Privacy Policy

Effective 26 July 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.

  • 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. We never read your phone’s address book.

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, using Apple’s built-in face detection, with no network involved, so an un-blurred face was never in the uploaded image at all. 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.

  • 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 at all.

5. 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.

  • 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.

6. 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.

7. Security

Data is encrypted in transit. Access to your profile is enforced by the database itself, per row, so a friend request 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.

8. Your control

  • See it: everything we hold about you is visible in the app, on your profile.

  • Change it: every field is editable, and every one can be left empty.

  • Delete it: Settings, then Delete Account, removes your profile, possessions, friendships and notifications.

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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. Contact us

Questions about this policy, or a request about your data, including anything in section 8, go to hello@bowogift.com.