackers are currently integrated into the Platform. No third-party email marketing service provider is currently connected; transactional account emails are sent through Supabase Auth's built-in email delivery. If either of these changes, we will update this section to name the new provider before it goes live.

7. Data Retention and Account Deletion

7.1 What we keep, and for how long

• Messages and their attachments: retained permanently to preserve dispute evidence. Attached media is automatically recompressed to archival quality (not deleted) after roughly 75 days of conversation inactivity following order completion, to manage storage costs.
• Order and transaction records, including buyer-submitted proof-of-receipt photos: retained permanently as dispute evidence.
• Listing content: retained while the Listing is active and, at FriendaPet's discretion, for a reasonable period after removal for record-keeping.

7.2 Account deletion — current process

You can request account deletion at any time from your Settings page, and you may cancel your own pending request at any time before it is processed. Submitting a request does not change anything about your account immediately — you can continue to log in normally and your profile remains active and unchanged until our team processes the request.

Your request is then reviewed and processed by our team; only an admin can complete this step. When your request is processed, we anonymize your public-facing profile information (your name, phone number, city/state, business or kennel details, and bio are replaced or cleared) and we permanently disable your ability to log in. Your account's email address and your historical transaction and message records are retained internally, consistent with Section 7.1, for dispute resolution, fraud prevention, and legal compliance. Your email address is never shown to other users and is used only as an internal record — for example, so that an admin can locate your past orders or conversations if a dispute arises after your account has been anonymized.

This is a request-and-review process with a human admin in the loop, not instant, fully automated self-service erasure.

8. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on your state of residence, you may have rights under state privacy laws such as the CCPA/CPRA (California) and similar laws in other states, which may include the right to know what personal information we have collected about you, the right to request deletion (subject to Section 7.2), the right to correct inaccurate information, and the right to non-discrimination for exercising these rights.

To request deletion, use the request option in your account settings, described in Section 7.2. To request a correction to your account information, contact us at the email address in Section 12 — our profile-editing form currently only runs once, at signup, and does not yet support revisiting and changing information you have already submitted, so corrections after that point are handled directly by our support team rather than through a self-service form.

9. Privacy of Minors

The Platform is not directed to children, and you must be at least 18 years old to create an account or complete a transaction, consistent with our Terms of Service and with Stripe Connect's own requirements. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected such information, we will delete it.

10. Security

We use reasonable administrative and technical measures to protect your information, including relying on Supabase and Stripe's security infrastructure and access controls (including row-level security policies on our database). No system is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee the absolute security of information transmitted to or stored by the Platform. FriendaPet never stores your full payment card number — that information is collected and stored directly by Stripe, keeping PCI compliance scope with Stripe rather than FriendaPet.

11. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the updated policy and revise the "Last Updated" date above; where required by law, we will provide additional notice of material changes.