Privacy Policy — Tierlink

1. Who we are

Tierlink is operated by [Legal entity name], [Street address, postcode, city, country] (“Tierlink”, “we”, “us”). We are the controller of the personal data described here. You can reach us at [email protected].

This policy covers the Tierlink mobile apps, the Tierlink API and this website.

2. What we collect

Almost everything below is data you type or upload yourself. We do not buy data about you, we do not run advertising, and the Tierlink apps carry no analytics or tracking SDKs.

What	Details we store	When
Account	Your sign-in method (Google, Apple, email or phone), the user id our sign-in provider issues, your email address and / or phone number, whether the email is verified, and a public id we generate for you.	When you register
Profile	First and last name, username, profile photo, header image.	When you fill in your profile
Address	Street, postcode, city, country and the coordinates of the place you pick, plus your choice of whether to show the precise location.	When you add an address
Pets	Name, age, breed, description and a photo, per pet.	When you add a pet
Service profile	Your description, the services you offer (boarding, drop-in visits, walking, day care, grooming), whether you travel to the customer, your prices per animal type, your currency, and whether the profile is switched on.	If you offer pet services
Content	Posts and their photos (up to 10 per post), and who you follow.	When you post or follow
Messages	Message text, photos (up to 10 per message), which message a reply belongs to, and when you last read a conversation.	When you use chat
Devices	A push notification token per device and the platform it belongs to (iOS, Android or web).	When you allow notifications
Support	The text of any service request you send us from the app.	When you write to us
Technical logs	Standard server logs kept by our hosting stack — IP address, time, and the request that was made — used to keep the service running and to investigate abuse.	Every request

We never receive your password. Sign-in is handled by Firebase Authentication, and we only ever see the account identifier it hands back to us.

3. What is public and what is not

Tierlink is a place to be found, so parts of your profile are deliberately public. Your profile page can be opened by anyone with the link — no Tierlink account needed — and active service profiles appear in Explore.

Visible to anyone

Your name, username and public id
Your profile photo and header image
Your pets, posts and post photos
The services you offer and your prices
Your area — see location precision

Visible only to signed-in users

Your service profile description
Your exact address, if you chose to show it

Never shown to other users

Your email address
Your phone number
Your sign-in provider account id

Your email and phone number are stripped from every profile the API returns to other people. They are used for sign-in and, where you have asked for it, for contacting you.

4. Your address and location precision

Tierlink does not track your device location in the background. An address is stored only when you choose one in the app, and it is used to place you on the Explore map and to let people search by city or postcode.

You control how precisely it is published with the show precise location setting:

On — signed-in users see your full address and exact coordinates. Signed-out visitors still only see the rounded version below.
Off — everyone sees only your postcode and city, and coordinates rounded to two decimal places, which places you within roughly a kilometre rather than at your door.

Whatever the setting, we keep the precise coordinates you entered so that area searches return the right results; the rounding is applied when we answer a request, and you can remove the address entirely at any time.

5. Photos and what they carry

Every photo you upload — profile, header, pet, post or message — is re-encoded by our server before it is stored. Re-encoding drops the metadata your camera attaches, including any GPS coordinates, so the location where a photo was taken is not published with it. Photos are also resized: up to 2048 px for post and message photos, and smaller for pet photos.

Photos are stored under a random, unguessable filename and are served without a login. That keeps them out of search engines and out of reach of anyone guessing URLs, but it also means that anyone you give the exact link to can open the image, including a photo sent in a private chat. Share links to photos with the same care as the photos themselves.

6. Messages

Messages are stored on our servers so that they can be delivered and re-read on your other devices. They are not end-to-end encrypted: we can technically access message content, and we do so only where we must — to keep the service running, or to act on a report of abuse or a legal obligation.

When you delete a message, we erase its text immediately and mark the message as deleted; the empty placeholder stays in the conversation so the thread still makes sense to the other person. Only the sender can delete a message, and only participants of a conversation can read it.

7. Push notifications

If you allow notifications, your device registers a push token with us. To deliver a notification we hand Firebase Cloud Messaging the token together with the content of the notification — for a chat message that is a preview of up to 120 characters, the sender's name and their profile photo path.

Turn notifications off on your device, or sign out, and the token is removed. We also delete tokens automatically as soon as Firebase reports a device as gone.

8. Why we use your data

Under the GDPR we need a legal basis for each use. Ours are:

Performing our contract with you — running your account, showing your profile, delivering messages, listing your services in Explore, and answering your support requests.
Your consent — push notifications, and publishing your precise address when you switch that setting on. You can withdraw either at any time in the app.
Our legitimate interests — keeping the service secure and available, preventing abuse and spam (for example the cap of five service requests per hour), and debugging failures.
Legal obligations — where the law requires us to keep or disclose something.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not sell it, and we do not make automated decisions with legal effects about you.

9. Who else sees your data

Other users — as described in section 3.
Google (Firebase) — Firebase Authentication verifies who you are at sign-in, and Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers push notifications, including the preview text they contain.
Our hosting provider — our application and database run on rented servers. The database and all uploaded files are ours; we do not use a third-party image host or content delivery network for them.
This website only — pages on tierlink.app load Bootstrap and a CSS reset from the jsDelivr CDN and the Firebase sign-in scripts from Google's gstatic.com. Those requests reveal your IP address to those providers. The mobile apps do not use them.
Authorities — where we are legally required to disclose something.

Google processes data in the United States as well as the EU. Those transfers rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.

10. How long we keep it

Your account and everything in it: until you delete your account.
Individual items: until you delete them. Deleting a post, a pet, a photo or an address removes it, and the underlying image file is removed with it.
Message text you delete: erased at once, as described above.
Service requests you send us: kept while we handle them and for our records afterwards.
Technical logs: kept short-term for security and troubleshooting.

11. Deleting your account

You can delete your account from the app. It happens immediately and cannot be undone. We delete:

your account record, profile, username and public id;
your address, pets, posts, service profile, prices and follows;
the messages you sent — they disappear from the other person's conversation too — along with your place in every conversation;
your push notification tokens and your service requests;
the image files for your profile photo, header image, posts and pets;
your sign-in account at Firebase.

One exception: photo files you attached to chat messages are detached from the conversation and are no longer reachable through the app, but the files themselves may remain in our storage. Write to us and we will remove them.

12. Your rights

If you are in the EU or the UK you have the right to access your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to withdraw consent, and to receive your data in a portable form. Much of this you can do yourself in the app: your profile screen shows the data we hold, editing it corrects it, and account deletion erases it.

For anything else, write to [email protected]. We answer within one month. You also have the right to complain to a data protection authority — for us that is [Competent data protection authority].

13. Security

Traffic between your device and Tierlink is encrypted with TLS. Every request to a private part of the API is checked against a fresh sign-in token, and requests can only ever read or change the data of the account that made them — for example, you can only remove your own push tokens, delete your own messages and edit your own posts. Credentials never touch our database. No system is perfect, and we will tell you and the relevant authority if a breach affects you.

14. Children

Tierlink is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will remove it.

15. Changes to this policy

When the service changes, this policy changes with it. We will update the date at the top, and for anything significant we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.

16. Contact

[Legal entity name]
[Street address, postcode, city, country]
[email protected]