Privacy Policy

1What we hold

Your account

Your name, email address, phone number and preferred language. Your password is handled by Firebase Authentication and never reaches our database.

Items you post

The title, description, photos, category, the city and quarter where you found it, the date, and the contact number you want a verified owner to reach you on. For an anonymous drop-off we also hold the drop-off place, your instructions, and the recovery code we generate.

Claims you make

Your answers to the finder's ownership questions and your score, your name and email copied onto the claim, the language you were using, any pledge you offer, and your IP address.

Anything you write to us

Ratings and comments you leave for a finder, and complaints you file about a claim.

Automatic

A counter that limits how often one account can post, upload or claim, and ordinary server request logs kept by our host. Three cookies, described under Cookies.

Messages you send us

When you write to us through the contact form we keep your name, email address, subject and message, so the message survives even if our email alert fails and so we can reply. We do not keep the IP address you sent it from.

What our team does

When an administrator acts on an account, an item or a claim — removing a listing, suspending an account, settling a dispute, looking up a phone number in order to reach someone — we record who did it, when, to what, why, and from which IP address. If the action concerned you, your account identifier is in that record, along with the reason the administrator wrote.

2Why we record an IP address on claims

3What is public and what is not

Anyone can see

An item's title, category, the city and quarter where it was found, the date, its photos in blurred form, and the finder's display name and reputation score. The written description is masked.

Nobody can see, ever

Your email address, your password, the IP address on a claim, and the correct answers to the ownership questions.

Only a verified owner sees

The full description, the photos unblurred, and for a drop-off the pickup address and recovery code — after passing the ownership questions. The finder's phone number is released too: always on a personal handover, and on an anonymous drop-off only if the finder chose to share it.

4Who else sees your data

Firebase Authentication (Google)

Your sign-in credentials and session. We never see your password.

MongoDB Atlas

Where everything described above is stored.

Cloudinary

Your item photos, both the original and the blurred version shown publicly.

Groq

When a finder asks for help writing wrong answers for a quiz question, we send that service three things: the item's category, the question the finder wrote, and its correct answer. No photos, no names, no contact details, and nothing about the person claiming.

Our email provider

The address we are writing to and the contents of that message.

Cloudflare Turnstile

The anti-spam check on the contact form only. Cloudflare receives your IP address and signals about your browser in order to decide whether you are a person; it does not receive your name, your email address or your message, and it sets no cookie. It loads on the contact page and nowhere else.

Vercel

Hosting, and ordinary request logs.

5How long we keep it

Items

A posted item stays claimable for 60 days, then it is retired automatically. We keep the record rather than deleting it, so recovery history and the audit trail remain intact.

Claims

Once you pass the ownership questions you have 48 hours to complete the recovery. After that the claim expires and the item becomes claimable again.

If you close your account

We keep the record but clear your name, email address and phone number, including every copy of them held on claims and items. We keep the record rather than deleting it because other records point at it, and deleting it would leave those broken.

The record of what our team does

We keep it indefinitely, including after an account closes — the account it concerned and the administrator's alike. That is deliberate: this record is the trace of what we did, and erasing it would mean closing an account also deletes the evidence of how it was handled. It is the one place an email address survives an account deletion, and only administrators granted access can read it.

6What you can ask for

A copy of your data

Everything we hold about you, in a readable format.

A correction

If something we hold is wrong, tell us and we will fix it.

Deletion

We will clear your personal details as described above.

How to ask

Write to us using the address at the bottom of this page. We are one person, so allow a few days.

7Children

8Changes to this policy