Privacy policy

Last updated: 24 September 2026

This policy is written for the person using WayVibe, not for a lawyer to file. It says what we hold, why, who else sees it and exactly how long it lasts. Where the app does not do something, it says so rather than staying quiet and leaving room.

The short version. WayVibe holds your name, your handle, your date of birth, whichever of email or phone you signed in with, the photos you take in the app, what you say in chats, which of your friends opened each of your photos and how many times, and a notification token. It asks for your location only when you choose to share it with a plan, post a plan publicly, or open the WayVibe Map, never in the background, and keeps no history of where you have been. A plan you post to the city shows a stranger the area it is in, never the address and never a coordinate, until they join it. Photos delete themselves after seven days unless you save them. You can erase all of it from inside the app, immediately.

1. Who this is between

WayVibe is published and operated by Radhaarc AI Labs, from India. On Google Play the app is listed as WayVibe (package com.wayvibe.app) by Radhaarc AI Labs. "We" means us; "you" means the person using the app.

Under India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 we are the Data Fiduciary and you are the Data Principal. We are also an intermediary under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the IT (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. We are not a significant social media intermediary and we do not hold ourselves out as one.

That intermediary status is not theoretical. A plan can now be posted publicly to a city and joined by somebody you have never met, which section 7B explains in full. That is user-generated content reaching people outside your friend graph, exactly the case the IT Rules are written for.

2. WayVibe is 18+, and that is not a formality

You must be 18 or older. The app asks for your date of birth before it will create an account and refuses the account if the answer is under 18 — signing in with Google, email or a phone number all go through the same check.

The reason is specific. The DPDP Act treats anyone under 18 as a child, and handling a child's data lawfully needs verifiable parental consent plus a ban on tracking, behavioural monitoring and targeted advertising. Building verifiable parental consent properly is a real system, and we have not built it. So rather than take under-18 accounts and handle them badly, we refuse them.

We keep your date of birth, not just a yes-or-no. Somebody who is seventeen today is eligible next year, and without the date there is no way to ever let them in. It is never shown to anyone.

3. What the app collects, and why

To make you an account: your handle, your display name, your date of birth, and whichever of a phone number or an email address you signed in with. If you signed up with a password, we keep a scrambled version of it that cannot be turned back into your password. Your time zone, so that "this evening" means your evening.

Because you filled in a profile: a bio, a vibe word and colour, a 60-character note that deletes itself after a day, a profile photo, an availability state you set by hand, and your home city, if you gave it during onboarding. We never infer that you are free. Your home city is private in the same way your gender is: nobody else's read of your profile shows it, today it only makes your own onboarding feel finished, and no screen anywhere shows it next to your name.

Because you told us what you're into: the activities you picked as your interests during onboarding, things like "chai" or "box cricket". This is private too, and it does exactly one thing: it moves the cards you picked to the front of your own deck when you are making a plan. Nobody else's deck is affected, and nobody else can see what you picked.

Because you used the app: the photos you take and their captions; the audience you chose for each one; place labels — words you typed, never coordinates (live location is separate, and covered in section 7A); who is in a photo and whether they approved it; likes and saves; which photos you opened and how many times; your friends, blocks and mutes; your squads; pings, beacons and plans; chat messages, voice notes, GIFs and reactions; the places you have been to, as labels; and any report you file.

Because you posted a plan to the city: if you choose to make a plan public instead of sending it, it carries a coordinate and a locality label such as "Satellite, Ahmedabad", so it can be found on the map, plus the category you picked for it. Section 7B says exactly who sees which of those, and when.

Because the app has to work: a notification token for your device, a scrambled record of your sign-in session, and ordinary server logs. We do not build a profile of you from logs.

Because you chose to share your location with a plan: where your phone is right now, while the app is open, for as long as that share lasts. Section 7A says exactly who sees it and when it is deleted.

Because you bought WayVibe Pro: the plan you bought, the order id, the amount and whether it succeeded. Your card, UPI or wallet details are never seen or held by us. On iPhone, Apple takes the payment through the App Store; on Android, Google Play; on the web, Razorpay's own checkout. Section 11 says more.

What we do not collect. Background location — the app never tracks you when it is closed, never asks for background location permission, and keeps no history of where you have been. Your photo gallery — every photo is taken inside the app. Your contact list — see section 7. Analytics or advertising data — there is no analytics tool, no ad network and no third-party tracker in the app, there are no ads, and nothing follows you to another app or website. Financial or health data — there is nothing to buy.

