Privacy Policy

Effective September 8, 2026

Keyobe is a small app for passing something you made along a chain of people you know. This policy explains exactly what it collects, why, who else can see it, and how to get rid of it. It is written to be read rather than to be survived.

Who we are

Keyobe is operated by Carlabby LLC. If you have a question about anything here, write to support@keyobe.com.

What we collect

Your account

• Email address — if you sign up with one, or if you use Sign in with Apple and choose to share it. Apple's Hide My Email relay addresses work fine and we never try to resolve them.
• Password — if you set one. Stored only as a one-way hash; we cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains a copy of our database.
• Display name, username, and profile photo — these are shown to other people in the app.
• Phone number — optional, and used for one thing only: so that people who already have your number in their contacts can find you. It is stored encrypted, and separately as a keyed one-way hash, which is the form actually used for matching.

What you make and send

• Photos and captions you attach to a spark.
• The short note you can attach when you hand a spark to someone.
• Reactions and reaction notes you send back to whoever chose you.
• The record of who handed a spark to whom, which is what the chain, tree and reach figures are built from.

Contacts

If you allow it, the app reads your device contacts to find people you already know who are on Keyobe. The contacts themselves never leave your phone in readable form. The app converts each phone number and email address into a keyed one-way hash on the device and sends only those hashes. We compare them against hashes of accounts that exist, and we do not store the hashes of people who have no account for longer than a pending invitation lasts.

We cannot recover a phone number or an email address from these hashes, and we do not build a picture of your address book from them.

Location

Location sharing is off by default and only turns on if you switch it on yourself. With it on, the app attaches the approximate area a spark was sent from, so that everyone in the chain can see how far it travelled. Coordinates are rounded to roughly a kilometre before anyone else sees them, and the app never shows a place name or a street. Turning it off in Settings stops any new location being attached.

Your device

• Push notification token — so we can tell you when something happens involving you. Only if you allow notifications.
• Purchase records — if you buy a reveal, Apple gives us a transaction identifier which we check with Apple and keep as the record of what you paid for. We never see your card, and Apple never gives it to us.
• Ordinary server logs — including IP addresses — kept briefly for security and debugging.

What we do not collect

• No advertising identifiers, and no advertising.
• No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs. The app talks to our own servers, to Apple, and to nothing else.
• No browsing history, no data from other apps, no background location.
• We do not sell your information, and we do not share it for anyone else's marketing.

Who can see what

Most of what you see in Keyobe is deliberately partial — that is the point of the product — so it is worth being specific about who sees what.

• People you send a spark to see the spark, your name and photo, and any note you attached to it.
• People further down a chain see the spark and the shape of how it spread. They do not automatically see the names of everyone it passed through. Which names are visible depends on where they sit in the chain.
• Reveals. Some names in a chain are hidden and can be unlocked with a reveal credit or a purchase. Buying a reveal shows you a name that was already in that chain; it does not create any new connection, and the person revealed is not told.
• Reactions and reaction notes are private between you and the person who handed you the spark. Nobody else in the chain sees them.
• Declining a connection request is invisible. The person who asked is never told that you said no. This is deliberate.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers, and only to run the app:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, our database, and storage for photos.
• Apple — Sign in with Apple, push notifications, and payments for reveals.
• An email delivery provider — for verification and password-reset emails.

These providers process data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes. We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or where it is genuinely necessary to protect someone's safety.

How long we keep it

Account information is kept while your account exists. Sparks and chains are kept as long as the account that created them exists. Hashes belonging to people who do not have an account — created when someone invites a contact — expire automatically and are swept from the database.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from Settings → delete account in the app. It happens immediately. There is no waiting period and it cannot be undone.

When you delete your account:

• Your name, username, profile photo, email address and phone number are erased from our database — overwritten, not merely hidden.
• Your sign-in credentials, sessions, push tokens and contact hashes are deleted outright.
• Your profile photo and the photos on sparks you created are deleted from storage.
• Sparks you started are removed from everyone's view and their captions erased.
• Notes and locations you attached to sparks are erased, including from chains that stay standing.

One thing survives, and it is worth explaining. If you passed a spark along, the fact that it reached the people you sent it to is part of their chain, not only yours — often for dozens of people who are still using it. Removing it would erase their history along with yours. So the structure of the chain stays, with your name, photo and everything else about you gone from it: your position simply reads as somebody who left.

We also keep purchase records where we are required to for tax and accounting purposes. These contain no personal detail beyond an internal account number.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, export or delete your personal information. You can correct most of it in the app, and delete all of it from Settings. For anything else, write to support@keyobe.com and we will respond.

Children

Keyobe is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, please write to support@keyobe.com and we will remove it.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Passwords are hashed, phone numbers are encrypted and separately hashed, and sign-in tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain rather than in ordinary app storage. No system is perfectly secure, and we will not pretend otherwise — but we do not hold data we do not need, which is the most effective protection available.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and tell you in the app. Continuing to use Keyobe after that means the new version applies.