Privacy Policy

Effective 21 September 2026

Bowo ("we", "us", or "our") exists so the people who care about you can give you things you actually want. That only works if you tell us real things about yourself, so we owe you a plain account of what we hold, who ever sees it, and how to take it back.

This policy is written to be read. Where something might sound worse than it is, or better than it is, we say which.

1. The short version

• We never sell your data, and we do not run ads.
• We do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not use advertising identifiers.
• Photos you take with "Snap your spaces" are sent to an AI provider to identify objects, with faces blurred on your phone first, and are never stored on our servers.
• Photos you take or upload on the Bowo website are used the same way, to identify objects only, and are never stored. Faces are blurred in your browser first. See section 3.
• We text you a code only when you ask us to verify your own number, and a phone number picked from someone's contacts gets one invitation text for each event it is picked for, with later texts about an event only for people who respond to it. See section 5.
• Everything in your profile is optional, and you can delete your account and its data from Settings at any time.

2. What we collect

Your account: your name and email address from Sign in with Apple (if you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever see the relay address), and the username you choose.

Your profile: your birthday, interests, things you already own, your top gift ideas, clothing and gift sizes, your car, and any gifting occasions you add. All of it is optional. The more you fill in, the better your friends' suggestions get, and that is the only reason we ask.

Holidays you celebrate: optional, and we treat it as sensitive because it can reveal something about your religion or beliefs. We never guess it. If you don't tell us, no holiday appears on your card, and "none of these" is a real answer we record and stop asking about.

Photos: your profile picture, which we store. And frames from "Snap your spaces", which work differently. See section 3.

People you add: names and birthdays you type in for people who aren't on Bowo.

Your contacts: only when you open Find friends, or when you invite someone to an event from your phone's contacts. Both read your address book on your phone, and neither uploads it. Find friends turns each phone number into a one-way code on your phone and sends those codes to us so we can answer which of those people use Bowo and allow themselves to be found. We do not keep those codes, and no name leaves your phone. Inviting to an event sends only the codes of the people you pick, and we keep each one against that one event so that if they join Bowo and verify that number, we can tell them in the app that you invited them. They see the event only if they accept. That code is deleted when the event passes, when you remove them from the list, or when you delete the event. We never use the codes for anything else. If you have used Find friends, the event picker marks which of your contacts are on Bowo, from that same check and nothing more. A code cannot be turned back into a number, so when we text someone you picked the invitation described in section 5, the number itself is sent to us too; we keep it only while that event's page is live, use it only for that event's texts, and delete it with the code. Find friends also puts an Invite next to each contact: that opens a message on your own phone, addressed and sent by you, which is your phone texting them rather than us.

Gifts you mark as purchased: so your friends don't buy the same thing. We record what you tell us. We do not see your payment details and we get nothing back from Amazon.

Technical: a notification token so alerts reach your device, your time zone so we send them at a reasonable hour, and crash reports. Crash reports are configured to exclude personal information and your IP address.

3. Photos and AI, read this one

When you use "Snap your spaces", the app photographs a part of your home and sends that image to a third-party AI provider, which returns a list of objects it recognises. This is the one place your data leaves us in a form a person could look at, so here is exactly what happens.

• Before the photo leaves your phone, the app finds faces in it and blurs them beyond recognition. This runs entirely on your device: faces are blurred, then the images are flattened and stripped of metadata before upload. On iPhone it uses Apple's built-in face detection, with no network involved. On Android it uses Google's ML Kit, which also runs on your phone and never receives the photo, but sends Google technical details such as your phone model and how long detection took. Like any detector, it can very occasionally miss a face or fail to run. The AI is also instructed to ignore people.
• The photo is sent to our server and forwarded to the AI provider. We do not save the image. Nothing is written to our storage.
• On the Bowo website (app.gobowo.com) you can take photos with your browser's camera or upload existing ones. A website photo takes the same path: sent to our server, forwarded to the AI provider, never saved. Faces are blurred in your browser first, using Google's MediaPipe face detector, which runs entirely on your device: the photo never leaves your browser unblurred, and the website's security policy blocks the detector from contacting Google, so it sends nothing anywhere. It is weaker than the phone detectors at a distance and can miss a small face far from the camera, and like any detector it can occasionally fail to run, so keep people out of website photos when you can. The AI is instructed to ignore people either way.
• The photo is deleted from your phone after the session. If nothing is identified, it is deleted immediately.
• What we keep is text: the names of the items found, added to your possessions list, where you can see and delete any of them.
• We also send parts of your profile to the same provider to write your gift suggestions. That request carries an age bracket, never your exact birthday, and never your name, username, email, or location.
• We do not send anything to the AI provider for accounts belonging to people under 18.

Our AI provider is Google (the Gemini API, on its paid tier). Google's terms for this service state that your photos and our requests are not used to train or improve their models, and that content is retained for up to 55 days, solely for abuse detection and legal compliance, with Google acting as a data processor. We intend to move to a zero-retention arrangement with Google, and this section will be updated when it takes effect. We will tell you in the app before we ever change providers.

