Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

TuComidApp is a marketplace and social platform that connects independent food sellers with buyers in British Columbia, Canada. This policy explains what personal information we handle, why we handle it, and what you can do about it. It applies to the app, the website, and the emails we send you.

The organization responsible for your personal information is TuComidApp. Our Privacy Officer is accountable for our compliance with this policy and can be reached at privacy@tucomidapp.com, in English or in Spanish.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the information you provide directly: account details (name, email address, phone number, username, profile photo, date of birth, and bio), seller and business information (business name, description, location, and delivery radius), your listings, social content (posts, stories, comments, and reviews), messages exchanged with other users, order details, support tickets, and your discovery preferences (such as dietary preferences and allergies).

We also collect some information automatically when you use the app: device type and operating system, app version, language, IP address, and diagnostic data about errors and performance.

We do NOT collect payment or banking information. TuComidApp does not process payments; payment is arranged directly between buyer and seller, outside the platform.

3. Location Information

We handle three different kinds of location, and we keep them separate on purpose:

• Usage location — the approximate area you choose from the location control at the top of the app. It decides what you are shown: nearby listings, distance filters, and maps. It is not an address and it is not shared with other users.
• Delivery address — the address you give a seller so that an order can reach you. It is shared with that seller, for that order, and with nobody else.
• Seller pickup address or service area — attached to a listing by the seller, and shown to buyers so they can find them or know whether they are covered.

4. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to: provide, maintain, and improve our services; facilitate orders and communication between buyers and sellers; send notifications according to your preferences (push, email, or in-app); personalize your discovery results; respond to your requests and support tickets; keep the platform secure and detect, investigate, and prevent fraud and abuse; measure how the service is used so we can decide what to improve; and comply with our legal obligations.

Your discovery preferences (diets, allergies, cuisines, price range) are stored privately, are used only to improve your own results, and are never shared with other users, sold, or used for advertising.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects. Personalization only changes the order in which listings are shown to you.

5. Cookies, Analytics and Consent

We use cookies and similar storage in four categories: essential (required for the app to work), functional (convenience preferences such as your theme, language, or chat state), analytics (usage measurement), and advertising (described in the next section). Essential storage always runs. The other three run only with your consent, which you can give, refuse, or withdraw at any time from the cookie banner or from Profile > Settings > Privacy — withdrawing is as easy as giving it. What is stored in each category is listed in our Cookie Policy.

Our analytics run on Google Firebase Analytics. When you consent, each event carries a pseudonymous identifier that lets us tell one person's sessions apart without knowing who they are, a general account type (buyer or seller), and an approximate zone. That zone is your usage location reduced to an area of roughly one kilometre; it is only ever reported when at least five different people fall inside it, and the underlying markers are hashed with a secret key, so the aggregates cannot be traced back to you. These events are exported to Google BigQuery, where we query them in aggregate.

Separately from those categories, we use Sentry to collect error and performance diagnostics. This runs on every release of the app, not only when you accept analytics, because it is what lets us find and fix crashes and keep the service secure — withholding it would leave us unable to tell that the app is broken for you. Those reports can include the screen you were on, your device type, and the identifier of your session; we filter out personal details such as your email, phone number, address and the contents of your messages before anything is sent.

6. Advertising

The app shows advertisements served by Google AdMob. To do that, AdMob may use an advertising identifier held by your device — to limit how often you see the same ad and to measure whether an ad worked.

Advertising runs only if you have accepted the advertising category. If you refuse it or withdraw it later, no ads are requested and no advertising identifier is used. On iOS, the operating system asks you separately before any tracking identifier can be used, and a refusal there overrides everything else.

We never send AdMob your name, email address, messages, orders, or discovery preferences. Your diets, allergies, cuisines, and price range are never used to target advertising. You can reset or delete the advertising identifier at any time from your device settings.

