AnimalHub - Privacy Policy

AnimalHub. Privacy Policy

Effective: May 14, 2025

Welcome!

This Policy explains how we collect and use your data and how you can control your information.

Transparency is one of our core values at AnimalHub. We believe there shouldn't be any surprises about the data we collect and how we use it - that's why we're upfront with how we process it. For example, we process your information to provide you a more personalized experience, including to show you content and information that is most relevant to your experience. Understanding your interests and preferences help us provide a better product experience.

Furthermore, we believe a personalized experience should not come at the expense of your privacy. Just like in real life, there are some moments you want to share privately with your close friends, and others that you want to share publicly.

This Policy covers our AnimalHub app as well as our other products, services, and features, such as our website. When you read "Services" in this Policy, we're talking about all of them. Also, if you see us refer to our "Terms," we mean the Terms of Service that you agree to when you sign up for our Services. Finally, if you see the term "AnimalHubber" we are often using that as shorthand for any user of our Services.

Let's get started with the controls you have over your information:

Control Over Your Information

Control over your information and settings is a core part of AnimalHub experience. You can access, update, and delete your information, decide who can contact you. Below, we give you more details on the types of settings that are available, and provide instructions on how to delete data or your account.

We want you to be in control of your information, so we provide you with a range of tools, including:

Access and update your information. You can access and edit most of your basic account information right in our Services. Just navigate to your settings and you will see the options available to you.
Delete your information. If you want to delete your account, you can directly go to Profile -> Edit Profile -> Personal Information -> Request Account Deletion. You can also delete some information within our Services, like content you've saved, content you've shared, and more.
Control who can see your content. We've built a number of tools that let you choose who you share your content with. In some cases you may want to share content with your friends, and in other instances you may want to share it with the public.

Information We Collect

This section provides you with details on what information we collect: what you provide to us, what we collect when you use AnimalHub, and information we receive from other companies or apps you've connected to your AnimalHub account. Sometimes, we may also collect additional information, with your permission.

When you use our Services, such as AnimalHub, we collect information you provide to us, generate information when you use our Services, and in some cases receive data from others. Let's break these down in more detail.

Information You Provide

Many of our Services require you to set up an account. To do this, we ask you to provide us with account details (information about you, like your name, username, email address). When you set up your profile, you'll also provide us with profile details (like your profile picture).

Of course, you'll also provide us with information you send through or save within our Services, including content and information about that content, and content you share and generate with our features (content, or "Inputs," including text, images, video, audio, precise location, and engagement, used to generate content and responses, or "Outputs"). We consider some of this information to be private content and communications. On the other end of the spectrum, some of the information you send through or save within our Services may be public content that is accessible to everyone (such as your Public Profile information). Keep in mind that AnimalHubbers who view your content, can always screenshot that content, save it, or copy it outside the AnimalHub app. So please don't send messages or share content that you wouldn't want someone to save or share.

Lastly, when you contact Support (content and communications shared with Support) or our Safety team, or communicate with us in any other way, including through our research efforts (like responses to surveys, consumer panels, or other research questions) we'll collect whatever information you provide or that we need to resolve your question.

Information We Generate When You Use Our Services

When you use our Services, we collect information about which of those Services you've used and how you've used them. This helps us better understand the way our community uses our Services so that we can make improvements.

This includes usage information (information about how you interact with our Services - for example, how often you interact with other AnimalHubbers) and content information (information about content you create or provide, your engagement, your interactions, and metadata - for example, information about the content itself like the date and time it was posted and who viewed it). Content information includes information based on the content of the image, or any other multimedia.

This also includes device information (such as your hardware or software, operating system, device memory), information collected by cookies and similar technologies, depending on your settings, and log information (such as details about how you've used our Services, access times, pages viewed, IP address, and unique identifiers like cookies).

Data We Receive From Others

The last category of data we collect is information about you that we may receive from others, such as other users, our affiliates, and third parties. This includes linked third-party service data (information we get when you link your AnimalHub account to another service), data from advertisers, contact info from other AnimalHubbers or third parties, and data relating to potential violations of our Terms (we may receive information from third parties, including website publishers, social network providers, law enforcement, and others, about potential violators of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines).

