Welcome Party Privacy Policy

Effective November 9, 2026. Welcome Party is operated by Elan Lee. Contact elanlee@gmail.com with privacy questions.

Information used to run the app

• Account: your phone number, display name, account identifier and preferences. Phone sign-in uses Google Firebase Authentication. Google processes phone numbers for authentication and spam and abuse prevention across Google services.
• City: your home city, current city, travel status and whether you have announced your visit. Your phone resolves approximate location into a city. The app does not upload location coordinates to our server. Its current-city record is replaced when your city changes.
• Friends: friend requests, confirmed friendships and blocks. If you grant Contacts permission, the app hashes phone numbers and email addresses on your device and sends those hashes to find existing users. Address-book names and full contact cards are not uploaded. Hashes remain personal data; they are not anonymous. You can also enter a phone number to send a friend request. If that number has not registered, we retain its salted hash, the sender’s account identifier and the request time so the request can be delivered after the number is verified during signup. The queued record is removed after delivery or when the sender deletes their account.
• Notifications and operation: device notification tokens, installation identifiers, app/device information, network information such as IP addresses, request metadata and service diagnostics are processed to authenticate requests, deliver notifications and operate the service.

Text invitations

Invite by text opens your device’s message composer with a selected phone number and the Welcome Party App Store link. You choose whether to send it. Your messaging service handles the text; Welcome Party does not read your conversations or receive text delivery or read receipts. Cancelling the text does not withdraw the separate friend request.

When friends can see you

Only accepted friends participate in matching. Announcing a visit makes that city visible to your friends and enables relevant notifications. You can stop announcing at any time. The optional Home City Neighbors setting shows participating friends who share your home city. The app does not show friends your coordinates or a route history.

Optional check-ins

“Lives in” identifies a friend’s home city, not their current whereabouts. You may explicitly share a timestamped city check-in with one requesting friend or choose to share it with all accepted friends. Opening the app or a request does not share a check-in. Requests identify the friend asking and record when they were sent. Read receipts, dismissals and muted requests are not disclosed to the sender. A shared check-in describes that moment, not ongoing location.

Requests and attached private replies stop being accessible 30 days after sending, even if opened or answered later. A reply explicitly shared with all friends has the same deadline. Standalone home check-ins expire 30 days after sharing. Expired records are automatically removed by an hourly cleanup job. Cancelling removes the request and private reply from both lists immediately; a minimal cancelled request record remains until its original deadline to enforce the seven-day cooldown. Muting remains until you undo it or delete your account. Account deletion also removes check-in requests, mute preferences and shared check-ins.

Service providers and sharing

Google Firebase provides authentication, database storage, cloud functions and push messaging. Apple provides iOS services and push notification delivery. These providers process the information needed for those services. Data may be processed outside your country, including in the United States. See Firebase’s privacy information and Google’s Privacy Policy.

Welcome Party does not sell your personal information, show advertising, or use your information to track you across other companies’ apps or websites.

Retention and deletion

Account data is retained while your account exists so your profile can be restored after reinstalling. In Settings, choose Delete Account to delete your authentication account, profile, friend connections, identifier lookup and your blocked-user list. Uninstalling alone does not delete your account. Contact us if you cannot access the app or need help with your data.

Operational logs can contain account identifiers, city/status changes and notification details. These are separate from the app’s current-city record and may remain for the service provider’s configured log-retention period. Security records and service-provider backups may also remain for their retention periods. A name saved in another user’s block list may remain until that user removes the block. We do not promise that deleting the app or account immediately erases every operational record.

Your choices

You can set a city by hand, stop announcing, remove friends, manage blocks and change notification, location or Contacts permissions in iOS Settings. Location and Contacts access are optional. Email us to request access, correction or deletion of personal information, or to raise a privacy concern.

Children and policy changes

Welcome Party is not designed for children under 13. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us so we can address it. We will update this page when the app’s privacy practices change and revise the effective date.