Privacy Policy

Pref lets you record your real-world preferences — food, travel, home, safety notes — and share them with people and businesses you trust. This page explains what data we collect, why, and how we handle it. It's a draft; we'll tighten the language with a lawyer before the app leaves private beta, but the substance won't change.

Who runs Pref

Pref is operated by Becker Capital Ventures LLC. For privacy questions or data requests, email hello@prefpref.com.

What we collect

• Phone number. Used to sign you in via SMS one-time code.
• Profile details. Name, handle, pronouns, preferred greeting, optional profile photo — whatever you choose to enter.
• Your preferences. Whatever you record (diet, allergies, seating, sleep, etc). You control visibility on each: Public, Friends, Family, or Private.
• Dependents. If you record preferences on behalf of a child, pet, or adult in your care, we store what you enter under your account. You can delete any dependent at any time.
• Social graph. Friendships, nudges, stickers, and share links you create. Visible to the people involved.
• Contact matches (optional). If you grant the Contacts permission, we hash each phone number in your address book on your device (SHA-256 over the E.164-normalized number) and send only those hashes to our server to check which of your contacts are already on Pref. We never upload contact names, emails, or plaintext phone numbers. When two people independently have each other in their contacts, we treat that as a mutual signal and connect you as friends automatically. You can skip the prompt — Pref works without it.
• Device metadata. We log server-side request timestamps and IP addresses for security (rate limits, abuse detection). These are kept for about 30 days.

What we don't collect

• We don't track you across other apps or websites. No advertising SDKs, no IDFA.
• We don't read contact names, emails, photos, or addresses — just hashed phone numbers, and only if you grant the Contacts permission.
• We don't upload your photo library or microphone stream. We access them only when you explicitly attach a photo or record audio for a preference.

Third parties we share data with

• Twilio — we pass your phone number to Twilio to send the SMS sign-in code.
• Google (Gemini API)— when you chat with our AI assistant Pina, or generate a share summary, we send your recent chat messages plus the relevant subset of your catalog (preference names, your answers) to Google for inference. We try to minimize personally identifying text; we never send medical data that isn't already part of a preference you chose to record. Google's handling is governed by their Gemini API terms.
• Railway — our hosting provider. They run our servers and database.

We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone else.

Shared links

When you create a share link for a business or friend, anyone who has the link can see the preferences you chose to expose. Share links expire (default 24 hours) and you can revoke them at any time from the app. We log view counts so you can see if a link has been opened.

Children

Pref is designed for adults. You can record preferences on behalf of a child in your care (for example, a peanut allergy to share with a host), but only if you are their parent or guardian. If you believe a child under 13 has a Pref account, email hello@prefpref.com and we'll delete it.

Deleting your account

Settings → Account → Delete account removes your profile, preferences, dependents, friendships, stickers, nudges, and share links immediately. We keep a minimal record (phone hash + deletion timestamp) for 90 days to prevent abuse, then purge it.

Security

All traffic is encrypted with TLS. Your sign-in token is stored in the iOS Keychain. Passwords aren't used — authentication is via a one-time SMS code.

Your rights

Depending on where you live (GDPR in the EU/UK, CCPA in California, and similar regimes elsewhere), you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete the data we hold about you. Email hello@prefpref.com and we'll respond within 30 days.

Changes

We'll update this page when practices change and bump the “last updated” date. For material changes, we'll notify you in-app.