Other Information, With Your Permission

Additionally, there may be instances when you interact with our Services that we will ask your permission to collect additional information.

How We Use Information

This section explains how we use the information we collect. Among other things, we use the information we collect to provide you with personalized products and Services that we work hard to build and improve. Below, we walk through each purpose for which we use information in detail.

Keep Things Up & Running (i.e., operate, deliver, and maintain our Services)

We use the information we collect in order to operate, deliver, and maintain our Services. We also use some of your information to help keep our products up to date, for example to make sure that our Services work with the latest operating systems and devices.

Personalize Your Experience & Give Context

We offer personalized Services to AnimalHubbers. One of the ways we do this is by showing you content that is relevant to you or we think you may enjoy based on the information you share with us. To do so, we use information about you across different areas of the Services in order to add context to your AnimalHub experience. For example, we automatically tag content with labels based on the content, your location, or the time of day. So if there's a dog in the photo, it may be searchable by the term "dog," and inform us that you're into dogs so we can surface you fun dog content in other parts of our Services.

Personalization can also help with suggesting people to follow. We may infer your interests based on your content or activity, or customize the content we show you. Personalization also includes tailoring your experience based on who you interact with most and what your friends are doing, including showing you content your friends create, like, or enjoy.

Our goal is to continuously provide you with more relevant and interesting content.

For example, if you watch a lot of horses, our recommendation algorithms will prioritize horses, but not dogs.

We believe it is critical to also balance the benefits of personalization with our AnimalHubbers' expectations of privacy. For example, we may automatically tag the content you save based on the content within it (e.g., the photo contained a dog), and then use that tag to personalize your experience, make recommendations. We do not use the private content and communications you send to your friends to personalize your experience, make recommendations.

Analytics

In order to understand what to build or how to improve our Services, we need to understand trends and demand for our features. For example, we monitor metadata and trends to help decide whether we should change parts of the feature. Studying data from AnimalHubbers can help us see trends in the ways that people use the Services. This helps inspire us to improve AnimalHub on a larger scale. We perform analytics in order to identify, monitor, and analyze trends and usage. Based on this information, we will, among other things, create information about our users to help us understand demand.

Research

We conduct research to better understand general consumer interests, trends, and how our Services are used by you and others in our community. This information, along with analytics (as we described above), helps us understand more about our community and about how our Services fit into the lives of those in our community. We also engage in research and development to develop new techniques and technologies. The results of our research are sometimes used in features on AnimalHub.

Enhance the Safety & Security of Our Services

We use your information to enhance the safety and security of our Services, verify AnimalHubber identity, and prevent fraud or other unauthorized or illegal activity.

Contacting You

Sometimes we'll get in touch with you to promote new or existing features. This includes sending AnimalHubbers communications through AnimalHub, email, or other messaging platforms, where permitted. For example, we may use the AnimalHub app, email, or other messaging platforms to share information about our Services and promotional offers that we think may interest you.

Other times, we need to communicate with you to provide information, alerts, or to send messages our users ask us to deliver at their request. This may include sending communications through AnimalHub, email, or other messaging platforms, where permitted, to deliver account status updates, security alerts, or friending reminders; it may also include fulfilling our user's request to send invites or AnimalHub content to non-AnimalHubbers.

Support

When you ask for help, we want to get you support as quickly as possible. In order to provide you, the AnimalHubber community, and our business partners with the help needed to resolve issues with our Services, we often need to use the information we have collected to respond.

Enforce Our Terms & Policies

We use the data we collect to enforce our Terms and the law. This includes enforcing, investigating, and reporting conduct that violates our Terms, policies, or the law, responding to requests from law enforcement, and complying with legal requirements. For example, when unlawful content is posted on our Services, we may need to enforce our Terms and other policies. In some cases, we may also use or share your information to cooperate with law enforcement requests, escalate safety issues to law enforcement, industry partners, or others, or comply with our legal obligations.

Other Purposes, With Your Permission

Additionally, there may be instances when you interact with our Services that we will ask for your permission to use your information in a new, different, or otherwise specific way.