The first time you use the camera, we ask for your explicit OK before anything is sent. You can skip the camera entirely and type your possessions by hand, and the rest of the app works normally.

4. What your friends can see

Someone you have accepted as a friend can see your profile: your name, photo, birthday, interests, possessions, sizes, gift ideas and the occasions you have added. That is the point of the app, but it is worth stating plainly. A friend sees what you put in.

Two things they cannot see. Gifts bought for you are hidden from you, so surprises stay surprises. And people you have not accepted as friends cannot see your profile. One more thing, if you added a phone number: someone who has it in their contacts can invite you to an event by it, or find you when they check their contacts against Bowo. Either way they see only your card, your name, username and photo, until you accept them. "Let people who have my number find me" in Settings turns this off.

If you share an event's invite link, anyone who has that link, including anyone it is forwarded to, can join the event and becomes your friend on Bowo, with the same profile access as any other friend. You can reset or turn the link off on the event page at any time, and Remove friend on their page takes that access away.

5. Text messages

Bowo sends text messages in exactly two situations, and there is no third one:

• A one-time verification code, when you type your own phone number into the app and ask us to confirm the phone is yours. One message each time you ask, about your account, never marketing.
• An invitation, to a person someone picked from their contacts to invite to a life event they are celebrating. It names the person inviting them and says how to see the invitation.

A number gets one invitation text for each event it is picked for. Never a second text for the same event, and no stream: texts about an event beyond its invitation, such as updates if plans change, go only to people who responded to that event's invitation.

We keep a record of every invitation text: a one-way code for the number, the event it was for, who sent it, and when. That record is checked before any message leaves, which is what makes the one-per-event limit hold.

That record is the one thing here we do not delete on request. It holds the one-way code, the event, who sent the invitation, and when, and nothing else. Clearing it would reset a limit that is meant to be permanent, and an event that had already sent its invitation could text the number again. Opt-out records are kept for the same reason: STOP has to keep working after everything else is gone.

Reply STOP to any message to stop every text from Bowo. It covers both kinds of message and everyone using Bowo, not only the person who invited you, and we never turn them back on ourselves. If you want messages again, reply START. Reply HELP for help. Message and data rates may apply from your carrier. A verified phone number is required to hold a Bowo account, and it is the way you sign in.

Sending an invitation needs the number itself, so when you invite someone from your contacts, their number is sent to us with the code. We keep it only while that event's page is live, use it only to send that event's texts, and delete it with the event, or sooner if you remove them from the guest list. We add nobody to a mailing list, and we send no marketing, reminders or follow-ups by text.

We use your own number for three things: to check that the phone is yours, to let friends who already have your number invite you to an event, and to let you find people in your contacts who are already on Bowo. "Let people who have my number find me" in Settings turns off the last two. Your mobile carrier and our messaging provider (Twilio) receive the number and the message, because that is how a text is delivered.

We do not sell your mobile information, and we do not share it with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes.

6. Who else we share with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with:

• Our hosting provider (Supabase), which stores your account and profile.
• Our AI provider, as described in section 3.
• Apple, for sign-in and for delivering notifications.
• Google, for face detection in the Android app, which receives technical details only (section 3).
• Our messaging provider (Twilio), which delivers the two messages in section 5 and receives only the number a message is being sent to.
• Our crash reporting provider (Sentry), which receives error reports with personal information switched off.
• Law enforcement, only where the law requires it.

Amazon is not on this list. We link to Amazon with an affiliate tag, which tells them the visit came from Bowo. It does not tell them who you are, and we send them nothing about you.

7. Affiliate disclosure

Bowo links to products on Amazon, and we may earn a commission from qualifying purchases. This never changes what we recommend. Suggestions come from your friend's profile, not from what pays us more.

8. Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to your profile is enforced by the database itself, per row, so a friend request you accept, or an invite link you share, is what grants visibility rather than a check we could forget to write. No system is perfectly secure, and we will tell you promptly if that ever matters to you.

9. Your control

• See it: Settings, then Your data, lists everything we hold about you, including the notes Bowo itself keeps (the gift summary it writes from your profile, your gift reviews, and how often you open each friend's page), the people you have invited to events by number, the invite links you created and the events you joined by link.
• Change it: every field is editable, and every one can be left empty.
• Delete it: any single category from Your data, or Settings, then Delete Account, which removes your profile, possessions, friendships, events, purchases, notifications and any contact numbers and codes you added to event invites. The one exception is the record of invitation texts described in section 5, which we keep so that limits meant to be permanent cannot be reset by deleting something.

If you are in a place with a legal right to access, correct, port, or erase your data, you have those rights here regardless of where you live. Email us and we will do it.

10. Children

Bowo is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. Accounts belonging to people under 18 are never sent to our AI provider.

11. Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle your data in a way that matters, such as a new provider, a new category of information, or a new use, we will say so in the app rather than quietly changing this page.

12. Contact us

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, including anything in section 9, go to hello@bowogift.com.