Privacy Policy
Hello :)
In case you’re not familiar, Yessly is an app that makes it fun and easy to know what your friends and family
are up to and keep memories of your real life interactions. With Yessly, you can keep up with the people you
care about the most, both near and far, create a personal diary of where you’ve been, or publicly showcase the
places you’ve visited.
We understand that privacy is important to you. We have prepared this Privacy Policy to make sure you are
aware of our practices. This policy applies to your use of the Yessly app and any other services that we may
offer.
Important Information
Before you read on, we would like to highlight important information.
- When you use our services you share information with Yessly.
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To create your account we only require a name, birthday and phone number. The name is used to identify you
on Yessly, your birthday ensures you’re old enough to use the app, and your phone number is used to
authenticate your account. If you get a different phone number, let us know so we can port your account.
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Your Yessly account profile information is public to make it easy to find friends and connect with others.
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Yessly is a location based application. In order to provide the services to you we need to access, store
your location data and showcase check-ins at places.
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You can always email us at [email protected] if you have questions about our Privacy Policy, if you want
access to your data, if you want us to correct your data, or if you want us to delete it.
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We have a data deletion and retention policy in place that details how long we store your information. As a
general rule, we store the information we collect as long as you are actively using the Yessly app. If you
haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete your account.
Information we collect
There are three categories of information we collect which you could find the details in the following
sections
- Information you provide.
- Information we may get when you use Yessly.
- Information we collect from third parties.
Information you provide
When you interact with our services, we collect information that you choose to share with us.
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Registration. When you register through the app you provide us with a name (which could be your first
and/or last name, or a pseudonym… it’s totally up to you), birthday and phone number. During registration we
will send you a verification code via text message which will enable us to verify your account.
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Profile picture. If you want, you can also add a profile picture to make it easier and more fun to
interact with your friends. Of course, you're free to change your photo and display name anytime you’d like:
just go to Settings in the app.
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Address book. We also allow you to share your address book to easily find friends that are already
active on Yessy. Sharing your address book also makes it easy to invite friends to Yessly and share the
love! Note that we only upload the phone numbers of your contacts (not their names!).
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Location. Yessly is a location based service. In order for the app to fully function we require your
precise location and need to store your location history. You provide us with your location through the
permission settings on your phone.
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Places. When you or your friends use features that offer check-ins to places, we will keep a list of
those places that you’ve checked in at or were checked-in at, until you decide to remove them.
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Communications. You also provide us with any other information you send through our services, such as
messages, images, videos, emojis and other media to your friends. We also keep track of metadata of
communications, such as the time and date when you sent messages.
- Support. Information you provide to our Care team ([email protected]).
Information we may get when you use Yessly
When you use our services, we collect information about how you use those services so we can provide you with
a better experience. Here are some examples:
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Usage information. We collect information with regard to your activity on Yessly. For example, how
you communicate with your friends: names, usernames, times and dates of communications, your fave friends,
search results when you look for friends and places, and so on. This helps us understand what you like, and
what we should improve!
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Device information. We collect a variety of device-specific information, such as the battery level,
the BSSIDs of wifi terminals, as well as the SSIDs (basically, the address of any WiFi routers you’re
connected to) but only in a temporary manner and for statistical purposes, phone name, phone hardware model,
operating system version, your phone’s advertising identifier, unique application identifiers, unique device
identifiers, phone language, wireless network names, IP addresses, and general mobile network information
(including the mobile phone number). This helps us protect your security, fix bugs, and improve the
precision of your positions.
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Location information. We collect location information so we can build useful, and fun, services and
features for you. For example we can determine your most frequent locations based on your use of the app and
its location data. We also store your location data to show you the areas you’ve uncovered, we call this
Footprints, a diary of your location history. If you want, you can check-in at and show off the places
you’ve visited to your friends, or you can decide not to share your history at all and keep it to yourself.
Information we collect from third parties
We may obtain information from any other third-party sources—and combine that with the information we normally
collect through our services. For example, we may obtain information from third parties to help identify
points of interest.
How we use information
Our main goal is to offer the best possible location based service. Specifically, we may use your information
to
- develop, operate, improve, deliver, maintain, and protect our services.
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send you communications, including by email. For example, we may use email to respond to direct support
inquiries.
- create statistical studies and monitor and analyse trends. For example:
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Statistical studies. Creating statistical studies on an anonymized basis. We will never disclose your
identity. Not even your name. For example, we may look for groups of users with similar usage patterns or
habits to see if we can improve the user experience of Yessly.
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Registration statistics. Determining which groups (e.g. country, users of different phone types, operating
systems, etc.) are statistically relevant to the different studies that Yessly conducts on an aggregate
basis.
- Interactions. Studying exchanges habits and interactions between friends.
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personalize the Yessly service. For example, suggesting friends or profile information or giving you an
overview of where you’ve been.
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contextualize your experience by displaying your best friends in the app. For example, your best friends
appear bigger than others to make it easy to connect with them.
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socialize the Yessly map by displaying an overview of places that you, your friends and other people in the
Yessly community have checked-in at. For example, if you check-in at your local restaurant, you can tag your
friends, and also see others who visit the place.
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enhance the safety and security of our products and services, for example by detecting and preventing
excessive friend requests. Nobody likes spam!