Purpose limitation. Each thing above is used for the purpose it is listed under and nothing else. We do not repurpose your data for advertising, profiling, scoring or training a machine learning model.

4. What this website collects

Two things on this website collect data, and they are the only two.

The early-access list. If you ask to be told when WayVibe opens, we store the email address you typed and the date you gave it. It is used for one thing: telling you when you can get in. It is not a newsletter, it is not shared, and it is not sold. We keep it until you ask us to remove it, or until you have an account and no longer need to be told — whichever comes first. Ask on the contact page and it is gone.

The contact and support form. If you write to us, we store your name, your email address and your message, including anything you attach to a bug report. It is used to answer you, and to fix what you reported. We keep it until you ask us to delete it; if you have not asked, we keep it while the issue is open and afterwards only so that we recognise the conversation if you write again. Ask on the contact page and it is gone.

Neither one is linked to an app account unless you tell us your handle. Neither one sets an advertising cookie — this site sets no cookies at all beyond remembering whether you chose the light or dark theme, which stays in your own browser and is never sent to us.

5. Photos: who sees them, and for how long

Every photo has an audience chosen before the shutter, and that answer is the only thing that decides who can see it: one person, a squad, all your friends, your close friends, or a named handful you picked. The audience is fixed at the moment you send it — befriending somebody later does not hand them an old photo, and unfollowing somebody does not take back one you already sent. A block overrides everything, in both directions.

There is no public feed and no way to browse strangers. Nothing you post is visible to anyone outside the audience you chose.

Photos delete themselves. An unsaved photo is destroyed seven days after you take it. You can choose a shorter life when you send one, from one minute upwards — you cannot choose a longer one. Saving a photo is what keeps it, and that is opt-in.

Who watched it. When a photo is genuinely on your screen, we record that you opened it. The person who took it — and only that person — sees the list: who watched, how many times each of them came back, and when they last did. Two things we would rather tell you than let you discover:

• You are not told when you are counted. There is no badge and no notification. This page is that notice.
• You cannot turn it off, short of not opening the photo. There is no setting for it.

Nobody else ever sees that list — not other viewers, not us for any purpose of our own, and never a third party.

6. A photo naming you stays invisible until you say yes

If a photo says you were in it, nobody but the person who took it can see it until you agree. You can see the one photo you have been asked about, because you have to in order to decide.

Silence is not consent. There is no deadline after which an unanswered photo appears anyway. If you never answer, it is never seen, and then it expires like any other. Saying no is permanent, and it never records who declined or why.

7. Contacts: exactly what happens

This is the part most apps are vague about, so here it is precisely.

If you tap through the "who is already here" screen, the app asks for permission to read your contacts, after a screen that has already explained why. If you refuse, nothing happens and the rest of the app works.

If you allow it, then on your phone: every number is written in full international form, each one is scrambled with SHA-256, the list is de-duplicated and capped at 2,000, and only those scrambled values are sent. Names, labels, emails and the numbers themselves never leave your device. On our side they are compared in memory against accounts that already exist, the reply names only people already on WayVibe, and nothing is written down. There is no contact list, no address book and no shadow graph of who knows whom.

One honest caveat: a scrambled phone number is not a secret — the range of Indian mobile numbers is small enough that anybody could scramble all of them. The protection that matters is that we never store the list and never learn about anybody who is not already a user.

7A. Live location: only when you share it

When it is collected. Only after you tap Share my location on a plan you have joined, and only while WayVibe is open on your screen. Joining a plan never shares your location by itself, and the choice is never remembered for the next plan. The app asks Android for location permission the first time you share, after telling you why.

What is kept. One position per person: the latest point, its accuracy and the time. Each update overwrites the last one. There is no location history.

Who sees it. People in the same plan see your precise position, so they can tell how far away you are. Your friends outside the plan see a rough position on the WayVibe Map, rounded to about a kilometre, and not which plan it is. Nobody else sees it, and a block hides it in both directions.

How long. Until the first of: you tap Stop, you leave the plan, the plan ends or is called off, or eight hours pass. Then the position is deleted, not archived.

Ghost Mode. Settings → Privacy → Ghost Mode hides you from the map for 1, 3, 8 or 24 hours, or until you turn it off. Turning it on ends any share immediately and deletes the position.

Places are still labels. A spot on a photo stays words you typed. Live location is never written to a place. A public plan's coordinate is a third and different thing again: not a label, not live location. Section 7B below is exactly what it does.

