Privacy Policy

Information we collect

Your phone number, name and date of birth are needed to create an account; without them we cannot make one. Everything else is up to you.

• Account details Phone number (used to verify you and to sign you in), username, full name, and — if you choose — an email address and a password. If you sign in with Google, Google gives us your name and email address.
• Profile Country, date of birth, short bio, a profile photo if you upload one, and — if you choose — your gender, your interests and places you would like to visit, which are shown on your profile. So is your age, worked out from your date of birth; the date itself is never shown to anyone.
• Location If you allow it, your device's location, rounded to about a kilometre before we store it. Used to match you, to work out the distance to a match, and to show you on your friends' maps.
• Travel plans Trips you add. A trip is private by default. If you choose to make one visible, other travelers whose trip overlaps yours can see your profile, the destination, and the month of your trip — never the exact dates. You can hide a trip again at any time and it disappears from those lists immediately.
• Contacts Only if you choose to sync them. The names, phone numbers, email addresses and organisations in your address book are sent to us and stored, so we can show which of your contacts are already on FarAway. If one of them joins later, their new account's phone number is matched against your stored contacts so you can both be given a few tokens (see Invites). Syncing again replaces the stored copy.
• Invites When someone joins FarAway, we record who brought them, if anyone did: the person whose invite link they used, or otherwise the first person whose synced contacts include their phone number. Both of you are given a few tokens, and each of you is told the other's name. If you install FarAway from an invite link, Google Play passes the inviter's username to the app; we use nothing else about the install.
• Messages Chat messages, photos and voice messages with your matches and friends, and when each conversation reached your phone and when you read it. The other person sees those as ticks on their messages; if you turn read receipts off, your read times are kept where only you can see them, and you do not see theirs.
• Lounge Posts and replies you write in the Lounge, the place a post is tagged with, and which answers to your posts you mark helpful. Everyone on FarAway can read them in the Lounge while they are there. Your profile shows them to the people you choose, with the number of different people you have helped; your country decides which tab a post appears in.
• Feedback What you write to us from Help us improve in Settings, with the app version, your phone's operating system and your language, so we can look into what you describe. If you stop a free trial, the app asks once why; we keep the reason you pick and anything you add.
• Online status Whether you are online and when you were last seen, shown to your friends. Premium lets you hide them.
• Purchases If you buy tokens or Premium, the purchase records Google Play sends us. We never see your card or payment details.
• Passport When you and a match both send a few messages in your first day, you earn a stamp for their country and miles for the distance between you. We count how many messages were sent, never what they say. Your stamps are shown on your profile to other travelers; your miles and rank only to you.
• Technical A device push token (for notifications), your time zone (to keep notifications quiet at night), crash reports, and basic logs.
• Our website sets no cookies and loads nothing from other companies. If you use its account deletion or report forms, we keep what you type into them, including the name and email you give.

How we use it

• Create and secure your account and verify your phone/email.
• Match you with other travelers and enable real-time chat.
• Show you travelers heading to the same country at the same time, if you've made a trip visible.
• Show your friends and their locations on your map.
• Show your Lounge posts and replies, tell people from a place you tag that you asked about it, and tell you about replies.
• Give tokens to you and the person who brought you, when someone joins from an invite or your synced contacts.
• Keep the community safe (reviewing reports, blocking abuse).
• See how far people get — signing up, taking off, matching, trying Premium — so we can fix where they get stuck. This stays on our servers and is not shared with anyone.

Why we use it

• To provide FarAway Your account, matching, chat, friends, trips, the Lounge, purchases, and the translations and transcripts you ask for: we need these to give you the service you signed up for.
• With your permission Your location and your synced contacts are only used if you allow it. You can take that back at any time: turn location off in your phone's settings, and email us to have your synced contacts removed (deleting your account removes them too).
• To keep FarAway safe and working Reviewing reports and keeping evidence, suspending accounts, stopping a suspended phone number signing up again, limiting spam and abuse, and crash reports and logs. An account reported by several different people is suspended automatically until a person has reviewed the reports; if that happens to you, write to us. A Lounge post or reply reported by several people is hidden until a person has reviewed it; that never suspends anyone by itself. You can object to any of this: tell us why, and we will stop unless keeping FarAway safe outweighs it.
• Because the law requires it Keeping purchase records, keeping evidence of suspected abuse of children, and answering lawful requests from the authorities.

Who else handles it

Other companies run parts of FarAway for us: sign-in and SMS codes, storing chats, photos and voice messages, notifications, crash reports, translation, voice transcripts, payments, email and hosting. They use your data only to do that work for us, under contracts that require them to protect it, including where they are outside your country. We do not sell your personal data.

Retention & deletion

We keep your information while your account is active. You can delete your account at any time in the app (Settings → Delete Account) or via our account deletion page.

Feedback you send us, including why you stopped a trial, is kept until we no longer need it, and is deleted with your account.

When you take off, join standby, or turn a subscription's renewal off or on, we note when. These notes are deleted after 180 days, and with your account.

When you change your username, we keep your old one for 30 days, so nobody else can take it straight away and links to it still reach you. After that it is released. It is deleted with your account.

Lounge posts leave the Lounge after 7 days. Posts and replies are deleted 90 days after they are written, or when you delete them, and a post takes the replies under it with it. One that has been reported is kept until the report is decided. Deleting your account deletes your posts and replies.

Photos shared in chat are deleted 24 hours after they are sent. When someone is reported, the photos and disappearing messages in their conversations with the person who reported them are kept until the report is decided. If the report says someone involved is under 18, they are kept after that as well, as the law may require.

Deleting your account hides it from everyone at once. For 30 days you can change your mind by signing in again; after that your profile information is erased for good. Messages you sent stay in the other person's conversation, shown as from "Deleted User". Your voice recordings are deleted.

If an account is suspended when it is deleted, we keep a scrambled form of its phone number until the suspension would have ended, so the number cannot be used to sign up again during that time. It is used for nothing else.

One exception: if an account has been reported as involving someone under 18, deleting it does not delete the details that identify it (name, username, phone number, email, date of birth, country and profile photo). We keep them with the report, as the law may require, and do not use them for anything else.

Reports sent from our report page are deleted two years after we close them.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right to:

• get a copy of the information we hold about you, including in a form you can take elsewhere;
• have it corrected, or deleted;
• have us stop using it, or restrict how we use it, while a question about it is settled;
• object to what we do on the basis of our legitimate interests;
• take back your permission for anything that relies on it, without affecting what was done before;
• complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Most of your profile can be corrected in the app, and you can delete your account there too. For anything else, email support@flyfaraway.app from the address on your account, or tell us your phone number: we may ask you to prove the account is yours. We answer within a month.

Age

You must be 18 or older to use FarAway. Do not use FarAway if you are under 18, or under the minimum age in your country if that is higher.

Changes

We may update this policy; we will revise the effective date above.

Contact

Questions? Email support@flyfaraway.app.