Privacy Policy

Zelbi puts a free item in front of a neighbour and gets the two of you to one place at one time. Doing that needs your location, your photographs and your messages. This page says exactly what we collect, who else ends up holding it, and how long it stays.

What you give us directly

• Your account. Email address, and — if you sign in with Apple or Google — whatever name they pass us. If you use Apple's hide-my-email, we only ever hold the relay address.
• Your agreement to these terms. When you accept the Terms of Service we record which version you accepted and when, and that you confirmed you are 18 or older.
• Your profile. Display name and avatar. Both are visible to anyone using Zelbi.
• Your listings. Photographs, title, description, category, condition, and the location of the item.
• Your messages to other people, including any photographs you send in a conversation, and when you read theirs — the sender can see that a message was read.
• Pickup arrangements. Times you propose or accept, the handoff method, and any note you write about where to leave an item.
• Payment details. Your card goes directly to Stripe. We never see or store your card number. We hold the reference Stripe gives us, and Stripe holds your email against a customer record it creates the first time you claim something.
• Anything you type into the help box in the app.

What we collect without asking each time

• Your location. Described in its own section below.
• Your device's time zone, sent each time the app starts, so reminders arrive at a sensible hour.
• A push token — the address your phone gives us so notifications can reach it. It is stored against your account and shared with our notification service.
• When you were last active. Refreshed on every request the app makes, and shown to other people as a recent-activity indicator.
• Which listings you have opened. Recorded on our side, not just on your phone.
• Your current location. When location is allowed, the app sends your position when it opens or comes back to the screen, at most every 30 minutes. We store it rounded to about 100 metres and overwrite it each time, so it is not a history. It is used for "new finds near you" notifications and, when we have no time zone for you, to time our emails. It is cleared when you delete your account.
• Your arrival at a pickup. After you book a pickup, your phone checks whether you have reached the item: while the pickup screen is open, and in the background too if you allow "Always" location. When it detects you there, we store the time you arrived. The fee is then taken two hours after the later of the end of the pickup and your arrival, instead of twenty-four hours after the pickup ends.
• Your activity in the app. When you open and leave the app, the screens you open, sign-in and setup steps, your answers to permission prompts, the listings and claims you open, the steps you take to claim, list or confirm a pickup, and errors you see. This is kept on our servers and not shared with anyone. We currently keep it indefinitely, including after you delete your account.
• The country your signup came from, looked up from your network address, because Zelbi is offered only in the United States.
• Apple DeviceCheck markers. Apple keeps one-bit markers for your iPhone on our behalf, so that one phone gets a credit for a first giveaway, or a credit from a friend's invite code, only once.
• Credits and invite codes you earn or use, and which version of the fee disclosure you agreed to at each claim.
• Technical records. Our hosting provider logs every request the app makes, and those log lines contain account identifiers, the coordinates sent with feed requests, and payment references. When something goes wrong, an error report is sent to our error-reporting service; those reports carry recent activity from the server, which can include account identifiers and other references.

Location

This is the most sensitive thing on the platform, so it gets its own section.

For a listing, we store the exact location of the item — usually a home. Publicly, that is never what we show. Every listing is displayed at a deliberately offset point, between 120 and 250 metres from the real one, and the distance shown to browsers is measured from that offset point rather than the real one. The offset is generated with a secret key held on our servers, so it cannot be worked backwards from anything the app hands out.

The exact point is released to one person, at one moment: the person who has claimed the item, once the $2.00 hold on their card exists. Before that, nobody but you has it. If either of you blocks the other, the exact point is withdrawn from their copy of the record. Otherwise the claimer's receipt keeps the pickup point after the pickup ends or is cancelled.

While you browse, your own live position is sent to us with each feed request so we can order items by distance. We do not build a history of where you have been from it, but it does appear in our hosting provider's request logs.

To show a place name, look up an address you type, or draw a map, coordinates and search text are sent to Apple and Google. On iPhone that is Apple's mapping and Google's place search. On Android it would also include map tiles, geocoding and directions from Google.

