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:

• Sign-in and contact details: the phone number you sign in with (we send a one-time code by SMS) and your email address.
• Application & profile: name, date of birth, gender, city and country, industry, education, languages, photos, a short bio, the name of the member who referred you if any, and your Instagram handle if you share one. We never connect to Instagram's systems: we do not see your followers, posts, or private profile — only the handle you type, which is shown to members you match with.
• Cultural and religious background: ethnicity and, where you choose to share it, religious or practice-related preferences. These are sensitive categories. By adding them you explicitly consent to Hala using them to run the community and the matching you asked for — never for advertising and never shared beyond that purpose. You can edit or remove them at any time in Edit profile, which withdraws that consent going forward. Because Hala serves a community rooted in Muslim and Middle Eastern life, membership itself may suggest a religious or cultural affiliation; we treat that with the same care.
• Photos: when you add a photo we ask for access to your camera or photo library only at that moment, and only the photos you choose are uploaded. Photos are resized and cropped for the profile, which removes location and other camera metadata before storage.
• 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).
• Support and dispute correspondence you send us.

Created as you use Hala:

• Likes, passes, matches, blocks, reports, and your Travel city and dates if you set them.
• Membership status (active, canceled, expired), received from Apple or Google. Payment itself is handled by Apple or Google — we never see or store your card details.
• Technical records: your IP address, device model and OS version, app version, a device token so we can send push notifications, and timestamps of requests. These are needed to deliver the service and investigate problems.
• Crash reports, if error reporting is enabled, configured to exclude personal information and message content.

From other people: reports another member files about you, and the referral name an applicant gives if they name you as their referrer.

We do not collect: precise GPS location (your city is what you type), your contacts, browsing history, advertising identifiers, or biometric data. We do not create faceprints from your photos or run facial recognition, and we do not run background checks. 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 send the messages described in Section 7.
• 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.

If you are in the EU, UK, or Switzerland, our legal bases are: the contract with you (running your membership and matching); your explicit consent for religious and ethnic background, which you can withdraw in Edit profile; our legitimate interests in keeping the community safe and the service working; and legal obligations.

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 (or Travel city while a trip is active), 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 and may not use it for anything else: Supabase (database, sign-in, and photo storage, hosted in the United States), Twilio (SMS sign-in codes), Resend (email), Expo and Apple/Google push services (notifications), Sentry (crash reports, if enabled), Apple App Store and Google Play (payments), and RevenueCat (subscription status, once in-app subscriptions launch).
• Legal: we disclose information to authorities only when the law requires it (a valid subpoena, court order, or an emergency involving a risk to someone's life or safety), and we will tell you unless we are legally barred from doing so or notice would endanger someone.
• Business transfers: if Hala is merged, acquired, or sells its assets, your information may transfer to the new owner, who must honor this policy or ask for your consent before using it differently; we will tell you in the app before that happens.
• Aggregated, de-identified statistics (for example how many members are in a city) may be shared with advisors or investors; they never identify you.

We never sell or rent personal information, and we do not share it for targeted advertising. 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. Messages we send you

We send transactional messages you cannot turn off while you have an account: sign-in codes, application decisions, and safety and billing notices, by SMS, email, push notification, or in the app. Message and data rates may apply.

We may also send occasional emails or push notifications about Hala features or community news. You can unsubscribe from those emails using the link in any email, turn off push notifications in your device settings, and stop non-essential texts by replying STOP. We never send marketing on behalf of anyone else.

8. Your controls and rights

• 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, and membership record, and removes your messages from your side of every conversation. Messages you already sent remain visible in the other member's conversation, attributed to a deleted account, until that member deletes them or their account. Deletion is immediate and irreversible; backups are purged within 30 days. Limited records may be kept as described in Section 9.

Your rights, wherever you live. You can ask us to access, correct, delete, or export the information we hold about you, and we offer these rights to everyone whether or not your state's or country's law requires it. We never sell personal information or share it for targeted advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. If we ever wanted to use sensitive information (like religion or ethnicity) for anything beyond the matching you asked for, we would ask first, and you can limit that use at any time by removing it from your profile.

To make a request, email privacy@halatheapp.com from the address on your account or use Settings. We will verify it is you (usually by sending a code to your phone), respond within 45 days, and never treat you differently for exercising a right. You may use an authorized agent if they show us your written permission. If we deny a request you can appeal by replying to our decision; if you still disagree you can contact your state attorney general or, in the EU/UK, your data-protection authority. Our website honors Global Privacy Control signals.

California residents: in the last 12 months we collected identifiers (phone, email, device token, IP address), profile and demographic information (including religion and ethnicity as sensitive personal information you chose to give), photos, messages, subscription status, and device and diagnostic data — from you, your device, and Apple or Google. We used them for the purposes in Section 2 and disclosed them only to the service providers in Section 3. We sold or shared none of it.

9. Retention

• Your profile, photos, and messages: for as long as your account exists, then deleted immediately on account deletion and purged from backups within 30 days.
• Rejected and withdrawn applications: 12 months, to protect committee integrity (preventing immediate reapplication with fabricated details), then deleted.
• Safety reports and the conversation excerpts attached to them: 24 months after the report is closed, or longer if a claim or legal hold requires it.
• Members removed for a violation: we may keep a hashed copy of the phone number and device identifier indefinitely so that removed members cannot rejoin.
• Server logs and crash reports: 30 days. Support correspondence: 24 months. Subscription records: as long as tax and accounting law requires.
• Accounts inactive for 2 years may be deleted after we email you a warning.

10. 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. No service can guarantee security. If a security incident affects your personal information, we will tell you in the app or by email as quickly as we can, and within the time your state's law requires, along with what happened and what we are doing about it.

11. 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.

12. International transfers

Our infrastructure is hosted in the United States. If you use Hala from elsewhere, your information is processed there. For members in the EU, UK, or Switzerland we rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses; email privacy@halatheapp.com for a copy of the safeguards, and you may complain to your local data-protection authority.

13. Cookies, software components, and links

Our website uses no cookies and no analytics. The app contains no advertising or third-party analytics components; the third-party software it does include is listed under Service providers in Section 3. We do not respond to browser "Do Not Track" signals because we do not track you across sites; we do honor Global Privacy Control. Members may share Instagram profiles; those and any other third-party sites are governed by their own policies, not this one.

14. Changes

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

15. Contact

privacy@halatheapp.com