Privacy policy

This policy explains how SOVO (“we”, “us”) collects, uses, shares and protects personal information when you use the SOVO app for iPhone and this website, sovo.world. We follow Canada’s Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). If you have a question, contact our Privacy Officer at support@sovo.world.

Who is responsible

SOVO is responsible for the personal information under its control. Our Privacy Officer is accountable for this policy and for how we handle personal information, and you can reach them at support@sovo.world.

What we collect

Your account

• Your email address and password, if you sign up with email. Your password is stored only as a secure hash by our sign-in provider, and we never see it.
• If you sign in with Apple or Google, the name, email address and account identifier they share with us, and your profile photo from Google if you have one. Apple lets you hide your email address, in which case we receive a relay address from Apple instead.

Your profile

• Your display name, your handle and your profile photo.

What you add to SOVO

• The hotels you rank, and the comparisons you make between them (which stay was better).
• Your stays: the hotel, who the trip was with (solo, couple, friends, family or business), your check-in and check-out dates, and any notes you write.
• Trip details you add: a trip name, its purpose and its tags.
• The price you paid for a stay and its currency, if you enter them.
• People you tag as companions on a stay.
• The hotels you save and the people you follow.

Technical information

• When the app talks to our servers, our service providers record technical details such as your IP address, your device and app version, and the time of the request. These logs keep the service secure and working.
• The app keeps your sign-in session in your device’s secure storage, so you stay signed in.

We don’t collect your location, your contacts, photos from your library, or card or billing details. We don’t use advertising or analytics tools, and we don’t track you across other companies’ apps or websites.

How we use it

• To create and secure your account, and to sign you in.
• To run SOVO: ranking your hotels, showing your lists, and powering the social features, such as following people, the feed, and what the people you follow thought of a hotel.
• To look up the hotels you search for and show their details and photos.
• To send account emails, such as confirming your email address.
• To answer you when you contact us.
• To keep SOVO safe: preventing abuse, enforcing our Terms of use and acting on reports.
• To meet our legal obligations.

We use personal information only for these purposes. If we ever want to use it for a new purpose, we’ll ask for your consent first.

What other people can see

SOVO is a social app. Other signed-in SOVO users can see:

• your display name, handle and profile photo;
• your rankings and your stays, including the hotel, who the trip was with, your dates and your notes;
• the hotels you save; and
• who you follow, and who follows you.

These stay private to you: your email address, the prices you paid, your trip names, purposes and tags, and your comparison history. If you tag a companion on a stay, only you and the person you tagged can see the tag. Nothing in SOVO is visible to people who aren’t signed in, and SOVO profiles aren’t published on the web.

Who we share it with

We don’t sell or rent personal information. We share it only with the service providers that run SOVO for us, under agreements that limit what they can do with it:

• Supabase hosts our database and servers, runs sign-in, and sends account emails.
• Google provides Sign in with Google, and hotel search, details and photos through Google Places. When you search, our servers send your search text to Google, without your name or email address. Hotel photos and Google profile photos load from Google’s servers, which receive your device’s IP address.
• Apple provides Sign in with Apple and distributes the app through the App Store.
• Cloudflare hosts and protects this website.
• Spaceship provides our email, so it processes the messages you send us.

We may also disclose personal information when the law requires it, such as in response to a valid court order, or when it’s needed to protect someone’s safety.

Where your information is stored

Our service providers store and process information outside Canada, including in the United States. Information stored in another country is subject to that country’s laws, and its courts and authorities may be able to access it.

How long we keep it

We keep your information for as long as you have an account. When you delete your account, we delete your profile and everything you added within 30 days, including content other people could see. Copies in our providers’ backups and logs are removed on their regular schedules. We keep information longer only when the law requires it.

Your choices and rights

• Access and correction. You can see and edit your profile in the app. You can also ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, by emailing support@sovo.world. We reply within 30 days.
• Deletion. You can ask us to delete your account by emailing support@sovo.world. We confirm the request with you, then delete your account and your data within 30 days.
• Withdrawing consent. You can withdraw your consent at any time by deleting your account. SOVO can’t work without some information, such as an account.
• Complaints. If you’re unhappy with how we handle your information, contact our Privacy Officer first. You can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada at priv.gc.ca.

If you live in the European Union, the United Kingdom or California, your local law gives you rights too, including to access, correct, delete or receive a copy of your information, and to object to some uses. Email us to use them. We don’t sell or share personal information for advertising, and we won’t treat you differently for using your rights.

Children

SOVO isn’t for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, email us and we’ll delete it.

Security

We protect your information with encryption in transit, access rules on every table in our database that limit each person to what this policy describes, and passwords stored only as secure hashes. No system is perfectly secure. If a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we’ll tell you and the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, as the law requires.

This website

sovo.world sets no cookies of its own, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from other companies; its fonts and images are served from sovo.world itself. Cloudflare, which hosts the site, processes your IP address and request details to deliver and protect it, and may set a security cookie if it needs to check for automated traffic. If you email us, we use your message and address only to reply.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we’ll post the new version here and update the effective date. If a change is significant, we’ll also tell you in the app or by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Privacy Officer, SOVO: support@sovo.world