Privacy policy

What this covers

Waoo Photo is a private photo library: you upload your pictures and videos, and the app organises them by date, by place and by the people in them. This page says plainly what is stored, what is read out of your files, who else can reach it and what you can do about it. It covers the website and the Waoo Photo Android app.

Your account is a Waoo Network account and works across every Waoo app. Signing in to Waoo Photo does not hand your library to the other apps - photos are only ever read back to the account that uploaded them and to people that account has shared with.

What is stored

• Your account - Email address, your name, a phone number if you choose to add one, and a password held only as a one-way hash. Sign-in tokens live in your browser and expire.
• Sign-in history - For each sign-in: the time, the device and browser, the IP address and the approximate city and country it comes from. It lets you see where your account is signed in, and it warns you about a sign-in from somewhere new.
• Your photos and videos - The original file you uploaded, plus the smaller copies the app generates to display it quickly.
• What is in the file - The details a camera writes into a picture - when it was taken, the camera and settings, and the GPS position where the photograph carries one. That position is what puts a photo on the map. On Android the app only receives it if you allow access to photo locations.
• Detected faces - Where a face appears in a picture and a numeric signature for it, so photos of the same person can be grouped. Names come from you: a face belongs to a person only once you say it does.
• Albums and shares - The album structure you build, and for each share the people you sent it to, what they are allowed to do, any expiry date you set and any comments left on it.
• Phone backup - If you turn on backup in the Android app: the phone's name or model, when it last checked in, and a short report of each backup run (how many photos were found, uploaded or still waiting). Files are matched by a fingerprint of their contents so nothing is uploaded twice.
• Error reports - When something goes wrong, the app sends the error, the page or screen it happened on, the app version, and on Android the phone model and Android version, so it can be fixed.
• Usage measurement - Which pages are opened, how long they take to load and which actions complete, so the product can be improved. That is behaviour, not the contents of your library.

What is never done with it

Your photos are not sold, rented or handed to advertisers, and no Waoo Photo page ever gives a photograph a public link - every request for a picture is authorised against a signed-in account. Face grouping runs only across your own library; it is never used to look for you in anybody else's.

We will hand data to law enforcement only where the law actually requires it, and will tell you when we are permitted to.

Who else touches it

Each of these works for us, on our instructions, and none may use your data for its own purposes.

• Hosting - Servers and file storage we operate, behind a content delivery network (Cloudflare) that terminates traffic and blocks abuse.
• Email - A transactional email provider, used for sign-in, verification and share notifications. Marketing email is opt-in only.
• Maps - The map view is drawn by Mapbox. It receives the coordinates of the photos being plotted, and any address you type when setting a photo's place, so it can render the map and turn a position into a place name. It never receives your photographs.
• Analytics - Page views are recorded by Waoo Network's own logging and by Google Analytics. Mouseflow records how pages are used - clicks, scrolling and movement around the page - so we can see where the app is hard to use. None of them receives your photos, your albums or the names you have given people.

What you can do

• Delete photos - Any picture, any selection, or an empty album can be deleted from the library at any time.
• Stop a share - Remove a recipient, change what a share allows, or give it an expiry date. An expired or removed share stops opening immediately.
• Correct it - People, names, albums and the details on a photo are all editable in the app.
• Delete the account - Open your Profile and choose Delete account. Your account is switched off and signed out everywhere at once, and everything stored with it is permanently deleted after 30 days. The steps are also at photo.waoonetwork.com/delete-account.
• Ask - Any question about your data goes to [email protected] and gets a human answer.

How long it is kept

Your library is kept for as long as your account exists, because that is the point of a photo library. Deleting a photo removes the file straight away; the record of it - its name, date and place - stays with your account until the account is deleted. Copies can survive briefly in operational backups before ageing out.

Sign-in history is kept for three years. When you delete your account, everything is permanently deleted 30 days later, except records we are required to keep: payments and orders, the terms you accepted, and your support conversations. Until then you can ask support to restore the account.

Cookies

Signing in sets a cookie so your session survives a page refresh; without it the app cannot keep you signed in. Google Analytics and Mouseflow set their own cookies. Nothing here follows you to other sites.