Privacy Notice 🙈

What we know about you, and what we don't.

Last updated 8 October 2026

⚡ The short version

🙈 Your email, number and birthday are never shown.
📸 Photos are for signed-in members only.
📍 We don't track where you are.
🚫 We don't sell your data or use ad trackers.
🌍 Our providers may keep data on servers outside the UAE.
🗑️ Download or delete everything, any time.

A friendly summary. The full text below is the one that counts.

This notice explains what personal data KarakCrew collects, why, who can see it, and the choices and rights you have. It applies to the KarakCrew website and app.

🙋Who is responsible

KarakCrew ("we", "us") decides how and why your personal data is used, and is responsible for it.
For anything about your data, write to hello@karakcrew.com.

🗂️What we collect

Account details: your name or nickname, your email address or mobile number, your date of birth, and a scrambled (hashed) form of your password. We never store your actual password.
The invite code you joined with, if you used one.
Profile details you choose to add: gender, emirate and area, whether you are a resident or a visitor, your bio, interests, languages, and your answers to profile prompts.
Photos you upload, and the captions you write for them. Before a photo is saved we remove the hidden data inside the file, including where and when it was taken.
What you do in the app: the plans you host or join, the crews you join, your friends and friend requests, the messages and reactions you send, and the cheers you give.
Invitations: your personal invite code, who invited you, and how many of the people you invited have joined. We use this to count referral points.
Cosy Corner: whether a plan is marked as a Cosy Corner plan, and that you joined it. We never ask or record whether you are neurodivergent, or anything else about your health.
Safety records: who you have blocked, reports you make, and reports made about you together with our decision.
Notifications: a list of things that happened for you (for example, someone joining your plan), kept for about a month. If you switch on push notifications for a device, we store the address your browser gives us for sending them, until you switch them off.
Sign-in records: a record that you are signed in on a device, and, for security, a short-lived record of sign-up, failed sign-in and password-reset attempts that includes the internet (IP) address they came from.
Approximate location, only if you turn on "Near me": your position, rounded to about one kilometre, is kept in your own browser for one hour and sent with your requests so that plans can be sorted by distance. It is not saved to your account.

🙅What we do not collect

We do not track your live or background location.
We do not read your contacts, calendar or other apps.
We do not collect payment details. No payments are made through the service.
We do not use advertising or analytics trackers, and we do not build advertising profiles.

⚙️Why we use your data

To provide the service you signed up for: creating your account, showing you plans and crews, running group chats, and showing your profile to other members.
To keep the community safe: preventing misuse, limiting repeated sign-in attempts, reviewing reports and enforcing the Community Guidelines.
To check that members are 18 or older, using the date of birth you give.
To contact you about your account, for example to send a password-reset code.
To meet our legal obligations.
We rely on your consent, given when you create your account and when you choose to add information to your profile, and on what is necessary to provide the service you asked for and to comply with the law.

👀Who can see what

Other signed-in members can see your profile: name, age, emirate and area, gender (unless you hide it), bio, photos and captions, prompt answers, interests, languages, and the plans you host.
Your email address, mobile number and date of birth are never shown to other members. Only your age is shown.
Your photos can only be opened by signed-in members. They are not public web pages and cannot be found through search engines.
Group messages are visible to the members of that plan or crew.
Private messages are only possible between two members who have both agreed to be friends, and are shown only to the two of them. They are stored on our servers and are not end-to-end encrypted. We do not read them as a matter of routine, and would review them only where needed to investigate a report or where the law requires it.
Your friends list is not shown on your profile. Other members cannot see who you are friends with.
If you message the team, that conversation is read by the people who run the service, so that they can help you.
Only you can see who has given you a cheers, and how many you have.
Someone you have blocked cannot see your profile, photos, plans or messages. Their photos, plans and messages are hidden from you too.
Our moderators can see your account details, your profile, and your recent group messages when they review a report. Private messages between friends are not shown on that screen.

🤝Who we share it with

Companies that run the service for us: our website hosting provider, our database provider, and our email delivery provider. They handle your data only on our instructions.
If you switch on push notifications, they are delivered through the notification service built into your browser or phone (run by Apple, Google or Mozilla, depending on your device).
The authorities of the United Arab Emirates, where the law requires us to.
Nobody else. We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

🌍Where your data is kept

Our hosting and database providers may store and process data on servers outside the United Arab Emirates.
Where that happens, we use providers that commit to protecting personal data, and we take steps so that your data stays protected to the standard described in this notice.

⏳How long we keep it

Your account and profile: until you delete your account.
When you delete your account, your profile, photos, prompt answers, the plans you host, your messages, your cheers and the reports you made are removed from the live service.
Reports made about a member, and our decision on them, may be kept after that member's account is closed, without the account attached, so that we have a record of safety decisions.
Records of sign-up, sign-in and reset attempts: about 24 hours. Password-reset codes: 15 minutes. A sign-in on a device: 30 days, or until you sign out.
Backup copies held by our providers may take a short further period to expire.
We may keep information for longer where the law requires it.

🔐How we protect it

Passwords are stored only in hashed form. One-time codes are stored only in protected form and expire quickly.
Connections to the service are encrypted.
Photos are served only to signed-in members, and repeated sign-in attempts are limited.
Access to member data is limited to the people who need it to run and moderate the service.
No online service can promise perfect security. If a breach affecting your personal data occurs, we will notify the relevant authority and affected members as the law requires.

🍪Cookies

We use only the cookies the service needs in order to work: one that keeps you signed in, one used briefly while you reset a password, and one that holds your approximate location for an hour if you turn on "Near me".
Your browser may also remember, on your own device, that you dismissed the "install the app" hint.
We do not use advertising or tracking cookies.

🎛️Your rights and choices

See and correct your information at any time from your profile.
Download a copy of your data from your profile.
Delete your account from your profile.
Hide your gender, or snooze your profile to stay out of member lists.
Withdraw your consent, or ask us to stop or restrict a particular use of your data. In some cases that will mean we can no longer provide the service to you.
To use any of these rights, or to ask anything else, write to hello@karakcrew.com. We will reply as soon as we reasonably can.
You also have the right to complain to the UAE Data Office.

🔞Children

KarakCrew is for adults only. You must be 18 or older to have an account.
We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If we learn that a member is under 18, we will close the account and delete its data.

✏️Changes to this notice

We may update this notice as the service changes. The date at the top shows when it was last updated.
Where a change is significant we will take reasonable steps to let you know.

Got a question about any of this?

We'd rather you ask than guess. Write to hello@karakcrew.com.

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