Privacy Policy

1. Your messages are private by design

Wakies are private between the sender and the recipient. They are encrypted in transit and at rest, and they are not watched, previewed, or analyzed for advertising by our team. The unlock time is enforced on our servers (not merely hidden in the app), so no one, including us, can play a Wakie before the moment its sender chose. We access the content of a message only when a recipient reports it for abuse, when we are required to for safety or by law, or when you ask us to in order to help with support.

2. What we collect

• Account basics: your name, email address, and the avatar you choose.
• Your connections: who you have connected with inside WakieUp. If you opt in to contact matching, your phone numbers and email addresses are sent to us over an encrypted connection, where we turn each one into a keyed, one-way code and immediately discard the original. We store only those codes and never keep your raw address book.
• Invites: when you invite someone, we store the phone number or email you sent it to, encrypted, so we can send them a code that proves the invite reached the right person. We delete it once the invite is used, revoked or expires. If someone else tries to use your invite and you are asked to approve them, we show you a masked version of the email they signed in with (for example m•••@gmail.com) so you can tell who it is.
• Your content: the Wakies you record and their covers and messages, stored encrypted until they are delivered and opened.
• Device basics: a push-notification token and your device timezone, so your Wakies open at the right local time. We never collect your location.
• Limited usage and diagnostic information needed to keep the Service running, secure, and reliable.

3. How we use what we collect

We use this information to deliver your Wakies at the right moment to the right person, to keep your account and the Service secure, to provide support, to prevent abuse, to check that profile names and photos are appropriate (below), and, for free accounts, to show a small number of family-friendly, non-personalized ads. That is the whole list.

To keep people search and community boards like the Round-Up leaderboard safe, we check that the name on your profile looks like a real name and isn't offensive. To do this we send only your first and last name, nothing else about you, to an AI moderation service (TypeSafe), which processes it for us under terms that don't let it train AI models on your name or share it beyond its own service providers. If a name doesn't pass, your connections still see it, and everyone else sees "WakieUp member" until you change it. If the check isn't sure about a name, it simply stays visible only to your connections.

Every profile photo must be a clear photo of its owner's face, so your people know it's really you. A new photo is checked before anyone else can see it: first on your device, then on our servers. To protect children, our servers compare a one-way digital fingerprint of the photo (never the photo itself) against known child sexual abuse material using Microsoft PhotoDNA. A photo that passes is then checked against our photo rules by an AI moderation service (Anthropic's Claude), which processes it for us under terms that don't let it use your photo for anything else. As the law requires, apparent child sexual abuse material is preserved and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). A trained WakieUp team member may review a photo our child-safety checks flag.

4. What we never do

• We never sell your personal information.
• We never rent or share your content for other companies to advertise to you.
• We never read your Wakies to build advertising profiles.
• We never collect or track your location.
• We never show children personalized ads.

5. Recipients can save Wakies

After a Wakie unlocks, its recipient can download it. What someone you chose to message does with a saved copy is outside our control, so send to people you trust.

6. Children and family accounts

We ask for your birthday when you set up WakieUp so we can keep the app age-appropriate. For younger users, any ads are contextual only (never personalized) and are held to a child-appropriate content rating.

An account for a child under 13 stays limited until a parent or guardian adds the child to their family by scanning a code from the child's device. Until then we keep only the minimum information needed to obtain that consent. We do not knowingly collect more personal information from a child under 13 without verifiable parental consent; if we learn we have, we delete it.

When a child is part of a family, a parent or guardian:

• approves who the child can connect with, and can end any of the child's connections;
• can review the text "get-to-know-you" chat that happens before a connection is accepted; both people in that chat are told a guardian may review it;
• cannot watch the videos inside the child's Wakies.

A family member who is 18 or older can leave supervision at any time from the Family screen. A guardian can also release a child. This section is evolving as laws on age assurance change.

7. Payments

Subscriptions are processed by your app store under its terms. Gift-card purchases are handled by a third-party payment provider and fulfilled by a third-party gift-card provider. We share with these providers only what they need to process the transaction, and we never see or store your full card number.

8. How we keep your data safe

We protect your information with encryption in transit and at rest, strict access controls, and the principle that the people who built WakieUp do not browse your messages. Access to content is limited to the narrow safety, legal, and support cases described above and is logged.

9. Reporting and safety

If a recipient reports a Wakie, the report, including the reported message, is reviewed by our team so we can act on abuse. The person who is reported is not told who reported them.

10. Your choices and deleting your data

You can delete your account at any time in Settings. When you do, your profile, undelivered Wakies, and media are removed, and your identity on previously delivered Wakies is anonymized. You can contact us at any time to ask about the personal information we hold about you.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will ask you to review and accept the new version before you continue using WakieUp.

Questions or requests? Contact us at support@wakieup.com.