Privacy Policy

Last updated: 08.05.2022

Welcome to our privacy policy! It is detailed… but we’d recommend you read it in full so you know exactly what we do with data here at Podiya. If you’re pressed for time, here are the key points:

  • We don’t monitor, record or store the contents of your audio calls, video calls or other conversations. We do store event description, information like timestamps and your Events, but these will not be shared with any third parties unless required by law
  • You can edit or permanently delete your personal data at any time. Your personal data is accessed through the “Profile” tab.
  • We keep your data on secured and restricted database servers. We do everything we can to keep your data secure and encrypted between your device and our servers. Podiya is a global community and we may store data on servers outside your home country. Please note that encryption is not supported in China.
  • We reserve the right to restrict access to Podiya in the event of misconduct. Providing a safe and friendly community for people is our top priority. We therefore take reports of abuse very seriously. Reports of misconduct on Podiya are reviewed by human moderators and can lead to a ban from our app. Please note that you can choose to share messages with our moderators only as part of the reporting process.

PRIVACY POLICY

This statement details how we handle personal data here at Podiya, if you use our mobile app or website. We are respectful of the data that is shared with us by our members and take protecting it very seriously.

Podiya is made in Ukraine and we are firmly committed to meeting and often exceeding Ukrainian data protection standards for all our members wherever possible.

Please take the time to read these details to fully understand how we handle your data and keep it safe.

Contact

Podiya

You can reach out to us directly via support@podiya.net.

 

For all requests concerning the security of your data, please contact our privacy team and our data protection officer at privacy@podiya.net.

Personal Data

Personal data is all information about an identified or identifiable person. This includes the following categories of personal data that we process:

  • Your contact details (such as first and last name, address, email address), Your last name will never be shared with other Podiya members by us,
  • Information within your profile (such as your age, gender, city),
  • Your correspondence with us,
  • Log files with information about your visit to our website and apps,
  • Online identifiers (such as cookie IDs, IP addresses, advertising IDs),
Purposes of Use

Personal data will only be collected by us to the extent and for the purpose for which you provide the data to us, e.g. for registering an account.

We use and store your personal data as part of our services for the following purposes:

  • To create a public user profile for you on Podiya;
  • To provide a curated community just for people, where access is restricted to Podiya members only. We take best efforts to prevent abuse and ban offenders, as soon as we are made aware;
  • To send information relevant to the service, e.g. via email or push notification (e.g. updates on your membership status);
  • To find events nearby;
  • To understand how Podiya is used and optimize the service;
  • For corresponding with you;
  • On quality assurance and statistics;
  • For your participation in our competitions;
  • For your participation in our events;
  • For your participation in our surveys;
  • To consider your application for membership and for community moderation;
  • In order to improve our service.
Legal Basis

Your data is processed according to the following legal provisions:

  • With regard to data communicated in forms, etc. with your consent, Art. 6(1) (a) GDPR;
  • With regard to services you use for the performance of a contract, Art. 6(1) (b) GDPR;
  • The fulfillment of legal obligations, Art. 6(1) (c) GDPR),

Otherwise, with particular regard to statistical data and online identifiers based on legitimate interests, Art 6(1)(f) GDPR (see below).

Legitimate Interests

When processing your data, we pursue the following legitimate interests:

  • Providing and improving our service;
  • Protecting against misuse;
  • Statistics and service analytics.
Data Sources

Unless otherwise specified, we obtain the data from you (including via devices used by you).

Data Transfer to Third Countries

Podiya is a worldwide service. Data is transferred to third countries outside your home country and outside the Ukraine. This is done on the basis of contractual regulations stipulated by law that ensure appropriate protection of your data and that are available for you to view on request.

Retention Period

We retain your data:

  • If you have consented to this as part of processing, until such time as you withdraw your consent (e.g. by deleting your account);
  • If we need the data to fulfill an agreement, until such time as the contractual relationship with you ceases or legal retention periods expire;
  • If we use the data on the basis of a legitimate interest, until such time as your overriding interest obliges us to delete or anonymize them;
  • If you delete your account, we will delete all the information about you, including the events you created in the application. We will also not store your email address linked to your account.
Data Protection

We have taken extensive technical and organizational measures to secure your data against potential risks, such as unauthorized login or access, unauthorized perusal, amendment or distribution, and against loss, deletion or misuse.

