Privacy Policy
This page sets out what Village keeps and why, who processes it for us, and the rights you have.
Who is responsible for your data
Village is run independently. For any privacy question or request, including to exercise the rights set out below, write to support@villagegiving.com. It is the address we read, and the one we reply from.
What is kept, and why
No law obliges you to give Village anything — it is all up to you. But without some of it there is no service: without a home location we have nothing nearby to show you, and without a verified phone number you cannot connect with another user. Village is for adults, 18 and over. Children do not have accounts, and anything held about them comes only from the user who entered it.
- Account — you sign in with Google, Apple or an emailed code. Google and Apple also give us your name, email address and a profile photo if you have one; an emailed code gives us the email address alone. Used to identify the account.
- Phone number — verified with a one-time code. It is what ensures each person has only one account.
- Your home — your exact location and full address (street and number) are stored on our servers, and they are what distances and nearby searches are based on. The full address is shown only to you. We also keep your chosen search radius, and the offset that holds the pin others see away from where you actually live. That offset is set once for your account, so your real address cannot be worked out by comparing the items you post.
- Your children — a date of birth or due date, sex, and a name if you choose to add one. The date is what the app uses to work out the age it shows you. The wishlist you build is stored too, and you can filter the map by it.
- Items and photos — the items you posted and their photos. Every photo is re-encoded on our servers before publication, which strips out the file's metadata, including any GPS location.
- Activity between users — connection requests, approvals and declines, completed give-aways, items you saved as favourites, and an event log for each connection: when a request was sent, when it was approved, when the name and phone number were revealed. The log is kept as a record, for when a dispute or a report needs one.
- Safety — people you blocked and reports you filed, including what you wrote in them. A report is never shown to the person it is about.
- Notifications and devices — your notification history in the app and, if you allow notifications, the ID of the device they are sent to.
- Error reports — when the app or our servers hit a fault, a technical report is sent: what went wrong, the app version, the device model and operating system, and the account's internal ID. Some crashes also carry a random ID for the app installation. A report never includes a name, phone number, email address, street address or location. When you report a problem from inside the app, what you wrote is sent too, along with a screenshot if you chose to attach one. The screenshot shows whatever was on screen at the time.
Who else processes it
The data is never sold and never passed to advertisers. These are the providers processing it for us today, on our instructions and only to keep the service running:
- Supabase — the account, the database and photo storage.
- Google Cloud — the servers that run the service and process the photos.
- Google Maps — the maps.
- Geoapify — address search; an address lookup goes through Geoapify's servers.
- Prelude — delivering the phone verification code.
- Resend — delivering the email sign-in code.
- Expo — delivering notifications to the device, through Apple's and Google's notification services. Expo and those services all see the device ID and the notification text. That text is generic, with no names, addresses or item details.
- Sentry — error reports, and the problem reports you send from the app.
The database and photos are stored in Frankfurt, Germany, and error reports are stored in Germany too — under European law (GDPR). Apart from these providers, we disclose data only where the law requires us to.
What other users see
On the map and in the list you appear without a name or anything else that identifies you — only the item, a pin offset by a few hundred metres, the neighbourhood and the city, and a distance rounded to a whole kilometre. Never a street and number. Your name and phone number are revealed only inside a connection that both sides have approved.
How long it is kept
For as long as the account is open. Nothing is deleted automatically after a set time — items, connections and notifications stay until you delete them or delete the account. The exceptions are error reports and problem reports, which Sentry deletes automatically at the end of a fixed retention period. You delete your account from inside the app, and it takes effect immediately. The Delete your account page sets out what is erased and what remains, including the connection event log, which is kept even after the account is deleted.
Your rights
Israel's Privacy Protection Law gives you the right to see the data held about you, to correct it and to delete it. You can view and edit most of it directly in the app — your profile, your children's details, your items and your home — and you can delete your account there too. For anything else, write to support@villagegiving.com from the account's email address.
This website
villagegiving.com itself collects nothing: no cookies, no analytics, no requests to a third-party server. Everything you have read here is about the app.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the updated text will be published on this page, and the date at the top will change with it.