7B. Public plans: posted to the city, not sent to anybody

What it is. Making a plan, you can choose Public instead of addressing it to a squad or to people by name. A public plan is posted to your city instead: it shows up on the WayVibe Map and in the "Activities Here" list, for anybody nearby, including people you have never met.

What it carries. A public plan has a place: a latitude and longitude, a locality label such as "Satellite, Ahmedabad", and the category you picked for it. All three are stored on the plan itself.

Who sees what, precisely:

• Before you join it, a stranger sees the host's name, the activity, the category, the start time, the locality and how many people have joined, a count, never a list of names. They never see the exact place, the coordinate, or who else said yes. This is not a rounding choice made at display time: our server does not send a non-joiner the exact place or the coordinate in the first place.
• Once you join it, you see the exact place, the same as anybody invited to a private plan, and the list of who else has joined, by name.
• The host is always named, on their own plan, to everybody. They chose to post it to the city, and a plan that cannot say whose it is cannot be reported either.
• Joining, in itself, does not open a chat between you and anybody else who joined. A public plan does not create a group conversation the way a squad or a picked plan does.

How long. The same as any other plan; see the table in section 8. There is no separate or longer retention for a public plan's coordinate. Deleting the plan, or your account, removes it exactly as it would a private one.

What you can do about it. Whether a plan you make is public or private is a choice you make once per plan, in the composer. Nothing defaults you into posting your evenings to the city. Separately, Settings has a switch for whether other people's public plans are shown to you on the map at all. That switch is about what you are shown, not about who can see what you post, and it defaults on because an empty map on day one is not useful to anybody.

8. How long we keep things

Chat messages, friendships, squads, places, plans (including a public plan's coordinate and locality) and reports have no automatic expiry. They last until you delete your account, the plan itself is deleted or called off, or until a chat's own timer removes them. We would rather say that plainly than imply everything vanishes.

9. Deleting everything

In the app: Profile → Settings → Delete → type your handle → Delete everything. It runs immediately. Nothing is queued and there is no undo.

Your photos are destroyed, then every record of them. Your moments, pings, beacons, plans, friendships, blocks, mutes, places, squad and chat memberships go. Your viewing history goes — every record of what you opened and how often, including on other people's photos. Your devices and sessions are revoked, so you are signed out everywhere. The email address, phone number and password you signed in with are erased, and that address is free to use again.

Two things survive, and neither identifies you. Your messages are emptied — the sender, the text and any photo are erased and a blank is left, so that other people's conversations do not develop holes. And an empty shell of your account remains, with the phone number removed, the name replaced with "Someone" and the handle scrambled, so that nothing else in the app breaks where you used to be referred to.

Without the app: ask on the contact page and we will do it for you. We acknowledge within 24 hours and complete it within 30 days — in practice, the same immediate erase.

Get a copy first. Ask us and we will send you everything WayVibe holds about you. Ask before you delete: afterwards there is nothing left to send.

10. Why we are allowed to hold this

Our ground under the DPDP Act is your consent, given at sign-up against this notice and again for each specific thing the app asks for — the camera, your contacts, notifications, the microphone. Consent is tied to the purpose it was given for, and we do not stretch it.

You can withdraw consent at any time: revoke the permission in Android settings, ask us to remove your email from the early-access list, or delete your account. Withdrawing is as easy as giving, which is what the Act requires.

Where the GDPR applies to you, we rely on performance of a contract for running your account and delivering your photos and messages, consent for contacts matching and notifications, and legitimate interests for sign-in security, rate limits and abuse prevention.

11. Who else touches your data

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for anybody else's purposes. There are no advertisers and no data brokers.

Eight services act on our behalf, and each sees only what it needs: Google Sign-In, when you choose to sign in that way, sees the token you hand over, your Google account id and email. Sign in with Apple, the same, and it is the one that can show us less: if you choose Hide My Email we are given a relay address and never your real one, and Apple sends your name once, on the first authorisation, and never again. Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers notifications and sees your device token and the text of the notification. Resend sends email sign-in codes and sees the address and the code.

Razorpay processes payment for WayVibe Pro bought on our website. (Bought in the iPhone app, Apple takes the payment through the App Store; in the Android app, Google Play does. We see only the order id, plan and status.) When you buy on the web, Razorpay's own checkout collects your card, UPI or wallet details directly; we never see or store them. What we hold on our side is the order id, the amount, the plan you bought, and whether it succeeded. A refund or a disputed charge is handled through Razorpay and shows up on our side only as a status change.

