Privacy policy
Last updated: 2026-08-27
Fugaz limits most operational data by design. Your phone is turned into an irreversible code; the clear number is retained only for the periods in section 3. Your location is rounded to a 300-metre grid before storage. Some identity, access, attribution and moderation records persist for the periods explained below.
1. Who processes your data
The data controller is Diego Herrero, a natural person operating the Fugaz application (fugaz.app).
For anything concerning your data, including any of the rights in section 7, write to [email protected].
2. What Fugaz is, and why that matters here
Fugaz shows people on a map who are nearby and want to meet right now. You can enter through WhatsApp or Telegram, share your location and appear for up to 24 hours. We use no password: control of your phone number identifies you. A user record and irreversible credentials derived from that number keep this identity stable.
That design is also how your data is protected: almost everything described here is enforced by construction, not by promise. The retention periods below are not applied by a person or a cleanup job — they are applied by the database, which deletes each item by itself when it expires.
3. Your phone number
It is the most sensitive thing that passes through here, so it gets its own section.
When you message the bot, your number arrives with the message. The first thing we do is turn it into an irreversible code (HMAC-SHA256 with a secret key of ours). That code is your identity inside the system: everything else — your profile, your position, your groups — hangs off it and not off the number. The number cannot be derived back from the code.
The number itself is kept only for as long as something needs it to work, and always with automatic expiry:
- What for
- So other people on the map, or your group, can message you on WhatsApp
- How long
- 24 hours from your last message to the bot. Every message you send restarts the clock; if you stop writing, it deletes itself
- What for
- If you apply to be a buddy: so we can call you to approve you
- How long
- 30 days, or until your application is resolved
- What for
- Linking your phone to your Telegram chat so we can reply through that channel
- How long
- 180 days from your last Telegram message; each message renews the period
The first row's period is renewable, and you are the one renewing it: 24 hours from your last message to the bot, not a minute more. It is exactly how long your presence in the app lasts — the countdown you see in your profile is the retention period of your number. The honest flip side: if you use the app every day, the number is stored continuously, because each of your messages restarts the 24 hours.
And there is real on-demand erasure: when you leave the map, the app asks whether you want to keep receiving notices. Say no, and your number is deleted on the spot, without waiting for any expiry.
Outside those cases, the number is not stored. When somebody contacts you from the map, your number is not handed over: the contact goes through the bot and requires you to answer. We also keep no separate record of when you wrote: the WhatsApp window clock is the number's own expiry.
4. Your location
The location you share is rounded to a 300-metre grid before it is stored. The exact coordinate is used in memory to do that rounding and then discarded: it is written to no database and to no log. What other people see — and the only thing that would exist if somebody got into our systems — is the 300-metre cell.
That position lives up to 24 hours, renewed while you keep messaging the bot — the same clock as your number — and then disappears on its own. We keep no history: there is no way to reconstruct where you have been, not even for us.
The lawful basis for processing your location is your explicit consent, given when you share it and withdrawable at any time by leaving the map (section 7).
That consent has two levels, and the second one is yours to choose. By default your location is only used so that the members of your group can find you: you do not appear on the people map (“Free spirits”). If you also want to appear there — where anyone nearby can see you and message you — you have to allow it explicitly, by unticking the box when you share your location or from your profile. It is reversible in the same place, and until you allow it you cannot see the people map either: nobody watches without being watched.
5. What else we process, what for, and how long
- Data
- Irreversible code derived from your phone number
- What for
- Identifying you inside the system without knowing your number
- Lawful basis
- Performance of the service
- How long
- As long as the data it accompanies
- Data
- Position rounded to 300 m
- What for
- Showing you on the map to people nearby
- Lawful basis
- Explicit consent
- How long
- Up to 24 h, renewed with every message to the bot
- Data
- Profile: name, what you tell about yourself, and — optional — age range, gender, nationality, languages and your social handles
- What for
- So people who see you on the map know who you are
- Lawful basis
- Consent
- How long
- 15 days, renewed every time you publish a location
- Data
- Minimal profile (name only) created when you enter through a buddy's QR
- What for
- So you do not show up as a nameless dot
- Lawful basis
- Consent
- How long
- 72 hours
- Data
- Chat messages between groups
- What for
- The conversation itself
- Lawful basis
- Performance of the service
- How long
- 72 hours from when each message is written
- Data
- Conversation requests
- What for
- So the other side can accept or not
- Lawful basis
- Performance of the service
- How long
- 24 hours
- Data
- Groups and who is in them
- What for
- So a group exists and shows on the map
- Lawful basis
- Performance of the service
- How long
- 72 h the group; 15 days the membership
- Data
- One-off permission to show your social handles to a specific person
- What for
- Showing them to somebody without making them public
- Lawful basis
- Consent
- How long
- 7 days
- Data
- Notices pending delivery
- What for
- So a notice is not lost if the channel is down
- Lawful basis
- Performance of the service
- How long
- 7 days
- Data
- A group's photo of the day, with its caption
- What for
- Showing what is going on there right now
- Lawful basis
- Consent
- How long
- 24 hours
- Data
- Comments somebody writes about another person
- What for
- So that whoever knows you can say something about you to whoever just saw you
- Lawful basis
- Consent
- How long
- 15 days, the same as the profile it talks about
- Data
- A shared view of a group (the link somebody sends to a chat)
- What for
- Showing what they were looking at without the other person having to sign up
- Lawful basis
- Legitimate interest in the app being showable
- How long
- 72 hours, after which the link stops opening
- Data
- Web session (our own cookie)
- What for
- So you do not have to identify yourself on every screen
- Lawful basis
- Strictly necessary for a service you requested
- How long
- 14 days
Every profile field except the name is optional. We process no special categories of data under Article 9 GDPR: no health, religion, political opinions or biometrics. Profile pictures, where they exist, come from your own WhatsApp and only if you turn them on; we do not process them to identify you.