Photographs

Your first listing photograph is sent to Anthropic, an AI provider, which writes the suggested title and description you are offered. The commercial terms we hold with them prohibit training their models on it. They state that material sent through their programming interface is deleted within thirty days. Content they flag under their own usage policy can be held for up to two years, and safety classification scores for up to seven; those are their rules, not ours, and we cannot recall a submission once made.

Location data inside photographs is removed. Photographs are re-encoded on your phone before upload, which strips the camera's embedded data including any GPS coordinates. Only resolution, orientation, dimensions and colour information survive. Your home coordinates do not travel inside a photograph.

Where photographs live. Every photograph — listing photos, avatars, photos sent in messages, and pickup confirmation photos — is stored with Cloudflare and served from a web address containing a random identifier. Those addresses are not listed anywhere and cannot be guessed, but they are not password-protected: anyone who has the exact link can open the image. Treat a link to one of your photos as something you would not paste in public.

Deleting them. When you remove a listing, its photographs are deleted from our storage immediately. Copies cached by the delivery network expire within about four hours, so someone holding the exact link could still open one during that window. Deleting your account deletes your current avatar and the photos you sent in messages. Avatars you replaced, photos of listings that expired or completed, pickup confirmation photos, and photos uploaded for a listing you never published are not deleted and remain stored.

Messages

Messages are stored, and they are automatically scanned before they send. A message the scan refuses is stored anyway, with a category for why, and the refusal is recorded separately. Two kinds are not stored: a message refused for trying to arrange times outside the app, and a refused edit. A message that passes is also checked a second time; the category that check gives is written to our logs, not stored with the message. Nobody reads your conversations as a matter of routine — the scanning is automatic — but the records exist and can be reviewed when a problem is investigated. Editing a message replaces what it said; the previous wording is not kept.

Notification text is stored on our side and sent through our notification provider to Apple. Those notifications show the other person's name, the item and a pickup time. They do not show the text of a message or any note you wrote about where to leave an item. That text can appear on a locked screen.

What we work out about you

• A trust score, with the events behind it — completed handoffs, late cancellations, missed pickups, disputes. A giver's number and one-word summary are shown to other people.
• What you seem to be interested in. We may work out interest categories from the items you have saved and claimed over the previous sixty days, to suggest listings. This is calculated when needed and is not stored as a profile.
• Automated suspicion records. Our listing and message rules can file a record against an account when something matches a scam pattern. These are kept.

Joining the waitlist

If you join the Zelbi waitlist on zelbi.ai, we collect:

• your email address
• your city and state
• whether you want to give things away, pick things up, or both
• your answer to our question about the $2 claim fee
• which link brought you to the page, for example a link we shared in a Facebook group

We use this for two things only: to email you when Zelbi opens near you, and to decide which cities to open first. We don't add you to our News emails, we don't sell your information, and we don't use it for anything else.

Your information is stored by Supabase, our database provider, and passes through Railway, our hosting provider, which keeps standard request logs. When we send your opening email, it is sent through Resend, our email provider.

We keep your waitlist information until Zelbi opens in your city and we've sent your email, or until you ask us to remove it, whichever comes first. To see, change or remove your information, email support@zelbi.ai.

Who else holds your information

These companies process information because Zelbi runs on them. Except where noted, they act on our instructions and not for their own purposes.

• Supabase — the database and sign-in system: everything above, plus session tokens and sign-in identifiers.
• Cloudflare — every photograph, stored under an identifier derived from the account that uploaded it.
• Railway — hosts the service; its request logs hold identifiers, coordinates and payment references.
• Anthropic — listing photographs and the text drafted from them.
• Voyage AI — the text you type into the help box, sent to be turned into a search vector so the right help article is found. Our account is opted out of their model training, and their terms state the text is deleted once processed.
• Stripe — your email, account identifier and claim references, plus your card details sent directly from your device. Stripe also acts on its own account for fraud prevention, legal compliance and improving its own services.
• Expo — push tokens and the full text of notifications.
• Apple — coordinates for place lookups and map display, all notification content delivered to iPhones, coordinates passed when you open directions, and sign-in events if you use Sign in with Apple.
• Google — the text you type into place search and the coordinates sent with it. Google decides its own purposes for what it receives, unlike everyone else on this list. On Android, Google would additionally receive map tiles, geocoding and directions.
• Resend — your email address, to deliver sign-in codes and Zelbi's emails.
• Sentry — error reports, which carry the technical records described above.
• Apple DeviceCheck — the one-bit markers for your iPhone described above.

