Notapub Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2026-05-11

Notapub ("we", "the app") is a text-first social app that helps people find others they'll genuinely connect with. This policy explains what personal information the app collects, why we collect it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and how you can delete it.

Notapub is intended for users who are 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect data from children under 18.

What we collect, and why

Account & identity

• Phone number — used as your sign-in identity (Firebase Auth) and for SMS verification. Never shown to other users.
• Email address — only if you choose the email-link sign-in fallback. Never shown to other users.
• No name, photo, or bio. Notapub is identity-light by design. We do not ask you for a display name, profile picture, or self-written bio, and there are no fields for them in the app. Other users discover you through your interests, not your identity (see "Profile signals" below).

Voice & microphone (RECORD_AUDIO)

• The app uses your microphone only while the in-app Call screen is open and the voice conversation is explicitly active. The microphone is never used in the background.
• Audio is streamed in real time to Google's Gemini Live API for transcription and conversational response. Where Gemini Live isn't available, audio is processed on-device and a text transcript is sent to a Google text model instead.
• We store the resulting text transcript of each conversation session under your account so the app can build your profile (see "Profile signals" below). We do not store the raw audio.
• You can delete any session transcript from the in-app history.

Location (ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION, ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION)

• Used only while the app is open to surface people who are physically nearby in the feed.
• Coarse location is preferred; fine location is used only when you opt in to precise nearby matching.
• Your raw location history is not retained beyond the rolling window needed to compute "nearby" — typically the last 24 hours.

Bluetooth (BLUETOOTH_SCAN, BLUETOOTH_CONNECT, BLUETOOTH_ADVERTISE)

• Used to detect when other Notapub users are physically near you (Bluetooth proximity), independent of GPS.
• The app does not connect to non-Notapub devices.

Contacts (READ_CONTACTS, WRITE_CONTACTS)

• Used to look for people in your phone contacts who are already on Notapub, so you can find them.
• Contact data is matched on-device against hashed identifiers; we do not upload your full address book.

Profile signals (the things you say to the app)

• The free-text answers you give to in-app prompts (and the transcripts of voice sessions) are processed by Google's Gemini API to derive a structured set of wants and haves (interests, looking-for, offering), which the app uses to find matches.
• We also generate vector embeddings of those signals to power semantic similarity search. Embeddings are stored only in our own Vertex AI vector index, scoped to your account.

Notifications (POST_NOTIFICATIONS)

• Used to deliver new-match and new-message notifications. You can disable them at any time in your OS settings.

Who we share data with

• Google Cloud / Firebase — hosts our backend (Firestore, Cloud Functions, Auth, Realtime Database, Hosting). Standard Google data-processing terms apply.
• Google Generative AI (Gemini) — your voice transcripts and free-text answers are sent to the Gemini API for processing. Per Google's API terms, content sent through paid Gemini API endpoints is not used to train Google's foundation models.
• Other Notapub users — what other users see about you is a short, model-generated summary of your interests (derived from your wants and haves) plus the individual want/have phrases themselves. Your phone number, email, raw conversation transcripts, contacts list, and exact location are never shared with other users. You have no profile picture, name, or bio for other users to see (we don't collect those).
• We do not sell your data to advertisers or any third party.

How long we keep it

• Account data: until you delete the account.
• Conversation transcripts: until you delete the session, or for as long as your account exists.
• Location data: rolling 24-hour window for live nearby; longer-aggregated patterns are retained only as anonymous stats.
• Function-call logs (used for debugging): 30 days.

Deleting your data

You can delete your entire account from the in-app Settings → Sign out → Delete my account path. This removes your profile, messages, transcripts, and embeddings within 24 hours. To request deletion outside the app, email privacy@notapub.com.

Step-by-step instructions and the full list of what gets erased are on the dedicated account deletion page.

Children

Notapub requires users to be 18 or older. If we learn we have collected data from a user under 18, we will delete it promptly.

Security

All traffic between the app and our backend uses TLS. Firestore data is encrypted at rest by Google Cloud. Microphone audio streamed to Gemini Live is sent over WSS (encrypted WebSocket). Ephemeral access tokens for the Live API are short-lived (≤30 min) and scoped to a single session.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes we'll surface a notice in the app and update the "Last updated" date above. Continuing to use the app after a change constitutes acceptance.

Contact

Questions or requests: privacy@notapub.com.