Privacy policy

This page describes what the DealJE app actually does with your data: what it collects, why, who else handles it, how long it is kept, and how you can see or erase it. The French version is the reference text; this translation says the same thing.

1. Who is responsible

The data controller is Daniel Laera, Geneva, Switzerland — a private individual, not a company. For any question or request about your data: contact@dealje.cloud.

2. The data we process, and why

Your account

• Phone number. This is your login identifier: you sign in with a code sent by SMS. It is kept for as long as your account exists.
• First and last name. Asked for at signup, for account integrity (reviews, disputes, support). They are never shown as such to other users.
• Email address, optional. You can give it at signup or later in your profile, and remove it at any time. The app sends you no email; we only use it to reply if you write to us. It is never shown to other users.
• Public name. By default "first name + last initial" (for example "Daniel L."), editable in your profile. It is the only name other people see on your profile, your listings and your reviews.
• The date you accepted this policy and the terms of use.

Your listings

• Title, description, price, category, condition, accepted payment method, and whether you are willing to travel.
• The listing's area. A listing shows an approximate area, never an address: whether you place the point on the map, use your location or pick a neighbourhood, the position is moved to the centre of a square of about 300 m before it is stored. The precise position is never saved. This area, along with the neighbourhood and locality name, is publicly visible on the listing. You then agree on where to hand over the item in the chat.
• Photos. They are kept in public-read storage: anyone who has a photo's address can open it, with no account and no login. So don't photograph anything you wouldn't want public (number plates, mail, faces…).
• Photo metadata (EXIF). The app re-compresses every photo on your phone before uploading it, which strips its metadata, including the GPS position where the picture was taken. The server also strips metadata itself, from every photo it receives: GPS position, camera, date and other details are removed before the photo is stored. Only the image's orientation is kept, so it displays the right way up.

Your location

• If you allow it, the app reads your phone's position to show you listings around you and display distances. It is sent to the server with each search to compute those distances, but it is not stored in the database.
• To show your locality's name (for example "Listings near Thônex"), the app asks your operating system's geocoding service — Apple on iPhone, Google on Android — to turn your position into a place name. The same service names the listing's area when you create a listing.
• You can refuse location access: the app still works, with a feed that isn't limited to your area.

Messages and offers

The content of your conversations and the price offers exchanged are stored on our server so both participants keep their history. The server does not analyse them, and nobody reads them, unless that is necessary to handle a report or a legal request.

To protect you from scams, the app checks the messages you receive on your phone (a payment link, a request for a code, a number or email to continue elsewhere…) and shows a warning under those that contain one. This check runs entirely on the device: nothing is sent, nothing is stored, and the message is never changed or blocked.

The server also records when each message is read, and passes that on to both participants in the conversation.

Your phone number is never displayed to the person you are talking to, nor sent to their app.

Reviews, reports and blocks

• Reviews: the rating and any comment are public, with the author's public name.
• Reports: the reason, the optional detail and the listing concerned are kept for manual review. Nothing is decided automatically.
• Blocks: the list of people you have blocked, used to hide their listings and stop their messages.

Alerts and favourites

Your favourites and your saved searches (keyword, category, area and radius). The centre of an alert's area is rounded to about 110 m before it is stored. Only you can see this data.

Notifications

If you accept notifications, your phone sends us a device identifier (notification token), the system type (iOS or Android) and the app's language, used only to tell you about a new message or a listing matching one of your alerts, in your language. The language also comes with a request for a code, so the SMS is written in your language.

Crash reports

If the app crashes or hits an unexpected error, it sends a technical report so that we can fix the problem: where in the code the error happened, the app version, the device model, the system version, the state of memory and storage, and a random identifier specific to this installation of the app. The report contains no phone number, name, message or location, and it is not linked to your account: error messages are cleaned of any such data before they are sent.

3. What is public

Visible to anyone using the app, even without an account: your listings (text, photos, approximate area, locality), your public name, your average rating and number of reviews received, and the reviews themselves.

Your profile and listings also show a few trust signals, worked out by the server: the month and year you joined, whether your number is Swiss (“Verified Swiss number”, without the number itself), how many of your listings sold, and how quickly you usually answer buyers.

Never visible to others: your real first and last name, your email, your phone number, your location, your favourites, your alerts, your reports and your blocks.

4. Who else handles your data

We only use the providers the app needs to work. Each one receives only what is described here.

• Hostinger — hosting. The server (database, photos, application) is a virtual private server located in Germany. Hostinger also hosts the contact@dealje.cloud mailbox: the messages you write to us, and the report alerts the server sends us (account numbers, public names, the report's reason and details, never a phone number).
• ASPSMS (Switzerland) — sending login SMS. Receives your phone number and the SMS text, which contains your one-time code.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging (Google) — delivering notifications. Receives your device token and, for a message notification, the sender's public name and up to 120 characters of the message. For an alert, a sale reminder or an expired reservation, the listing's title. On iPhone, the notification is then delivered by Apple's push notification service. The Firebase SDK built into the app also sends Google technical diagnostic data, which is not linked to your account.
• Firebase Crashlytics (Google) — crash reports, as described above. Receives the error trace, technical information about the device and the installation's random identifier, never data from your account.
• Mapbox (United States) — map tiles. When you view a map, your phone downloads tiles from Mapbox's servers, which therefore see your IP address, the map area you are looking at and the app's identifier (user agent). The map data comes from OpenStreetMap.
• Infomaniak (Switzerland) — backups, through its Swiss Backup service. Every day a backup of the database and photos is sent there, encrypted on our server before it leaves: Infomaniak cannot read it. It is kept for up to 6 months.
• Apple or Google (geocoding) — as described above, your system's service receives the position to turn into a place name.
• Apple (connectivity check) — when the app cannot reach our servers, it loads Apple's connection test page (captive.apple.com) once, as iOS itself does, to tell whether the problem is your network or DealJE. Apple sees your IP address; no data from your account is sent.