Google Places does two things. It answers a venue search when the curated WayVibe Places list does not already have an answer: if you search near yourself, the coordinates of that search point are sent to Google to find nearby venues, we do not send your live location to Google outside of that search, and a curated match never calls Google at all. Separately, it supplies the photographs on curated venue cards: 446 of our 452 curated places have one, the other six left blank rather than given a stand-in. Google returned a photo reference for each of those venues once, and our server exchanges that reference for a fresh signed image url from Google each time somebody views the card, cached briefly so a popular venue's photo does not cost a call every time it is seen. Nothing personal is sent for that exchange. No account id, no location, nothing about who is looking.

Google (Gemini) also checks each new profile photo automatically, to confirm it is a real photograph of one person and not a cartoon, avatar or artwork. For that check the photo, shrunk and with its metadata removed, is sent to Google with no name, handle or other account detail; the result (accepted, or one reason word) is kept on your account.

A GIF provider, Klipy or Giphy, whichever the owner has switched on, answers a GIF search from inside a chat. What you type to search is sent to whichever one is configured. The GIF you pick is then downloaded by our server, not your phone, and stored exactly like a photo you took: encrypted, capped in size, and subject to the same expiry and deletion rules as any other message attachment. If neither provider is switched on, GIF search simply is not offered, and the app falls back to your phone's own keyboard.

We will also disclose data where the law requires it: a valid court order or a lawful demand from an authority.

An AI model writes one sentence on a suggestion card and decides which few places to show first. This is the section to read if that matters to you, and section 11A says exactly what it is and is not given.

Where processing happens. WayVibe is built and operated from India, and that is where our own servers sit. Google, Firebase, Razorpay and whichever GIF provider is switched on are each multinational companies that may process data on infrastructure outside India as part of running their own service, in the ordinary way any Indian business using a global cloud or payment provider does. We have not signed a data-localisation commitment beyond what each of those providers already gives us.

11A. A feature we are still building: Stranger Mode

Section 7B above is live: a plan can be posted to the city and joined by somebody outside your friend graph, and its area, never a coordinate, never a distance, is exactly what a non-joiner is shown. That much has shipped.

What has not shipped is a way for two people who found each other that way to message each other directly. Joining a public plan does not, by itself, open a chat with its host or its other joiners.

That is a separate question from whether a stranger can message you at all. Settings → Privacy → Who can message you already lets an account accept a first message from anyone on WayVibe, not only friends, and defaults to friends only. That setting exists on its own, is not connected to public plans, and is one-sided rather than mutual: setting it to "Everyone" means you accept a first message from anybody who sends one, not that you have agreed with that specific person first. Stranger Mode, described below, is different again: a mutual opt-in specifically between two people who found each other through a public plan or a future stranger-discovery surface, and we are saying so here, ahead of it shipping, because the commitments below are already decided and we would rather be held to them than write this page again the week it launches.

• A "ghost" state, distinct from the Ghost Mode in section 7A, will hide you from being found by a stranger through this surface. It will not mean nothing is recorded: messages and reports will still be kept, the same as everywhere else in WayVibe, because a harassment report with no evidence behind it cannot be acted on.
• Enforcement will be against behaviour that can be evidenced, such as harassment, an unwanted image, or contact after somebody has said no, leading to a strike and eventually a ban. It will never be against a guessed intention.

The safety page carries the same commitments in plainer language. Once this ships, this section will be rewritten in the present tense like the rest of the page, and the date at the top will change.

11B. AI: what a model is told, and what it is never told

WayVibe uses an AI model in exactly one place: the "What should we do?" suggestions. This section is deliberately specific, because a vague answer here is worth nothing to you.

There is one task and it is called ranking. The model is handed a list of real places near you and asked to put a few of them in an order and write one short sentence about each. That is the whole of it. Our code defines names for five other AI tasks -- classifying, tagging, explaining, itineraries and embeddings -- and not one of them has a single call site: they are unfinished plumbing, not features, and nothing in the app can reach them.

What the app does NOT do with AI, each of which is a thing people reasonably assume and none of which is true here:

• There is no chatbot and no text box you can type a prompt into.
• It never generates images, audio or video.
• It never writes to you as a person or holds a conversation.
• It cannot invent a place. It chooses from venues already in our database; it has no way to add one.
• It does not moderate, rank or judge people -- only venues.
• It does not decide anything about your account: not your visibility, not who sees you, not what you may do.

