Privacy Policy

Hala is a private, membership-based community for meeting people. Privacy is not a compliance exercise for us — discretion is the product. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the control you keep.

1. What we collect

You provide it:

• Application & profile: name, date of birth, gender, city and country, occupation, education, photos, a short bio, languages, and Instagram handle if you share one.
• Cultural and religious background (optional): where you choose to share it (for example ethnicity or practice-related preferences), we treat it as sensitive information: it is used only to power the matching experience you asked for, never for advertising, and never shared beyond that purpose. Providing it is your choice.
• Messages: what you send to your matches. Messages are stored so your conversations work across devices; we do not read them except as described in Section 5 (safety).
• Contact details: the email address (and, if offered later, phone number) you sign in with.

Created as you use Hala:

• Likes, passes, matches, blocks, and reports.
• Membership status (active/expired). Payment itself is handled by Apple or Google — we never see or store your card details.
• Basic device and app-version information, and — if error reporting is enabled — crash reports, which are configured to exclude personal information and message content.

We do not collect: precise GPS location (city is what you type), contacts, browsing history, or advertising identifiers. Hala has no ads and we never sell personal information.

2. How we use it

• To run the application and committee review (that is the service).
• To show your profile to other approved, active members — this is the core function of a members’ community.
• To create matches and deliver messages.
• To keep the community safe: reviewing reports, enforcing blocks, and moderating conduct.
• To operate memberships, provide support, and fix failures.
• To meet legal obligations.

We do not use your information for third-party advertising, and we do not profile you for any purpose other than the matching you signed up for.

3. Who sees what

• Other members: only approved members with an active membership can see profiles, and they see what a profile shows: your first name, age, photos, city, bio, and the details you added. Members you block can see nothing.
• Applicants and non-members see no member content at all.
• The membership committee reviews applications (what you submitted) and safety reports.
• Service providers who process data on our instructions: Supabase (database, authentication, storage — hosted in the United States), Sentry (error reporting, if enabled), Resend (email delivery), and Apple/Google (payments). Each is bound by its own data processing terms.
• Legal: we disclose information if required by law, or to protect the safety of members or the public.

We never sell or rent personal information. There are no data brokers, ad networks, or analytics resellers in this app.

4. Screenshots and member discretion

Membership is built on discretion. Our Terms prohibit capturing or sharing other members’ profiles, photos, or conversations. Technology cannot fully prevent screenshots, so this promise is enforced socially and contractually: violations are grounds for removal.

5. Safety review of messages

Messages are private between matches. If a member files a report, a small committee may review the specific conversation relevant to that report as evidence. This is the only circumstance in which message content is viewed, and it is never shared beyond the review.

6. Artificial intelligence and automated decisions

Hala does not use generative AI to run your experience, and we want to be precise about what that means:

• People decide membership. Applications, removals, and safety outcomes are decided by the membership committee — human beings — never solely by an algorithm. You will not receive a consequential decision from Hala that no person looked at.
• Matching is simple rules, not AI profiling. The order of profiles you see is produced by plain, explainable criteria: your stated preferences, activity, and blocks. We do not build behavioral models of you, score your desirability, or infer characteristics you did not tell us.
• Everyone you talk to is a person. Hala has no AI chat assistants, AI personas, or bot profiles. Every profile was reviewed and admitted by the committee.
• Your data never trains AI. We do not use your photos, messages, application answers, or any personal information to train artificial intelligence or machine-learning models, and we never provide it to anyone else for that purpose. Our service providers are bound by terms that prohibit using your data to train their models.
• Automated safety screening, human judgment. We may use automated tools to help flag spam, scams, or prohibited content for review, but any action that affects your membership is taken by a person.
• If this ever changes, any AI-powered feature will be clearly identified as such in the app, this policy will be updated first, and where the law requires consent, we will ask for it before the feature touches your data.

7. Your controls

• Edit your profile and photos at any time in the app.
• Pause your visibility (Settings) — you disappear from discovery.
• Block any member — mutual invisibility, immediately.
• Delete your account (Settings → Delete account): this permanently erases your profile, photos, application, matches, messages, and membership record. Deletion is immediate and irreversible. Limited records may be retained where the law requires (for example, records of a safety report you were involved in).

Depending on where you live (e.g., EU/UK GDPR, California CCPA), you may also have rights to access, correct, port, or delete your data, and to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Write to privacy@halatheapp.com and we will honor these rights.

8. Retention

Your data is kept while your account exists. Deleting your account removes it as described above. Rejected applications are retained for 12 months for committee integrity (preventing immediate reapplication with fabricated details), then deleted.

9. Security

Data is encrypted in transit; access is controlled row-by-row at the database level so members can only ever query what the app is meant to show them; photos are served through expiring signed links; and payment data never touches our systems.

10. Age

Hala is for adults 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18; applications with an under-18 date of birth cannot be submitted, and any such account discovered is deleted.

11. International transfers

Our infrastructure is hosted in the United States. If you use Hala from elsewhere, your information is processed there under appropriate safeguards.

12. Changes

We will post any changes here and, for material changes, tell you in the app before they take effect.

13. Contact

privacy@halatheapp.com