Privacy

Bunchy is built and run by Gianni Goossens, an independent developer working as a sole trader, not a company, based in Belgium. That means the data controller here is a person rather than an organisation, and “we” on this page is one developer.

Write to privacy@bunchy.app about anything on this page and that person will answer. A postal address is available on request. It is a home address, so it is not published here.

The list is short because the product is built to work without more. Nothing here is collected “just in case”.

Email address

To sign you in, to recover your account, and to send you the notifications you switched on. Nothing else.

Password

Stored only as a scrypt hash. We cannot read it, and a copy of our database does not reveal it.

Year of birth

The year only, never a full date of birth. Used to check you are 16 or over and to keep age gaps sensible in matching.

Your profile

Display name, username, a short bio and an avatar link, if you add them. Visible to other members.

Approximate location

A town or city and a coarse coordinate (see section 3). Never an address.

Interests, goals, availability, personality answers

The five onboarding steps. This is what the matching actually runs on, and it is the reason introductions are better than random.

Time zone

Derived from the country you gave, not asked for. It is what makes “weekday evening” mean the same thing for two people in different countries.

What you write

Messages in bunches and to your connections, activities you create, reports you file.

Sessions

A random token, stored hashed, plus your browser's user-agent string and a hashed version of your IP address, enough to show you where you are signed in and to spot abuse, not enough to reconstruct your address.

Product events

That an account was created, a connection was sent, a bunch was joined (see section 5).

Banned addresses

If an account is banned, a one-way keyed fingerprint of its email address, never the address itself. See section 9.

This is a design decision rather than a promise about our behaviour. When you tell us where you are, we resolve it to a town and then snap the coordinates to a coarse grid before writing them down. The most precise fact our database is capable of holding is “somewhere in this cell of roughly five kilometres”.

That is enough to rank people by distance and useless for finding anyone. Even if we wanted to hand over your exact location, or someone took a copy of the database, it is not in there. You can also turn off showing your area to other members entirely, in your privacy settings.

Your profile, interests and goals are visible to other signed-in members. That is what makes an introduction possible. Your email address, birth year and coordinates are never shown to anyone.

You control who can find you, who can message you, who can invite you to a bunch, whether your area is shown and whether your exact age is shown. Those settings live on your profile and take effect immediately. Messages in a bunch are visible to that bunch; direct messages are visible to the two of you.

Most of what a social product knows about you exists to measure your attention. We have no way to measure it, on purpose:

• No page views, no session duration, no scroll tracking. The analytics taxonomy has no event for any of them, and a test fails if someone adds one.
• No third-party analytics or advertising trackers. There are none on any page.
• No contact list, address book or phone number.
• No precise location, ever, section 3.
• No profile of you sold, shared or licensed to anyone. We do not sell personal data, and there is no business model here in which we would.

The product events we do record carry a reference to your profile and structured facts like which bunch was joined. They never carry your name, email or location.

Under the GDPR, each thing we hold rests on one of these:

Performing our contract

Your account, profile, matching, messages, bunches and activities. You cannot have the service without these.

Our legitimate interests

Keeping the platform safe (blocks, reports, moderation, rate limiting) and understanding whether it works (aggregate product events). We have weighed these against your interests and kept the data minimal.

Your consent

Optional notifications, in particular any suggestion we send that no person asked for. Off unless you switch it on, and withdrawable at any time from your profile.

Legal obligation

Where we must retain or disclose something to comply with the law.

Compatibility is scored by software. It weighs shared interests, complementary interests, what each of you is looking for, personality answers, overlapping free time, distance and any history you already share. Every suggestion shows you the reasons behind it, in plain language, because a recommendation you cannot interrogate is one you have no reason to trust.

All of it runs on our own servers, as ordinary code we wrote and can read. Nothing you write is sent to anybody else to be processed, and no outside service is involved in deciding who you are shown. If that ever changes we will say so on this page before it does, and name the company.

None of this produces a decision with legal or similarly significant effects. It orders a list of people you might like to meet. You decide whether to say hello.

Our hosting and database providers process data on our behalf under contract, and may not use it for anything else. We do not currently use any third-party analytics, advertising or profiling service. When we add a processor that handles personal data, this page names it before it goes live.

We disclose data to anyone else only where the law requires it, or where it is genuinely necessary to protect someone’s safety.

Your account

Until you delete it. There is no inactivity sweep that removes accounts silently.

Sign-in sessions

30 days, then they expire and are removed. Signing out removes one immediately.

Product events

Deleted with your account, which does shift our historical charts slightly. That is the right trade.

Safety records

A report you file about someone outlives your account, with your name removed. Otherwise reporting harassment and then leaving would quietly clear the queue and let the reported person escape review.

Things you wrote in a bunch

Stay in that bunch with your name detached, so the group's conversation still makes sense to the people still in it.

A banned address

Kept until the ban is lifted. Only for bans. A suspension or a member simply leaving never creates one.

That last one deserves saying plainly, because it is the one place where deleting your account does not remove everything. Deleting an account frees its email address, so without it a banned member deletes and signs straight back up, and every block and report about them stops meaning anything. What we keep is a keyed one-way fingerprint of the address, not the address, and not something anyone holding a copy of that table could turn back into one. It is linked to no account, no name and no profile. If a ban is lifted, it is deleted.

We think the people a ban protects have a stronger interest in not meeting that person again than the banned person has in the erasure of one opaque hash. If you disagree in your case, write to us and say so.

You have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, take it elsewhere, object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and withdraw any consent you gave. Two of those are buttons rather than requests:

• A copy of everything. One JSON file, downloaded immediately from your profile. No form, no waiting period.
• Deletion, immediate and irreversible, from the same page. We do not keep a copy for thirty days in case you change your mind.

For anything else, write to privacy@bunchy.app. We answer within one month. If you are not satisfied, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données), Drukpersstraat 35, 1000 Brussels.

One cookie, holding your sign-in session. It is httpOnly, so scripts cannot read it, and it exists solely to keep you signed in. There are no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies on any page, which is why Bunchy has no cookie banner to dismiss.

Bunchy is operated from Belgium and your data is stored in the European Union. Where a provider processes data outside that region, we rely on the safeguards the law requires, standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision. And we will name any such transfer here.

You must be 16 or over. The matching model and the safety model both assume adults and older teenagers, and we do not knowingly hold data about anyone younger. If you believe a child has an account, write to privacy@bunchy.app and we will remove it.

If we change anything that affects what we hold or what we do with it, we will tell you in the product before it takes effect, not with a quiet edit and a new date at the top.