Some of these providers may process data outside Switzerland and the European Union, notably in the United States (Google, Apple, Mapbox). These transfers rely on the safeguards provided for by the nFADP and the GDPR, such as standard contractual clauses and the Swiss/EU–US Data Privacy Framework these companies participate in.

5. How we protect your data

• All traffic between the app and the server is encrypted (HTTPS).
• SMS codes: valid for 5 minutes, deleted as soon as they are used, and erased no later than about ten minutes after sending if they are not.
• Sessions: the token that keeps you signed in is stored on the server only as a SHA-256 hash, so a copy of the database would not let anyone sign in as you. On your phone, tokens are kept in the system's secure keychain.
• Server logs: phone numbers are masked (only the last 3 digits remain readable), and neither message content nor your IP address appears in them.
• Abuse limits: your IP address is used, in memory only, to limit how many SMS codes one connection can request. It is not stored, and is forgotten at most one hour after your last request.

6. How long we keep your data

• Account data: for as long as the account exists.
• Listings: an active listing automatically becomes "expired" after 60 days, and stays linked to your account.
• Deleted listing: it disappears from the app and its photos are deleted from storage straight away. Its description and approximate position are erased 30 days after the deletion; if an open report concerns it, they are kept until moderation has dealt with the report. Its title and price stay, linked to the conversations about it, until you delete your account. If it had been sold, the date of the sale stays too: it is used to count the sales made on DealJE.
• SMS codes: a few minutes (see above).
• Session tokens: up to 60 days unused, 1 year at most, then deleted. Signing out revokes them.
• Notification tokens: until you sign out or delete the account, or as soon as Firebase reports them as invalid.
• Server logs: their size is capped and the oldest lines are deleted as new ones come in; the copy kept at each server update is deleted after 90 days.
• Crash reports: 90 days at Google (Firebase Crashlytics), then deleted.
• Backups: an encrypted backup of the database and photos is made every day and sent to Infomaniak (Swiss Backup, in Switzerland), where it is kept for up to 6 months. Only the working copy of the latest backup stays on the server itself, replaced every day by the next one. Backups may contain data erased since, until they are themselves deleted.

7. Deleting your account

From your profile in the app. Deletion is immediate and irreversible: there is no grace period, and the account cannot be restored.

What is erased

• Your phone number, first name, last name, email and public name.
• The photos of all your listings, deleted from storage. Your listings are removed from the app and no longer visible to anyone.
• The reviews you received.
• Your favourites, alerts, blocks (in both directions) and the reports you filed.
• Your notification tokens, your sessions and any pending SMS code.

What is kept, anonymised

• Your messages: a conversation also belongs to the other person, who keeps their history. Your messages remain in it, signed "Utilisateur" (User).
• The reviews you wrote: they are part of another seller's reputation. They stay visible, signed "Utilisateur".
• Reports filed against you: they are kept (reason, detail, date), attached to the anonymised account, so that deleting and signing up again does not wipe a record of conduct.
• The title and price of your former listings stay in the database, invisible, attached to the anonymised account, because the conversations that grew out of them depend on them, together with the sale date of those that were sold, to count the sales made on DealJE, and, when you said so by marking a listing sold, which conversation made the purchase, so that only that buyer can leave a review. Their description and approximate position are erased 30 days later (later only if an open report concerns them, while it is dealt with).
• The date on which you had accepted this policy.

Once this data is detached from your name, number and email, nothing in DealJE links it back to you. Your number becomes free for a new signup.

Erasing some of your data without deleting the account

• A listing: delete it from “Mes annonces” (My listings). Its photos are erased from storage at once, its description and approximate position 30 days later (section 6).
• Your favourites: tap the heart again.
• Your search alerts: delete them in Profile › “Mes alertes” (My alerts).
• A conversation: delete it from your inbox. It disappears for you only; the other person keeps their history.
• Your email address: clear the field in your profile and save.
• Anything else: write to contact@dealje.cloud.

Without access to the app

No longer have access to the app? Write to contact@dealje.cloud with the phone number of your account. We handle your request within 30 days. Before deleting anything, we check that the number is yours. The simplest way: reinstall the app, sign in with the code sent by SMS, then use Profile › “Supprimer mon compte” (Delete my account). If the number is no longer yours, we verify your identity through the account's email address or another proof before acting.

8. Legal basis

DealJE is subject to the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nFADP / nLPD). Because the app can also be used from the European Union (the border region, for instance), we also apply the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) where it applies.

• Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR): account, login, listings, messages, notifications — what the app cannot work without.
• Consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR): your location and notifications, which you allow in your phone's settings and can withdraw at any time.
• Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR): security, abuse prevention, keeping reports and technical logs, and crash reports to fix the app's errors.

9. Your rights

Under both the nFADP and the GDPR, you can:

• access your data and learn how it is processed;
• correct it — name, email and public name directly in your profile;
• erase it — by deleting your account (section 7) or by writing to us;
• receive it in a common, machine-readable format (portability);
• object to processing based on legitimate interest, or ask for it to be restricted;
• withdraw your consent at any time, without affecting what was done before.

For anything the app doesn't let you do directly, write to contact@dealje.cloud, from your account's email address if you gave one; otherwise we will ask for something to check that the request really comes from you. We will reply within 30 days.

You can also lodge a complaint with the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), edoeb.admin.ch, or, if you live in the European Union, with your country's data protection authority (in France, the CNIL).

10. Changes

If the app changes the way it handles your data, this page will be updated and its date changed.