The App and Services are not directed to children and children are not eligible to use our Services. Protecting the privacy of children is very important to us. We do not collect or maintain Personal Information from people we actually know are under 13 years of age, and no part of our the App or Services is designed to attract people under 18 years of age. If we later learn that a user is under 18 years of age, we will take steps to prevent the user from utilizing the App and the Services.
In general, the Personal Information we gather enables us to provide the Services to you and helps us learn more about the use of the App and/or Services. We collect Personal Information that you submit to us voluntarily at registration and in the course of using the App and/or Services, including, but not exclusive to, when you are logged in, your friends and the questions you answer on the App. To use the Services you must create an “Account” by providing your name, email address, gender, age, location, additional preferences, a password, and potentially additional information. You may connect to the App or Services through Facebook, in which case we may collect that information from Facebook for the purposes of creating your Account and playing the App. When you communicate with us by sending us an email, we will collect and store any information that is contained in your communications with us.
When you register, we will create a profile for you that includes your first and last name and additional information, including, but not exclusive to, your gender, location, relationship status, your bio and a profile picture. If you registered through Facebook, we may use the information we collected about you from Facebook to pre-populate your Profile.
We will refer to all of the information contained in your Profile as your “Profile Information”. As your Profile Information is intended by you to be published on the App, your Profile Information will not be considered Personal Information under this Agreement, even if it contains Personal Information and we may use and disclose the Profile Information on the App without restriction. Some of your Profile Information may be provided by other Members.
If you access the Services from your mobile device, we will collect your unique device identifier, the application version you are using, and your event activity. Unless you are logged in, we will not associate this information with the Personal Information we note above.
If you choose to use our share, answer friend questions features, we will ask for your friends information. We will send your friend invites to the App.
In addition to information you voluntarily submit, we collect Inferred Data through our automated Brand Agents. This includes analysis of interaction patterns, response latency (pauses or hesitations), and conversational context to better understand your intent and readiness to move forward with our Services.
As you use the App or Services, certain Anonymous Information may be passively collected and stored, such as your Internet protocol address, domain names, browser type, and access times. We may also use Cookies (as defined below) or web bugs and navigational data like Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) to gather information regarding the date and time of your visit and the solutions and information for which You searched and viewed, or on which advertisements displayed on the App You have viewed and/or clicked. “Cookies” are small pieces of information that a App sends to your browser while you are viewing a App. We may use both session Cookies (which expire once you close your web browser) and persistent Cookies (which stay on your browser until you delete them) to improve your experience on the App (e.g., by keeping you logged in). Many consider the use of cookies to be industry standard. Persistent Cookies can be removed by following your Internet browser help file directions. If you choose to disable Cookies, you may experience session errors and may need to log-in again for each page you visit on the App.
Disclosure – Usage of Third Party TrackingWe may use a third party tracking service to track and analyze Anonymous Information from Users of our App. Such third parties may use Cookies, Android ID, UDID, email address and/or IDFA to help track User behavior.
Additionally, we may also enable advertisers and ad servers to promote third-party products and/or services by placing advertisements on the App. These advertisers and ad servers may use unique identifiers in order to monitor information related to served advertisements. Clicking on such advertisements will direct You to the App of a third-party and the advertiser. This Privacy Statement does not cover the privacy practices of any advertisers or ad servers.
Our Relationship with Social Networking SitesWe have created and may offer You interfaces that allow You to connect with social networking sites such as Facebook (“SN Site”) through our App. We will work with the SN Site’s application protocol interface (better known as their developer API) in a way that allows You to authorize us to access Your account on that SN Sites on Your behalf. In order to provide this authorization, You will not provide us with Your user name or password to the SN Site, but You will need to log-in to that SN Site directly through our App. Once authorized by You, the SN Site will provide us a token that allows the SN Site to recognize us when we ask, on Your behalf, for access to Your account information or to post information. You will be able to revoke our access to any SN Site at any time by amending the appropriate settings from within Your account settings on the Applicable SN Site, though such revocation may limit the Services we are able to provide You.
Friended values user privacy and transparency in handling sensitive data, including face data. Below is an outline of how face data is collected, used, stored, and retained in our application.
When a user uploads a profile photo, Friended performs a one-time validation of the image to verify that the user is a real person. This process analyzes facial characteristics to ensure the authenticity of the profile photo.
Face data collected through the initial validation process is used solely for the following purposes:
The one-time validation process is conducted using a third-party service provider that specializes in image verification. The data is transmitted securely for this validation and is not shared with any other third parties for marketing, advertising, or any other purposes.
The original profile photo is stored securely within Friended’s infrastructure to be displayed within the app. Face data used for validation is processed by our verification provider and is not stored beyond the completion of the validation process.
What Belle does. Belle is Friended's AI assistant. Belle chats with you in the app and, if you opt in, by SMS. Belle uses what you tell her (and your activity in Friended) to personalize her responses, surface relevant content and offers, and help you make progress in connecting with others. Belle is not a human and will tell you so at the start of each conversation and at least every three hours during continuing conversations, as required by New York General Business Law § 1702 and California Business & Professions Code § 22602.
Service provider. Belle is powered by Namakina, our service provider. Namakina processes conversation content, identifiers, and inferred profiles on our behalf under a written agreement that prohibits Namakina from using the information for its own purposes or selling it.