6. Who we share with
We do not sell data, we run no advertising, and we hand nothing to third parties for commercial purposes. The only recipients are the providers the app needs to work:
And there is one thing another person can do, not us: whoever sees you on the map can share that view —your card and the ones around it, frozen— as a link that opens for anyone who receives it, signed up or not. The link stops working after 72 hours. If you delete your profile before that it disappears from the app at once, but a view already shared may keep showing the frozen copy until it expires. If that bothers you, write to us and we will kill it.
- Who
- Upstash (database)
- What they receive
- Everything described above, with its retention periods
- Where
- European Union (EU Central) — no international transfer
- Who
- Vercel (web hosting)
- What they receive
- Requests to the app, including your IP
- Where
- —
- Who
- Ably (real-time chat notifications)
- What they receive
- Only the signal that a new message exists: conversation id and timestamp. The text never leaves our database
- Where
- —
- Who
- CARTO (map background)
- What they receive
- Your IP and the tiles your browser requests, i.e. roughly which area you are looking at
- Where
- —
- Who
- Meta (WhatsApp)
- What they receive
- The messages you exchange with the bot, as in any WhatsApp conversation
- Where
- Per WhatsApp's own policy
- Who
- Telegram
- What they receive
- Messages exchanged with the bot and, when you choose to share it, your phone number. Fugaz keeps the relationship between that number, your internal identity and the chat for 180 days
- Where
- Per Telegram's own privacy policy
- Who
- Neon (PostgreSQL)
- What they receive
- Internal identity, irreversible credentials, roles, arrival attribution and moderation decisions
- Where
- Database infrastructure contracted by Fugaz
- Who
- Cloudflare (photo storage and delivery)
- What they receive
- The photos that get published, and the IP of whoever requests them. It also automatically scans what passes through its network for child sexual abuse material
- Where
- The store sits in the European Union, but cached copies are served from servers around the world
- Who
- OpenAI (photo review, welcome messages and the translation you ask for)
- What they receive
- Three separate things. One: the photos you upload, and only as you upload them, to block sexual, violent or self-harm content before they are published; they travel already resized and stripped of metadata, so neither the place nor the date they were taken goes with them. Two: if we write to you to help you get started, the text of that conversation and, for each person in the group, their name, their handle inside the app, what they say about themselves, their languages, the country they probably come from, and whether they are on the map. Three: when you tap the button to translate a chat message, the text of that message — only that one, only when you ask, and without who wrote it or which conversation it belongs to. Your phone number does not travel, and neither does your position
- Where
- We contract with OpenAI Ireland Ltd. (Ireland); processing happens in the United States under the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. None of this is used to train models. OpenAI keeps a log for up to 30 days to detect abuse and then deletes it
WhatsApp and Telegram are external channels. Each platform processes what you exchange with it under its own terms, which we do not control. This is separate from what Fugaz retains in its own systems.
7. Your rights
You may exercise the rights of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction of processing and portability. Two of them need neither a message from you nor an answer from anybody:
- Delete your profile — from the app itself, on your profile screen, or by messaging the bot
delete profile. It is deleted immediately. - Leave the map — from the app ("stop showing up", which also offers to delete your number on the spot) or by messaging the bot
stop. Your position disappears at once; this is how you withdraw the consent in section 4.
The three ways to delete your account, and what is kept afterwards, are explained in Delete your account.
For any other right, write to [email protected]. Bear in mind that, since we do not store your phone number, we cannot always locate your data from an email address: the most direct way to prove that some data is yours is to message the bot from the same WhatsApp number you use the app with.
If you believe your request was not handled properly, you may lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority of your country of residence. In Spain that is the Spanish Data Protection Agency (aepd.es).
What erasure does not reach
If somebody reports a piece of content, we keep a copy of what was reported for 90 days and the decision we made for 2 years. Blocking another person lasts 1 year, and a ban from the app, 3 years. Those records are not erased at the request of the reported person while they remain necessary to defend against a claim (Article 17.3(e) GDPR) and to be able to tell whoever reported what was decided. A report copy never includes location.
8. Cookies
We use first-party technical cookies: at_session keeps your session for 14 days; locale and theme remember language and appearance; and chat_app remembers your WhatsApp or Telegram choice for one year. They are necessary or store requested preferences, so no consent banner is required. We use no advertising cookies, pixels or third-party trackers. We do generate internal service and onboarding statistics without an external advertising analytics service.
9. Minors
Fugaz is for people aged 18 and over. The form requires confirming you are of age before a profile can be saved. If we find a profile belonging to a minor, we delete it.
10. Security
Beyond the usual technical measures, the real protection here is what we do not accumulate: with no exact coordinates or location history, an incident cannot reconstruct journeys. Operational data has expiry periods; persistent records are limited to identity, access, attribution and moderation.
11. Changes to this policy
If we change anything material, we change the date in the header too. The retention periods on this page match the ones the system applies as of that date.
This is a translation. The binding version is the Spanish one, available at fugaz.app/privacidad.