privacy policy

what snips is

in short: one photo or short video a day. it seals at midnight. that shapes everything below.

The Service lets you capture one moment per day — a Snip: a photo or a short video. A Snip seals at the end of its day: it can't be edited, and a past day can never be refilled, even by deleting its Snip. A new Snip is shared with your friends by default (no one else), and you can instead keep it fully private — snips is private by default, with no public or discovery surface right now. This one-a-day design is central to the product, and the retention section below explains exactly what it means for your data.

information we collect

in short: your sign-in details, your Snips, optional location, and the technical bits needed to run the app. nothing more.

Account information. You sign in with Apple, with Google, or with a one-time code sent to your email address. From Apple or Google we receive your name (if you share it) and your email address, plus an identifier that links your account. We never see your Apple or Google password. If you sign in by email code, we hold the email address you used; the code itself is sent for us by Resend, our email delivery provider.

Profile. Your display name, handle, optional avatar photo, timezone (so “one Snip per day” follows your local day), default Snip audience, and daily-reminder preferences.

Birthday. Your date of birth. We use it to check that you are 13 or older, and for the app's own birthday touches on your day (candles on your Snip). Friends cannot see it. If the birthday you give is under 13, the account is blocked and you have 30 days to appeal; after that the account is purged.

Home place (optional). A place you name as home, stored as a label and a coordinate. We use it for place-aware touches, such as the time-of-day tint of your profile wall. The coordinate is never shown to anyone; the label appears on your wall only if you add the home chip there yourself.

Your Snips. The photos and short videos you capture, the time of capture, any note you attach, and the audience you chose for each one. For a video Snip we also store a still poster frame.

Location (optional). If you grant location permission, a Snip can carry where it was taken, visible only to the audience you chose for that Snip. If you never grant the permission, Snips simply carry no location.

Friends and reactions. Who you are friends with on the Service, friend requests, and the reactions you and your friends leave on shared Snips. Friendships start from an invite link you send, a search for someone by name, or an optional “add from contacts”. If you choose that and grant permission, the app reads the email addresses in the contacts on your device, turns each one into a one-way hash (SHA-256), and sends only the hashes so we can look for matching accounts. The address book itself never leaves your phone, we do not store the hashes, and the lookup is rate limited.

Circles and messages. Circle chats and direct messages with friends: the text, reactions, comments, hand-drawn doodles, and stickers you send, and who has seen a message or is typing. People in a conversation with you can see when you are typing. We store this so it can be delivered to and shown to the people in the conversation, and a copy is kept on your device so the chat opens quickly. You can unsend a circle Snip, and you can delete stickers you made.

Tags. Who you tag on a Snip. A tag is a name and nothing more: it never changes who can see the Snip. The person you tag gets a notification.

Stickers. Stickers are cut out on your device (Apple Vision on iOS, ML Kit on Android). The finished sticker image is stored in your account, and it can include friends you chose to cut out. Friends can use stickers of you in chats and on walls.

Your profile wall and moments (rolling out). The layout of your wall, whatever you and your friends leave on today's band (drawings, stickers, pinned Snips), and your moment: the song, movie, series, book, podcast, game, place, or anything else you say you are into, with its title, artist or author, artwork link, preview link, and your one-line note. When you search for a moment, the words you type go to Apple's iTunes Search service to find matches. No account information travels with them, and Apple's privacy policy covers that request. Previews stream from Apple's servers when you tap play. Your wall and your moments are visible to your friends unless you set the wall to only me.

Device and technical data. A push-notification token for your device (so reminders and friend notifications can reach you) and the device platform. On iOS, if you allow it, a Live Activity on your lock screen can carry your daily reminder while the app is closed; it uses a device token, like a push notification.

Feedback. If you send feedback from inside the app, your message is delivered to our inbox.

Usage analytics. We measure how the Service is used, so we can tell which parts work and which are broken. This never includes your content: no photos or videos, no captions, no names, handles or email addresses, no message or comment text, and no precise location. What we record is the shape of an action, not what was in it — that a Snip was sealed and whether it was a photo or a video, that a screen was opened, that an upload failed and why, how many friends an account has. In the app these are linked to your account's internal ID so we can tell a returning person from a new one; signing out unlinks them. Our analytics provider is PostHog, acting on our instructions.

Where visitors come from. On the snips.so website we record which link or campaign brought you — the referring site and any campaign tags in the address. This is cookie-less and not tied to any profile of you across visits. The addresses of invite pages are stripped before they are recorded, so an invite link is never stored in our analytics.

What we never do. The Service carries no advertising SDKs, no ad networks and no third-party trackers. We do not build advertising profiles, we do not sell or share your data for advertising, and we do not track you across other apps or websites.

how we use your information

in short: to run the app and send the notifications you asked for. no ads, no profiling, no selling.

• To provide the Service: storing your Snips, showing them to the audience you chose, syncing across your devices.
• To send notifications you control: daily capture reminders and friend activity.
• To respond when you contact us.
• To debug problems and protect the Service against abuse and fraud.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers, and we do not use it to train AI models.

If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, these are our legal bases: running the Service you asked for (contract); your consent for the optional parts (location, contacts, notifications, the selfie avatar); and our legitimate interest in keeping the Service safe and in understanding how it is used.

We disclose personal information only if the law requires it, to protect the safety of users or the public, or — should the project ever become or join a company — to a successor that commits to honoring this policy. We would notify you of such a change.

who we work with

in short: a short list of services that run parts of snips for us, on our instructions. no one else gets your data.