Automated decisions. Belle makes recommendations and decisions about what content or offers to surface to you. Most of these are recommendations, not decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on you. If we ever use Belle to make a decision that has legal or similarly significant effects (such as suspending your account, denying you a feature, or routing you out of the service), we will tell you and offer human review.
Quebec residents. If you are in Quebec, you have the right to be informed when a decision based exclusively on automated processing has been made about you, to obtain the personal information used and the principal factors leading to the decision, to request correction, and to submit observations to a person able to review the decision. Contact our Privacy Officer at support@friended.com.
Safety. Belle is designed to detect signals of self-harm or crisis and refer you to crisis resources, including 988. Belle is not a crisis service. If you are in immediate danger, call 911.
Consent records. When you give, decline, or withdraw consent for SMS marketing, we keep a record of the request shown to you, your response, the time, and the message identifiers. We retain these records as required by federal law, even after you withdraw consent or close your account.
Belle may recommend third-party services and offers. Some of these recommendations are paid — when a partner pays us a commission if you take an action on their site after we recommend them, we identify the offer as "Sponsored" or a “Partner Offer”. We do not share your personal information with these partners when you tap an affiliate link; they only know that you came from Friended. We design our affiliate program so that the act of recommending a partner does not constitute a sale or share of your personal information under state privacy laws.
We share information with companies that help us operate Friended. The most significant is Namakina, which powers Belle. Namakina processes information about you on our behalf under a written agreement that restricts how Namakina can use it: Namakina may not sell or share your information, may not combine your information with information from other Namakina clients, and must delete or return your information when our relationship ends. We require Namakina to apply the same restrictions to any subcontractors it uses, including the AI model providers behind Belle.
We will use your Personal Information to:
We may also use your Personal Information to create Anonymous Information records by excluding information that makes the information personally identifiable to you.
We may send you communications via email about the App and Services. You can opt out of receiving certain communications from the App by clicking the “Unsubscribe” link at the bottom of each email or by emailing us at support@friended.com. Please note that even if you unsubscribe or opt-out, we may still send you App and Service related communications (e.g., emails related to your Account).
We use Profile Information in all of the ways we use Personal Information.
We may, through our use of Cookies and web bugs, keep you logged into our App, track your session history, collect your click-stream data, and personalize your experience on the App. We may use your Anonymous Information to analyze usage patterns so that we may enhance the App or Services, improve our internal operations and the content of our software, notify visitors about updates to our App or Services, and improve the efficacy of our content and advertisements that appear on the App. We may also use your Anonymous Information (including Cookies) to market our products and services to you, whether on our App or on third party Apps.
Under California's CCPA and similar state laws:
We may disclose certain Personal Information:
We provide Members who play the App with the opportunity to communicate with responding Members via chat. All such communication is directly through the Services, and we have access to this information as a result. Through this communication, another Member may request additional information from you. Such sharing of information is entirely your choice, and you share this information at your own discretion.
Profile InformationWe may share your Profile Information publicly on the App. Please remember that this is a social App. You are welcome to share as much Profile Information as you think is necessary and appropriate. But please be aware than any Profile Information will be made available on your Profile, which may be available to other Members and/or Visitors (depending on your privacy settings).
Anonymous InformationWe may disclose Anonymous Information without restriction.
All Friended users have rights to access, correct, delete, and port personal information we hold about you, and to opt out of marketing communications. You can exercise these by emailing support@friended.com or in-app at Settings → Privacy. If you live in a U.S. state with a comprehensive privacy law (currently California, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Florida, Oregon, Montana, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Delaware, Nebraska, Minnesota, Maryland, Kentucky, Rhode Island, and others as they take effect), you also have:
Maryland residents: Maryland's Online Data Privacy Act prohibits us from selling your sensitive personal information or showing targeted advertising to anyone under 18. We do not do either. Verifying your request. To protect your information, we may need to verify your identity before fulfilling a request. We will respond to your request within 45 days; we may extend this by an additional 45 days where reasonably necessary, and will tell you if we do.
Canadian Residents. If you are in Canada, the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and applicable provincial privacy laws govern our handling of your personal information. You have the right to access, correct, and withdraw consent for the personal information we hold about you.The Friended app gives you the following controls available at all times:
We respond to opt-out requests within 15 business days and to other privacy-rights requests within 45 days. We may need to verify that you are the account holder before fulfilling a request.
This Privacy Policy addresses only our use and disclosure of information we collect from and/or about you. If you disclose information to others, including to other Members, the use and disclosure restrictions contained in this Privacy Policy will not apply to any third party. We do not control the privacy policies of third parties, and you are subject to the privacy policies of those third parties where Applicable.
The App or Services may contain links to other apps that are not owned or controlled by us. We have no control over, do not review and are not responsible for the privacy policies of or content displayed on such other apps. When you click on such a link, you will leave our App or Services and go to another app. During this process, another entity may collect Personal Information or Anonymous Information from you.
This Privacy Policy is subject to revision from time to time on a going-forward basis. We will post any revised version of the Privacy Policy on this page. Continued use of our Services following such changes will indicate your acknowledgement of such changes and agreement to be bound by the terms and conditions of such changes.
If you have questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy, please contact us by sending an email to: support@friended.com or by calling: +1 (207) 977-0795
Request Personal Information Collected
To request what personal information of your is collected, please email support@friended.com
Request Personal Information be Deleted
To request that your personal information be deleted, please email support@friended.com. When you request the deletion of your Personal Information, we will also purge any Inferred Intent Profiles and conversational memory stored by our automated Brand Agents.