In order to protect your personal data against unauthorized access by third parties when being transmitted, we secure data transmissions, if necessary, using SSL and TLS encryption. This is a standard encryption procedure for online and mobile services, particularly for the Internet. Encryption is not supported in China.

However, we cannot prevent the other members from sharing the information about you or your events without your or our permission through third party websites or services. We recommend that you exercise caution in disclosing any information, personal or otherwise, when adding an event in our application.

Our Policy on Children’s Information

Children under 14 are not allowed to use Podiya. If you are based in the European Economic Area (EEA), you may only use Podiya if you are over the age at which you can provide consent to data processing under the laws of your country or if verifiable parental consent for your use of Podiya has been provided to us. If you are a parent and you learn that your child is using Podiya and you don’t want them to, please contact (support@podiya.net).

Cookies

Cookies and similar technologies are very small text documents or pieces of code that often contain a unique identification code. When you visit a website or use a mobile application, a computer asks your computer or mobile device for permission to save this file on your computer or mobile device and gain access to information. Information collected through cookies and similar technologies may include the date and time of the visit and how you use a particular website or mobile application.

We need cookies to: (a) remember information so that you will not have to re-enter it during your visit or the next time you visit the site; (b) provide custom, personalized content and information; (c) to provide and monitor the effectiveness of our Service; (d) to monitor and aggregate metrics such as total number of visitors, traffic, and demographic patterns; (e) to diagnose or fix technology problems; (f) to help you efficiently access your information after you sign in; (g) to keep you logged in; and (h) to keep the Podiya community safe for members.

Switching off or revoking cookie consent:

You can choose to opt-out of all but the necessary cookies. In the settings of the browser, you can change the settings to ensure that cookies will be blocked. Most browsers provide you with an explanation on how to do this in the so-called ‘help-function’. However, if you block the cookies, it is possible that you will not be able to enjoy all the technical features our website has to offer, and it may negatively affect your user experience. You can change your cookie consent on the Podiya website by clicking the “Change your cookie consent” button at the bottom of this page.

Data Recipients

We use your personal information only within the company and forward it only to those companies that are involved in performing the contracts concluded with you or otherwise involved in providing the relevant service. We forward the following customer data to third parties:

  • To analyze how Podiya is used by our members and optimize the service and design, pseudonymous usage and personal data is shared with Google Analytics, Firebase Analytics, New Relic, Rubyspark Labs and Rubylight Limited.
  • To communicate information relevant to the service via email or push notification, names, device IDs, email addresses and other personal information may be shared with Amazon Pinpoint (https://aws.amazon.com/pinpoint/), Interable and Sparkpost (https://sparkpost.com). You can control what type of messages you receive in the profile settings, switch off push notifications for Podiya completely in your device settings and unsubscribe from email notifications in each individual email.
  • With your explicit consent, in order to make ads more personal, we may share personal but anonymized information, such as age and gender as well as device identifiers with Admob by Google, MoPub and Facebook Audience Network. iOS and Android devices have a resettable advertising identifier that companies can use to target ads based on the apps you use.
  • Both iOS and Android devices allow you to opt out of the use of mobile advertising identifiers for purposes of showing you targeted ads. For iOS, go to your iOS device settings and turn on the “limit ad tracking” setting. For Android, turn on “opt out of ads personalization” in your Android device settings.

We create Podiya member profiles based on your login data and also use these profiles and the information they contain, provided by you, for the following purposes:

  • We create a public member profile for you on Podiya so that members can find the people who create the most relevant events. While some elements of your profile, including your first name, age, profile picture, language settings, profile answers, current city, time zone and Topics are public, community members can not contact you via the Podiya app. We never show your email address, exact location and last name to other members.
  • We store applications for membership in the community, including your personal data for a minimum of seven days. After that period, you can permanently delete all personal data from Podiya using the “Delete Profile” (menu “Profile”) button in the app.
  • In order to keep Podiya a safe place for language learners, we take violations of our community rules very seriously. Therefore, we may retain anonymous personal identifiers for up to 24 months and might prevent access to the community on this basis during this period.