These companies process data for us, only so the Service can work:

• Supabase: the database, file storage, and sign-in, hosted in the United States and the European Union;
• Expo: delivery of push notifications;
• Apple and Google: sign-in;
• Apple's iTunes Search service: searching for a moment and playing its preview;
• PostHog: usage analytics;
• Anthropic: the optional selfie avatar;
• Resend, sending from our own mail domain: sign-in codes and the export email.

One more, for a surface that does not exist yet: if a public tier is ever switched on, Snips submitted to it would be screened by an automated moderation service (OpenAI) before they appear. There is no public tier today.

the selfie avatar (optional)

in short: you can make your avatar from a selfie. one small copy goes to an AI service to suggest a look, then it's gone — we never store your selfie.

What happens. You can build your cartoon avatar from a selfie. If you choose to, the app measures the photo on your device (a smile, a head tilt) and also sends one downscaled copy — at most 512 pixels — to Anthropic, the AI provider we use, to suggest which creature, colors, and mood fit. What comes back is a tiny recipe of shapes and colors, never an image.

What is kept. Nothing. The selfie is deleted from your device's cache as soon as the suggestion returns; it is never uploaded to our servers, never written to our database, and we never see it. Only the avatar look you choose to save is stored, and it contains no photo and no biometric data — the on-device measurements never leave your phone.

The AI provider. Anthropic processes the image solely to answer that one request and does not use it to train AI models; under its commercial terms it may retain API inputs briefly for abuse monitoring before deletion.

Consent. The app explains this and asks before the camera ever opens, and the feature is entirely optional — the avatar studio works fully without it.

who can see what

in short: private means you. friends means the friends you've accepted. there's no public tier right now.

Every Snip has an audience, and you can change a Snip's audience at any time, including after it seals:

• Private — visible only to you.
• Friends — visible to the friends you have accepted on the Service. This is the default audience for new accounts — though until you actually add a friend, a friends-audience Snip is still seen by no one but you. You can change your default at any time in settings.

reports and account safety

in short: you can report any Snip and block anyone. where the law requires it, we report content indicating child sexual abuse to the authorities.

Every Snip can be reported, and any user can be blocked, directly in the app — see the safety page for how. Reports reach us and are reviewed by a person. Where the law requires it, content indicating child sexual abuse is reported to the relevant authorities.

retention and deletion

in short: you can delete any Snip, with undo until midnight that day. delete today's and the day reopens for a new Snip; delete an older one and the day stays empty. you can also make any Snip private, export everything, or delete your whole account.

You can delete any Snip individually. Deleting one removes it from your timeline, from your friends' view, and from new exports right away. You can undo the deletion until midnight (in your timezone at the time) on the day you delete it, unless you've already snipped again for that day; after the undo window the photo or video is permanently removed from our storage. Delete the Snip taken today and that day reopens — you can snip again until midnight. Delete a Snip from an earlier day and that day stays empty for good; we keep only the date so that day cannot be refilled. Copies already downloaded to friends' devices, links shared before the deletion, and exports made earlier are not retroactively erased. What you can always do as well:

• Change the audience of any Snip at any time, including making it fully private.
• Export your data: the app can produce an archive of your Snips and their details.
• Delete your account, in the app under profile → delete account. This permanently removes your account, profile, Snips, media files (photos and videos), friendships, reactions, comments, export archives, and push tokens — the deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. You can also email hello@snips.sofrom your account's address and we will complete the deletion for you.

When you delete your account in the app, we keep a single anonymous note — the leaving reason you picked and how many Snips the account held — with nothing in it that links back to you. We use it only to understand why people leave.

Chats, wall content, moments, and stickers are kept until you delete them or delete your account. A wall day seals at midnight and stays as it is unless you peel off or remove what is on it.

After account deletion, residual copies may persist briefly in encrypted backups before being purged on their normal cycle.

your rights

in short: ask us what we have about you, get a copy, fix it, or have it deleted — just email.

Wherever you live, we extend you the same rights: to access the personal information we hold about you, to receive a copy of it, to correct it, and to have it deleted. If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, these correspond to your rights under the GDPR (including objection, restriction, and the right to complain to your supervisory authority); if you are in Israel, to your rights under the Privacy Protection Law; if you are in California, to your CCPA rights — and, as stated above, we do not sell or share personal information for advertising. To exercise any of these, email hello@snips.so. We may need to verify that a request really comes from the account owner.

international transfers

in short: your data lives on cloud infrastructure that may be outside your country, protected by standard safeguards.

Your data is stored and processed on cloud infrastructure that may be located outside your country, including in the United States and the European Union. Where a transfer out of the EEA/UK requires safeguards, we rely on recognized mechanisms such as standard contractual clauses.

children

in short: you must be 13 or older. we don't knowingly keep data from younger kids.

The Service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

security

in short: encrypted in transit and at rest, with access locked down per account — though no system is perfect.

Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest, and database-level access rules ensure each account can only reach its own private data. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot promise absolute security — but if we learn of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you as the law requires.

changes to this policy

in short: if this policy changes meaningfully, you'll know before it takes effect.

We may update this policy as the Service evolves. For material changes we will give you notice — in the app or by email — before the change takes effect, and the date at the top always reflects the latest revision.

contact

in short: hello@snips.so — a real person reads it.

Questions, requests, or concerns about privacy: hello@snips.so.