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assess the success rate of our marketing campaigns, for example to see if you installed Yessly after seeing
an ad for Yessly on another platform.
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send you push notifications to get updates when friends accept your requests, when friends reacted to your
post.
- verify your identity to prevent fraud or other unauthorized or illegal activity.
- enforce our Terms of Service and other usage policies.
- store some information locally on your device, so that you can open the app and view content faster.
How we share information
We may share your information in the following ways:
- With other Yessly users. Specifically, we may share the following information:
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Information about you, such as your name, username, number of followers, profile picture, places you’ve
checked-in.
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Your location, but only if the user is your followers or you’ve allowed them to view it, or if you
explicitly opt-in you can also show parts of the world you’ve explored and places you’ve been to in the
past with the Yessly community.
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Information about how you have interacted with the service such as the day you joined, the day you
followed your friends or vice versa.
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Places you’ve checked-in. When you check-in at a place or get tagged at a place this information may be
visible to other users who’ve checked-in at a place.
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When you are sending a follow request, we will share your profile name, followers you have in common, so
the receiver can make a better decision on whether or not to accept the follow request.
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Any other information you have consented for us to share. For example, when you let us access your
device’s address book, we may share information about you with other users who have your name and phone
number in their device’s address book.
- With third parties. Specifically:
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With service providers and partners. We may share information about you with service providers who perform
services on our behalf and business partners that provide services and functionality, including partners
who show Yessly ads on their platforms.
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With third parties for legal reasons. We may share information about you if we reasonably believe that
disclosing the information is needed to:
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Comply with any valid legal process, governmental request, or applicable law, rule, or regulation.
- Investigate, remedy, or enforce potential Terms of Service violations.
- Protect the rights, property, and safety of us, our users, or others.
- Detect and resolve any fraud or security concerns.
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Other third parties. We may also share aggregated, non-personally identifiable or de-identified
information.
- With the world. If you decide to publicly share information.
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With third parties as part of a merger or acquisition. If Yessly gets involved in a merger, asset sale,
stock sale, share sale, financing, liquidation or bankruptcy, or acquisition of all or some portion of our
business to another company, we may share your information with that company before and after the
transaction closes. Things like this can happen in the wild world of tech!
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Also be aware that your followers may take screenshots of the app and/or share some information about their
interactions with you on Yessly.
Third-Party Content and Integrations
We store your information as long as necessary and as long as you’re a user of our service. We have different
retention protocols in place depending on the information. As a general rule, we store the information we
collect as long as you are actively using Yessly and in some cases, we only store information for a short
period of time. If you haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete your account and
the associated data. Don’t want us to delete your data? Don’t worry, we won’t remove data if you’re still
using the app. For example, if you mainly use the Yessly app to record your Footprints and check your account
at least once a year we won’t delete your account. Also note that we aggregate or anonymize information for
certain purposes such as data analytics. Once we've anonymized the data we retain it indefinitely.
Of course, we also respect your requests for account deletion. The following section, Control over your
information, provides more information on how to delete your account.
We take data deletion and retention very seriously. As a basic principle, we only keep the data we need to
provide you with our services.
Control over your information
It is very important to us that you have control over your information! Here are some ways we establish just
that:
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Location. You can change the location that is visible to your friends at any time in the app
settings. We allow you to share only limited location information with certain friends, or even hide your
location from them altogether.
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Places. If you check-in at a place, you can always remove that place. The same goes for places others
have tagged you in. Don’t like the check-in, just remove it. If someone is spamming you, remember maybe
they’re not your friend, and remove them from your follower list and report them from their profile.
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Access. We strive to let you access and update most of the personal information that we have about
you. Most of this can be done in the profile section of the app. If you need to access, update, or delete
any other personal information that we may have, you can contact [email protected]. Note however that, we may
ask you to verify your identity or provide additional information before we can provide access to your
information.
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Deletion. You can easily delete information in the application, for example any post you’ve posted or
friends you’ve accepted. If you want to delete all your location history, you can do this by deleting your
account. Because the entire application relies on location history, it is not possible to just reset your
location data.
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Account deletion. We don’t like seeing you leave us but if, for some reason, you want to delete your
account you can always contact us at [email protected] to request account deletion.
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Account un-deletion. If you’ve asked us to delete your account…and then you changed your mind and
totally want it back you will have up to 30 days to restore your account before we delete your information
from our servers. During this period, your account will not be visible to other users.
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Right to object. You have the right to object to our use of your information. For some types of data
(e.g your username), you can simply delete it from Yessly and it won’t be processed anymore. For other types
of data that are crucial to the functioning of Yessly, you can delete your account to stop us from
processing your information. This can be done by dropping a note to [email protected] and we can talk you
through the process.
Revisions to the Privacy Policy
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we’ll let you know one way or another.
Sometimes, we’ll let you know by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy (which is available on our
website and in our app). Other times—especially if there is a major change—we’ll provide you with additional
notice, such as adding a statement to our websites’ homepages or providing you with an in-app notification.
That’s all for now
If you have any questions feel free to let us know at [email protected].
13. Dispute resolution
If you have a concern, let’s talk. We totally encourage you contact us first at [email protected] and we’ll do
our best to resolve the issue.