Pages on zelbi.ai load their fonts from Google, which receives each visitor's network address.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for advertising. We may disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone from harm.

How long we keep it

Plainly: indefinitely, for almost everything. We do not yet run a schedule that deletes old records automatically. What follows is what actually happens today.

• Your account and its contents stay until you delete your account.
• Messages stay in the conversation, including for the other person.
• Records of completed pickups and disputes are kept indefinitely, for legal and safety reasons — including the written explanation you give when you raise a dispute.
• Photographs stay until the listing is removed, with the exceptions listed in the Photographs section.
• Anything typed into the help box is stored with a scrambled form of your account identifier rather than your account itself, and the text is cleared after 30 days. Each question is also sent to Voyage AI to match it to a help article; see "Who else holds your information".
• Your activity in the app is kept indefinitely.
• Our hosting and error-reporting providers keep their records for a limited period they set.
• Database backups hold a copy of records for a period after they are deleted or changed, so a deletion is not instantly reflected in every copy.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings in the app, and that screen describes what happens before you confirm. In full:

• Your name, photo, bio, active listings and saved items are removed, and the account cannot be used again.
• Messages you sent stay in the other person's conversation, without your name.
• Pickups you arranged are cancelled and any card hold is released. You are not charged.
• Completed pickups and disputes are recorded indefinitely without your name, for legal and safety reasons.
• One thing is kept from your email address: a scrambled, one-way fingerprint of it. It cannot be turned back into your address, and it is never used to contact you or for analytics. It is used to recognise the address if it signs up again, and to stop the one-time credit for a first giveaway, a referral credit and invite codes being given to it twice.
• It happens straight away and cannot be undone.

Kept after deletion:

• your time zone, the country your signup came from, and the phone number field on your account;
• your credits;
• your activity in the app, and which listings you opened;
• your records of accepting the terms and confirming your age;
• the notifications sent to you;
• Stripe's customer record for you and your saved card, which Zelbi does not delete.

Two things sit outside what deletion reaches. Stripe keeps its own record of any payment you made, under its own legal obligations, and we cannot remove it. And notifications the other person already received about you keep the wording they were sent with — your name is not removed from a message that was already delivered to their phone.

There is also a description at zelbi.ai/delete-account

Your choices

• Location is required. Zelbi is built around what is near you, so the app asks for location access during setup and does not work without it. You can turn it off in your phone's settings at any time; the app will ask for it again before you can browse.
• Notifications can be turned off in your phone's settings. Turning notifications off doesn't stop you using Zelbi; you'll miss pickup reminders unless you check the app. Some optional categories can also be adjusted in the app; notifications about your own claims and pickups are always sent.
• Emails. We send two kinds. Emails about your account and your pickups always go, because the service depends on them. News about Zelbi (new features, invitations and offers) goes to people who have finished setting up their profile. Each one has an Unsubscribe link at the bottom, and one tap stops them. If you joined the waitlist, we also send one email when Zelbi opens near you.
• Your profile — name and photo — can be changed at any time.
• Blocking stops another person seeing you or reaching you.
• Access, correction or deletion of your information: write to support@zelbi.ai and we will respond. Deleting your account does this directly.

Washington residents have rights over their personal information under state law, and those rights are exercised through the same address.

Children

Zelbi is for adults. You must be 18 or older to use it, and you confirm that when you sign up. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has an account, write to support@zelbi.ai and we will close it.

Where we operate

Zelbi is operated by Zelbi Inc., a Delaware corporation based in Washington State, and is offered only in the United States. It is not directed to people outside the United States. Our main providers store your information in the United States.

Changes to this policy

If we change something that matters, we will say so in the app before the change applies to you, and the date at the top of this page will change.

Contact

Zelbi is operated by Zelbi Inc., a Delaware corporation based in Washington State. Email us at support@zelbi.ai, or write to Zelbi Inc., PO Box 40476, Bellevue, WA 98015.