7. Information Sharing and Service Providers

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising beyond what the previous section describes. We share it only in these situations:

• Between buyers and sellers, to make an order work: your profile details, the order information, the messages you exchange, and the relevant delivery or pickup location.
• With service providers that process data on our behalf, under contract and only for the purpose we give them: Google (Firebase for sign-in, database, file storage, messaging and analytics; BigQuery for analytics storage; AdMob for advertising), Sentry (error and performance diagnostics), and the provider that delivers our outgoing email.
• In response to a lawful request from a court, regulator, or law enforcement authority.
• To enforce our Terms of Service or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our users or the public.
• As part of a business transaction, if the service is ever sold, merged, or reorganized — in which case the acquirer is bound by this policy, and we will tell you before your information is transferred.

8. Where Your Information Is Processed

Our database, files, analytics, and error diagnostics are hosted by Google Cloud in the us-west2 region, in the United States. Our email and error-monitoring providers also process data in the United States.

While your information is in another country, it is subject to the laws of that country. Courts, law enforcement, and national security authorities there may be able to obtain access to it under their own laws, without notice to you or to us. We choose providers that contractually commit to protecting it to a standard comparable to what Canadian law requires, but no contract can exempt them from the legal process of the country they operate in.

If you have any question about this, or would rather not have your information processed outside Canada, contact our Privacy Officer at privacy@tucomidapp.com before creating an account.

9. How Long We Keep Your Information

We keep personal information only for as long as it serves the purpose it was collected for, or as long as the law requires us to. These are our current periods:

• Account and profile — while your account is open, and deleted within 30 days of you closing it.
• Listings, posts, stories, comments, and reviews — while your account is open; removed together with the account.
• Direct messages — while your account is open. A copy remains visible to the other participant in the conversation, as in any exchange of messages.
• Orders and order history — seven years from the date of the order. Canadian tax and accounting rules require records of transactions to be kept, and these are also the evidence in any dispute between a buyer and a seller.
• Support tickets and moderation records — three years, so that repeated problems can be recognized.
• Analytics events — ninety days in our own database. Aggregated counters and zone statistics are kept without a time limit, because they no longer identify anyone.
• Error and performance diagnostics — ninety days.

10. Data Security and Breach Notification

We take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information against loss, theft, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, and destruction. Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted, access to personal data is restricted to authorized personnel on a role basis, and administrative actions are logged.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach of our security safeguards creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will notify you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as soon as feasible, and the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia where required. We keep a record of every breach, whether or not it has to be reported.

11. Your Rights and How to Exercise Them

You have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to get a copy of it, to have it corrected if it is wrong, to withdraw a consent you gave, and to have your account and its information deleted. Most of this you can do yourself, without asking us:

• Access and correction — your profile settings show and edit the information on your account.
• Export — Profile > Settings > Account management sends you a copy of your data.
• Deletion — the same screen closes your account and deletes it, subject to the retention periods in section 9.
• Consent — Profile > Settings > Privacy turns each category of storage on or off at any time.

For anything else, write to privacy@tucomidapp.com. We will respond within 30 days. We may first ask you to confirm your identity, and we will ask only for what is needed to do that. If we cannot grant a request in full, we will tell you why and what you can do next.

Withdrawing a consent is always possible, subject to legal or contractual restrictions and reasonable notice. Some withdrawals limit what the app can do for you — for example, we cannot process an order without the details of that order.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia (https://www.oipc.bc.ca) or to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (https://www.priv.gc.ca).

12. Age Requirement

TuComidApp is for adults. You must be at least 19 — the age of majority in British Columbia — to create an account, and we ask for your date of birth to check it.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below that age. If we learn that we have, we delete the account and the information associated with it. If you believe someone under 19 has an account, write to privacy@tucomidapp.com and we will look into it.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We post the new version on this page and update the "Last updated" date. When a change is material, we ask you to review and accept the updated policy in the app before you continue using it, and we tell you what changed.