Otherwise, your personal information will not be forwarded to third parties unless you have given your express consent for this or unless we are obliged to disclose it – for example, at the direction of a court or administrative authority.

To provide the functionality and for usage analytics and marketing purposes, we record information about activities on our apps and websites (e.g. clicks, screens viewed, pages visited).

Registration and Authentication

By registering or authenticating, users allow Podiya to identify them securely and give them access to its services. Depending on what is described below, third parties may provide registration and authentication services. In this case, Podiya will be able to access some data stored by these third-party services for registration or identification purposes, with the user’s explicit consent:

  • Facebook Authentication (Meta, Inc.): Facebook Authentication is a registration and authentication service provided by Facebook, Inc. and is connected to the Facebook social network. The personal data collected is various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Firebase Authentication (Google Inc.): Firebase Authentication is a registration and authentication service provided by Google Inc. To simplify the registration and authentication process, Firebase Authentication can make use of third-party identity providers and save the information on its platform. Personal Data collected: phone number. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Google OAuth (Google Inc.): Google OAuth is a registration and authentication service provided by Google Inc. and is connected to the Google network. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Sign in with Apple (Apple Inc.): Sign in with Apple is a registration and authentication service provided by Apple Inc. In cases where Users are required to provide their email address, Sign in with Apple may generate a private relay address on behalf of Users that automatically forwards messages to their verified personal email account – therefore shielding their actual email address from the Owner. Personal Data processed: email address; first name; last name; User ID. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Hosting and Backend Infrastructure

This type of service has the purpose of hosting data and files that enable Podiya to run and be distributed, as well as providing a ready-made infrastructure to run specific features or parts of Podiya. Some of these services work through geographically distributed servers, making it difficult to determine the actual location where personal data is stored.

  • Amazon Web Services (AWS) (Amazon Web Services, Inc.): Amazon Web Services is a hosting and backend service provided by Amazon.com Inc. A wide range of Personal Data, including sign-in data and images is stored on AWS infrastructure as Podiya’s main hosting and infrastructure provider. Place of processing: Germany and the United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Google Cloud Platform (Google Inc.): Google Cloud Platform is a hosting and backend service provided by Google Inc. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Handling Payments

Podiya doesn’t provide any payment processing services. To ensure greater security.

Infrastructure Monitoring

This type of service allows Podiya to monitor the use and behavior of its service components, so its features, performance, operation, maintenance and troubleshooting can be improved. Which Personal Data are processed depends on the characteristics and mode of implementation of these services, whose function is to filter the activities of Podiya.

  • Crashlytics (Google Inc.): Crashlytics is a monitoring service provided by Google Inc. to enable Podiya to improve the stability of the app and reduce app crashes. Personal Data collected: geographic position, unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example) and various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Firebase Crash Reporting (Google Inc.): Firebase Crash Reporting is a monitoring service provided by Google, Inc. to improve the stability of the app and reduce app crashes. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Firebase Performance Monitoring (Google Inc.): Firebase Performance Monitoring is a monitoring service provided by Google, Inc. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Managing Contacts and Sending Messages

This type of service makes it possible to communicate with users outside of the app, e.g. via push notifications and email. They may manage a database of email contacts, phone contacts or any other contact information to communicate with the user. These services may also collect data concerning the date and time when the message was viewed by the user, as well as when the user interacted with it, such as by clicking on links included in the message.

  • Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google Inc.): Firebase Cloud Messaging is a message sending service provided by Google, Inc. Firebase Cloud Messaging allows the Owner to send messages and notifications to Users across platforms such as Android, iOS, and the web. Messages can be sent to single devices, groups of devices, or specific topics or User segments. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • SparkPost (Message Systems, Inc.): SparkPost is an email address management and message sending service provided by Message Systems, Inc. Personal Data collected: email address and various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Web and Mobile Analytics

The services contained in this section enable us to monitor and analyze web and mobile traffic and can be used to keep track of how Podiya is used by users.

