Last updated 22 September 2026. SEEN. is run by Kahuku Apps, which is the data controller for the information described here. The rules for using the app are in our Terms & Conditions. Questions: hello@seen-irl.com.
The short version
SEEN. shows you the people who are at a place you are also at. To do that it needs to know who you are, roughly where you are, and which place you checked into. Almost everything it stores is temporary: a day after a place ends, the place and everything inside it — profiles as they appeared there, signals, matches, chats — is deleted.
We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, we do not show ads, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.
What we collect
Things you give us
- Your phone number, to sign you in. It is verified by SMS and is never shown to anyone else in the app.
- Your profile: first name, birthdate, email address, photos, your gender and who you are here to meet, and optionally a short bio, your vibes and an Instagram handle. We store your birthdate and show only your age. Your gender and who you are here to meet decide who is shown to you in a place, and who you are shown to: you only appear to people who came to meet what you are, and only they appear to you.
- Messages you send to people you have matched with. Photos cannot be sent in a conversation — that was removed for privacy.
- Reports you make about someone: the reason, your note, and where it happened.
- Places you open, if you host: the name, description, cover image, location and check-in range.
Things the app produces as you use it
- Your location, while the app is open, to find places near you and to show how far away the people at your place are. It is rounded to roughly 11 metres before it is stored, and your exact position is never shown to anyone.
- Nearby-place alerts, if you switch them on. These watch for you arriving at or leaving up to twenty nearby places, using your device's own region monitoring. That monitoring happens on your phone, and the crossings are used to notify you and to check you out of a place you have walked away from.
- What you do in a place: which place you checked into, when you were last active there, and who you marked as seen or passed on.
- Who you have blocked, on both sides of the block, so it holds in both directions. Blocking also creates a safety review item and notifies our moderation team; the blocked person is not notified.
- Your allowance at each place: which people the place has shown you, how many you have opened, how many of the people who saw you have been revealed, and any credits you have bought. Kept per visit, which lasts 12 hours, and tied to the place.
- Your plan: which subscription or top-up you hold and when it runs out. Apple handles the payment — we never see your card details.
- A push notification token, so we can tell you about a match, a message or a nearby place, and your notification preferences.
- Crash reports: when the app fails we keep the error, where in our code it happened, the build number and the account that was signed in, so it can be fixed.
If you ask to be told about Android
Our website has a box where you can leave a mobile number to be told when SEEN. is available on Android. You do not need an account for this and nothing else about you is recorded. We keep the number you typed, which country you chose, and which poster or link you came from — nothing about your device, and no advertising identifier.
We will send you one text message, when SEEN. is available on Android. We will not send you anything else, and we will not share the number with anyone, sell it, or use it to advertise to you. The number is not connected to any account, because at that point you do not have one. If you later sign up, the two are still not linked.
To be taken off the list before we write to you, email hello@seen-irl.com with the number and we will delete it.
The photo check runs on your phone
When you add a profile photo, the app checks that it contains a face. That check runs entirely on your device using Apple's built-in vision framework. No face data, template or measurement is created, sent to us, or stored. It confirms a face is present — not whose face.
Why we use it
| What | Why | Legal basis (UK/EU) |
|---|---|---|
| Phone number | Signing you in and keeping the account yours | Performance of a contract |
| Profile, photos, age | Showing you to the people at your place | Performance of a contract |
| Gender, who you want to meet | Filtering who you see, and who sees you | Consent (special category data where it applies) |
| Location | Finding places near you and rounding distances | Consent, via the device permission |
| Signals, matches, messages | Making the app work at all | Performance of a contract |
| Reports, blocks, strikes | Keeping people safe and enforcing the rules | Legitimate interests, and legal obligation |
| Plan and credits | Giving you what you paid for and stopping abuse | Performance of a contract |
| Push token | Telling you about matches and messages | Consent, via the device permission |
| Crash reports | Fixing the app | Legitimate interests |
Sexual orientation can be inferred from who you say you want to meet, which makes it special category data in the UK and EU. We use it only to decide who appears in your room, we ask for it optionally, and you can remove it at any time.
Who can see what
- People at your place see your first name, age, photos, bio, vibes and a rounded distance — only while you are checked in, and only at that place.