Every sentence it writes is checked before you see it. A sentence containing a number we cannot find in that venue's own record is discarded rather than shown. The name, distance, rating, price band and opening hours on a card are read from our database and never from a model.

What the model receives. All of it, with nothing left out:

• A pseudonym such as user_3f8a21b4. It is a one-way hash of your account id, salted with a server secret. It is not your account id, it cannot be reversed into one, and it exists so one request can refer to one person consistently.
• The city you are in, as a name: "Ahmedabad". Not your coordinates.
• A radius in words: "~5 km". Not a position.
• Your interests, as the labels you picked yourself: "cafes", "heritage".
• The group size, the time of day as a bucket such as "evening", a budget band if you chose one, and today's festival if there is one where you are.
• The facts about the candidate places: name, category, rating, distance, price band and opening hours.

What the model never receives, enforced in code rather than promised in a document: your name, your email address, your phone number, your exact coordinates, your photographs, your messages, your contacts, who your friends are, or anything another person wrote. Coordinates are turned into a city and a radius bucket before the request is built, and they live in a different object from the one handed to the model, so a coordinate cannot be included by accident.

Which companies process it. The request goes to the first of these that is configured and answers: Groq, Google (Gemini), or OpenAI. Each receives only the list above, processes it to produce that answer, and does nothing else with it. The specific model within a provider changes as they release new ones; what does not change is the list of what is sent.

Your data is not used to train anybody's model. That is the commitment in section 3 and it covers this: we do not train on your data, and we do not send it to be trained on.

Your data is not used to train anybody's model. That is the commitment in section 3 and it covers this too: we do not train on your data, and we do not send it to be trained on.

If you would rather not. Turning AI personalisation off in Settings stops this entirely -- no pseudonym, no city, no interests, nothing built at all. You still get suggestions; they come from our own ranking instead, which is the same list everybody sees before any model runs.

12. Security

Photos and voice notes are encrypted at rest before they touch a disk, and everything travels over an encrypted connection. To be exact about what that does and does not mean: this is not end-to-end encryption. We hold the key, because the server has to resize a photo and check who is allowed to see it. So we will say "encrypted in transit and at rest", and we will never tell you we cannot see your photos.

Passwords are stored scrambled with a slow, salted algorithm and cannot be read back. Session tokens are stored scrambled and rotate; reusing an old one revokes the whole family, on the assumption it was stolen. Sign-in codes expire on their own, are burned after five wrong attempts and are rate-limited per number. Uploads are checked by content, not by their name, and capped in size.

No system is perfectly secure and we are not going to claim otherwise. If a breach affects you, we will tell you and the Data Protection Board, as the DPDP Act requires.

13. Your rights

Under the DPDP Act you may:

• Access a summary of the data we hold about you and what we do with it.
• Correct, complete or update it.
• Erase it.
• Nominate somebody to exercise these rights if you die or become incapacitated.
• Complain, first to us and then to the Data Protection Board of India.

How to use them today: edit your profile in the app for corrections; Settings → Delete for erasure; the contact page for everything else, including access, nomination and withdrawing consent. We answer within 30 days.

Where the GDPR applies to you, you additionally have rights to restriction, portability and objection, and may complain to your own supervisory authority.

14. Complaints, and the Grievance Officer

Both the DPDP Act and the IT Rules 2021 require a published route for complaints, answered by a named person. Ours is on the contact page.

• A grievance is acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days, which is what Rule 3(2)(a) requires.
• A complaint that content shows you nude, in a sexual act, or impersonating you is acted on within 24 hours, as Rule 3(2)(b) requires. Report it in the app or write to us; you do not need a court order first.
• Where a court or an authorised government agency lawfully orders content removed, we act within 36 hours.
• A data-protection request under section 13 is answered within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with how we handled a complaint, you may take it to the Data Protection Board of India.

15. Children

WayVibe is not for anyone under 18 and the app refuses those accounts. We do not knowingly hold a child's data. If you believe a child has an account here — most likely by giving a false date of birth — tell us and we will delete it.

We do not profile anybody, advertise to anybody, or track anybody across other apps and websites, at any age.

16. Changes

If we change what we collect or why, we will update this page and its date, and show you the change in the app before it takes effect. We will not quietly widen what we collect and leave this page behind. A policy that describes an older version of the app is worse than none.