  • Analytics collected directly (Podiya): Podiya uses an internal analytics system that does not involve third parties. Personal data collected: cookies and usage data.
  • Google Analytics (Google Inc.): Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google Inc. (“Google”). Google utilizes the data collected to track and examine the use of Podiya, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services. Google may use the data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. Personal Data collected: cookies and usage data. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy – Opt Out.
  • Google Analytics for Firebase (Google Inc.): Google Analytics for Firebase or Firebase Analytics is an analytics service provided by Google Inc. In order to understand Google’s use of data, Google’s partner policy. Firebase Analytics may share data with other tools provided by Firebase, such as Crash Reporting, Authentication, Remote Config or Notifications. The user may check this privacy policy to find a detailed explanation about the other tools used by the owner. Podiya uses identifiers for mobile devices (including Android Advertising ID or Advertising Identifier for iOS, respectively) and technologies similar to cookies to run the Firebase Analytics service. Users may opt out of certain Firebase features through applicable device settings, such as the device advertising settings for mobile phones or by following the instructions in other Firebase related sections of this privacy policy, if available. Personal Data collected: cookies, unique device identifiers for advertising (Google Advertiser ID or IDFA, for example) and usage data. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Facebook Ads conversion tracking (Facebook, Inc.): Facebook Ads conversion tracking is an analytics service provided by Facebook, Inc. that connects data from the Facebook advertising network with actions performed on Podiya. Personal Data collected: cookies and usage data. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Location-based Services

Podiya may collect, use, and share user location data in order to provide location-based services. Most browsers and devices provide tools to opt out from this feature by default. If explicit authorization has been provided, the user’s location data may be tracked in order for Podiya to show Podiya members nearby or on a city map, with city-by-city granularity. Podiya will never show your precise location to other members. Personal data collected: geographic position.

Managing Support and Contact Requests

Our customer support platform allows us to manage support and contact requests received via email or by other means, such as the contact form. The personal data processed depends on the information provided by the user in the messages and the means used for communication (e.g. email address).

  • Zendesk (Zendesk, Inc.): Zendesk is a support and contact request management service provided by Zendesk Inc. Personal Data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • HelloNext (HelloNext, Inc.): HelloNext is a service used to collect user feedback and feature requests provided by Hellonext, Inc. Data collected: logs, analytic, cookies and other tracking technologies. Place of Processing: Safe Harbor Privacy Principles agreed upon by the U.S, the European Union and Switzerland – Privacy Policy.
Advertising

Podiya is not using any advertisement in the application to earn money.

Content Performance and Features Testing (A/B testing)

The services contained in this section allow the Podiya to track and analyze the user response concerning web traffic or behavior regarding changes to the structure, text or any other component of Podiya.

  • Firebase Remote Config (Google Inc.): Firebase Remote Config is an A/B testing and configuration service provided by Google Inc. Personal data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
  • Google Optimize (Google Inc.): Google Optimize is an A/B testing, website testing, and personalization tool provided by Google Inc. Personal data collected: various types of data as specified in the privacy policy of the service. Place of processing: United States – Privacy Policy.
Your Rights

As a Podiya user, you have the right to access, rectification, right to object, to complaint, erasure and blockage with regard to your personal data. More specifically:

  • You have the right to request information about whether and which personal data is processed by us. You also have the right to demand that your personal data is rectified or amended.
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to request that your personal data should be deleted, e.g. by tapping “Delete Profile” in Profile/Settings.
  • Under certain circumstances, you have the right to demand that the processing of your personal data should be restricted.
  • You can withdraw your consent to the processing and use of your data completely or partially at any time with future application.
  • You have the right to obtain your personal data in a common, structured and mechanically readable format, e.g. via the “Download My Data” button in My Profile/Settings.
  • If you have any questions, comments, complaints or requests in connection with our statement on data protection and the processing of your personal data, you can also contact us.
  • You also have the right to complain to us if you believe that the processing of your personal data is in violation of the legislation.
 
Contact details

You reach us at privacy@podiya.net.

Requirement or obligation to provide data

Insofar as this is not expressly stated, when data is collected, the provision of data is neither required nor obligatory.

Date of issue of this data privacy statement

08.05.2022

We reserve the right to make amendments at any time to this data privacy statement for future effect.