- Nobody is told that you passed on them. Passing is silent, always.
- Nobody can see who liked them before it is mutual, unless they spend a look to unmask a sighting — and even then they see only that someone saw them there.
- A person you matched with sees your profile and your messages. A match happens only when you have each marked the other as seen.
- SEEN.+ TRAVEL members can look into a place they have not joined and see who is there, the same profiles anyone in the room would see. Looking is read-only: they cannot signal or message anyone without checking in, and nobody is told they looked.
- Your Instagram handle is never shown in a room. It leaves your profile only when you tap “Share Instagram” inside a conversation, which posts it as an ordinary message.
- Your exact location, phone number and email are never shown to anyone.
- We can see reported accounts and the evidence attached to a report. We do not read conversations otherwise.
When it is deleted
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| A place and everything in it — attendees, signals, matches, messages | About a day after the place ends |
| Your presence in a place, once you stop appearing there | Swept every ten minutes |
| A match and its conversation | Three days, then gone |
| Your copy of a conversation you left | Immediately. The other person keeps theirs and is not told |
| Cached map data for an area nobody has asked about | Fourteen days |
| Your profile, photos and account | Until you delete them — deletion is immediate |
| Reports and the evidence attached to them | 12 months, so a pattern of behaviour is not lost when the room is |
| Records of a suspension | Kept, so a removed account cannot simply come back |
| A mobile number left on the website to be told about Android | Deleted once the launch message has been sent, or sooner on request |
| Purchase and billing records | As long as tax and accounting law requires |
There are no backups and nothing that has expired can be restored, by you or by us.
Who we share it with
We use a small number of providers to run the service. They process data on our behalf, on our instructions, and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.
- Google Firebase — sign-in, database, file storage, push delivery and server code. This is where your data lives.
- Apple and Google — delivering push notifications to your phone.
- Apple — payments and subscriptions. Apple tells us what you bought; it does not give us your payment details.
- Google Maps Platform — searching for a place by name when a host is opening a place. The search text and a rough location go to Google.
- OpenStreetMap (Overpass) — finding publicly listed places near a map area. A map area is sent; your identity is not.
- Pexels — suggested cover photos for a place, looked up by the place's name from our server, not from your phone.
- Apple Maps and Google Maps — the map tiles themselves, drawn on your phone by the operating system.
We may also disclose information where the law requires it, to enforce our terms, or to protect someone from harm. If the business is ever sold or reorganised, data may transfer with it, subject to this policy.
We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — including as those terms are defined under California law.
Where your data is held
Our providers store and process data in the United States. If you are in the UK or EU, that means your information is transferred outside your country; those transfers rely on the standard contractual clauses our providers offer.
Security
Access to your data is enforced on the server, not just in the app: a profile is readable only through the copy inside a place you are also in, signals are readable only by the person who made them, and matches and counters can be written only by our server code. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest by our providers. No system is perfect, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.
Children
SEEN. is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and we ask for your birthdate to enforce that. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor is using SEEN., report the account in the app or email hello@seen-irl.com and we will remove it.
Your choices and your rights
- Permissions. Location, camera, photos and notifications are all things you grant, and you can withdraw any of them in your device settings. The app degrades rather than breaks.
- Nearby alerts can be switched off in the app at any time. With them off, the region monitoring stops entirely.
- Checking in is always yours. You are never put into a place because you walked into one. Nothing makes you visible at a place until you check in yourself, every time.
- Your profile. You can edit or remove anything on it whenever you like.
- Your account. You can delete it from your profile. That removes your profile, your photos and your presence in every place.
- Access, correction, deletion, portability and objection. Wherever you live, you can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct or delete it, ask for a copy, or object to a use of it. Email hello@seen-irl.com; we answer within 30 days and we will not treat you differently for asking.
- UK and EU. You may withdraw consent at any time, and you may complain to your data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.
- California. You have the rights above under the CCPA/CPRA. We do not sell or share personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of.
Some things survive an account deletion because they have to: records of a suspension, evidence attached to a report, and billing records we are required to keep.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who sees it, we will update this page and the date at the top, and tell you in the app before it takes effect.
SEEN. · hello@seen-irl.com