This section explains who we share information with, what that information may include, and the reasons for sharing that information, including when we need to transfer it outside of the country it was collected from.

AnimalHub. To provide our Services to you and our community, we may share your information with your friends on AnimalHub or other AnimalHubbers. For example, the content you post, is shared with people you allowed.
Public. Most of the features on AnimalHub are private, but we also offer public features that allow you to be discoverable outside of AnimalHub, for example on the web. Your Public profile information, like your username, are visible to the public.
Service Providers. We share your information with our service providers, who process that information on our behalf. For example, we rely on such Service Providers to facilitate authentication, or protect the services.
Business and Integrated Partners. We share your information with business and integrated partners in order to provide the Services.
Anti-Fraud Partners. We share your information, such as device and usage information, with industry partners working to prevent fraud.
Legal, Safety, and Security Partners. We share your information as necessary for the following legal, safety, and security reasons:
- comply with any valid legal process, governmental request, or applicable law, rule, or regulation.
- investigate, remedy, or enforce potential Terms of Service and Community Guidelines violations.
- protect the rights, property, or safety of us, our users, or others.
- detect and resolve any fraud or security concerns.
For the purposes of a Merger or Acquisition. If we were to sell or negotiate to sell our business to a buyer or possible buyer, we may transfer your information to a successor or affiliate as part of that transaction.

International Data Transfers

Our Services connect you with your friends around the world. To make that possible, we may collect your personal information from, transfer it to, and store and process it in India or other countries outside of where you live. Whenever we share information outside of where you live, we ensure safeguards are in place to protect the data as required by law where you live.

How Long We Keep Your Information

In this section we provide you with information on how long we keep your information, why we keep your information, and also highlight how we may need to keep your information to comply with laws, courts, and other obligations.

As a general rule, we keep information as long as you tell us to, and otherwise as long as we need it to provide our Services, or as required by law. For example, if you save a post, we will keep it as long as you need it. Whether we retain your data depends on the specific feature, your settings, and how you're using the Services. Here are some more factors we consider when we decide how long to keep your information:

If we need the information to operate or provide our Services. For example, we store your basic account details - like your name, and email address - to maintain your account.
To do the things you expect from our Services and as we've described within this Privacy Policy. For example, we maintain your list of followers/followings until you ask us to delete them since these are key to expressing yourself.
If we need it for other legitimate purposes, such as to prevent harm, investigate possible violations of our Terms of Service or other policies, investigate reports of abuse, or protect ourselves or others.

Although our systems are designed to delete some of your information automatically, we cannot promise that deletion will take place by a specific time.

In some cases we need to comply with legal requirements to store your data which stops us from deleting your information. For example, if we receive a notice from a court asking us to keep a copy of your content. Other reasons we may keep a copy of your data are if we get reports of abuse or other Terms or policy violations, or if your account, content created by you, or content created with other AnimalHubbers is flagged by others or our systems for abuse or other Terms or policy violations. Finally, we may also keep certain information in backup for a limited period of time or as required by law.

Region Specific Information

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights, this section provides more details on region specific information.

We do our best to keep our policies as simple as possible, but depending on where you live, you have some additional rights or there may be specific information that you should be aware of. Some jurisdictions require that we state our legal basis for processing data for particular purposes.

Our Audience

Our Services are directed to individuals 12 years and older.

Our Services are not directed to children under the age of 12, and you must confirm that you are 12 years or older in order to create an account and use our Services. If we have actual knowledge that you are under the age of 12 (or the minimum age at which a person may use the Services in your state, province, or country without parental consent, if greater), we will stop providing Services to you and delete your account and data.

In addition, we may also limit how we collect, use, and store some of the information of AnimalHubbers under 18. In some cases, this means we will be unable to provide certain functionality to people under the age of 18.

Updates to the Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time, and will give you a heads up if we make any changes we think you should know about.

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. But when we do, we'll let you know one way or another. Sometimes, we'll let you know by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy that's available on our website and mobile application. Other times, we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to our websites' homepages or providing you with an in-app notification).

Contact Us

Have any questions about the information here or wish to contact us? please contact us at: [email protected]