Privacy Policy

This policy explains what personal data we collect when you use the Friendzone website and app, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the rights you have over it. It is written to meet the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR) and the Data Protection Act 2018.

1. Who we are

Friendzone is made by Instauratio Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales under company number 16290185, with its registered office at 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. We are the data controller for the personal data described here.

For anything about your data, email hello@getfriendzoned.com.

2. What Friendzone does

Friendzone helps you arrange time with your friends. You plan something with an assistant in the app, then invite the friends you choose. For a friend the assistant has never been in touch with, you send the first message yourself, from your own phone, and it carries a link to a simple web page where they can answer. Once a friend has heard from the assistant, or has written back to it, the assistant takes over the texting: a reminder, the details once something is booked, and a cancellation if the plan falls through. Your friends do not need the app and never make an account: they take part by text message (SMS) and that web page, as guests.

That shape decides most of what follows. We hold data about two kinds of people: members, who have an account, and guests, who are contacted on a member’s behalf and may never have heard of us. Section 5 is written for guests.

3. The data we collect

On this website

• Waitlist email address. If you join the waitlist we store the address you enter, the date you entered it, and whether we have sent you an invite. Nothing else. We do not store your IP address with it.
• Bot protection. The waitlist form may use Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from scripts. Turnstile processes technical signals from your browser; see Cloudflare’s privacy policy.
• Server logs. The site is served by Cloudflare, which keeps short-lived request logs (IP address, browser, pages requested) for security and reliability.

This website sets no analytics or advertising cookies.

In the app

• Account. When you sign in with Google or Apple we receive your name, email address and a unique identifier from that provider. We do not receive your password.
• Phone number. We ask for your mobile number and verify it by SMS. It is used to identify you to the friends we contact and to recognise friends who also use Friendzone. It is not used to sign in.
• Your friends. The names and phone numbers of the friends you add, and any preferences you set about them. You can type these in or, if you allow it, pick them from your phone’s contacts. We only receive the contacts you choose, never your whole address book.
• Plans. The details of each plan: who it is with, what it is, when and where, the venues suggested and chosen, and whether it went ahead.
• Location. The area you choose for a plan. We do not track your location in the background. If you ask the app to use your current location, it requests it once and we keep only the area it resolves to.
• Messages. Everything the assistant sends and receives while arranging a plan, by SMS or through a guest’s invite page, including guests’ replies and the answers they give on the page. A message you send a friend from your own phone goes through your phone’s messaging app, not through us; we record only that you sent it.
• What the assistant remembers. So that you do not have to repeat yourself, the assistant keeps short notes of lasting things you tell it while you plan: about you, and about the friends in your circle. For example, that you do not drink, that a friend is vegetarian, or that you like somewhere quiet. Some of these can touch on health or belief, such as what someone eats or drinks or what access they need. The assistant keeps what a plan needs to know and not the reason behind it. Every note is listed in the app under Profile, in “What Amica knows” (Amica is the assistant’s name), and you can remove any of them there.
• Subscription. Whether you have an active subscription, the product, and the store’s transaction identifier. Payment is taken by Apple or Google; we never see your card details.
• Device and diagnostics. A push notification token so we can notify you, a device identifier used to prevent abuse, such as claiming a free allowance repeatedly, and crash and error reports, which may include technical details of your device and what the app was doing when it failed.
• Support. Anything you send us when you get in touch.

4. Why we use it, and the lawful basis

We do not sell personal data, and we do not use it for advertising. We will not send you marketing email unless you have separately agreed to it, and you can stop it at any time.

5. If you are a guest

A friend who uses Friendzone is arranging something with you. Here is what that means for your data.

• What we hold. Your name as the member entered it, your mobile number if they gave it to us, the messages the assistant sent you, your replies, and any answer you gave on your invite page. Your friend’s assistant may also keep a short note of something lasting your friend has told it about you, such as that you are vegetarian, do not drink, or are never free on Mondays, so that the plans they make suit you. It keeps the fact a plan needs and not the reason for it. A note like that belongs to that one friend’s account: only their assistant uses it, it is never shown or passed to anyone else, including other members who know you, and it is never used to contact you or to market to you. We do not look you up elsewhere, and we do not combine what different members have said into a profile of you.
• Why we can do this. The member has a legitimate interest in making plans with a friend, and we have one in providing that service. The first message about a plan comes from your friend, from their own phone, unless the assistant has texted you before on that friend’s behalf; the assistant never texts someone it has had no contact with. We judge that a short, clearly labelled message from a friend’s assistant, which you can stop with one word, is something most people would reasonably expect from a friend who has your number. The assistant always says who it is, who asked it to get in touch, and that it is an assistant rather than a person. It never markets to you.
• How to stop. Reply STOP to any message and we will not text you again from any member, and we keep your number on an opt-out list so that stays true. Reply HELP for a reminder of how it works. On your invite page you can also untick text updates for that plan.
• How to have your data deleted. Email hello@getfriendzoned.com from any address, or reply to a message asking us to delete your details. We will remove your number, your messages and anything a member’s assistant has noted about you from every member’s account. If you want to stay contactable by a particular friend, say so and we will only remove the rest.
• Your other rights are the same as a member’s; see section 10.

If you are a member: only add people who would welcome hearing from you, and make sure you have the right to share their number with us. The terms of service ask this of you, and it is what keeps the arrangement above fair to your friends.

6. How we use AI

The assistant is built on large language models supplied by Anthropic (the Claude models) through their commercial API. While the assistant works on a plan, the following is sent to that service so the model can respond: the plan details you have entered, the first names of the people involved, the area and venue options, what the assistant remembers about you and about the friends on that plan, and, during outreach, the text of messages to and from guests. Once a plan is under way, the same service reads the planning conversation once more to pick out anything lasting worth remembering for next time (section 3). Anthropic processes this data on our instructions as a processor. Under the terms we use, Anthropic does not use our data to train its models, and it deletes the inputs and outputs after a short retention period except where it must keep them for safety or legal reasons. Anthropic’s servers are in the United States; see section 8 on transfers.

Some things the AI does not do:

• It does not make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you. It suggests; you decide, and you can stop a plan at any time.
• It does not read your contacts, your calendar, or your other messages. It only sees what you and your guests put into a plan, and what it has remembered from your earlier plans.
• It does not act as a person. It says it is an assistant the first time it texts any guest.

We may review a small number of conversations ourselves to check the assistant is behaving well and to investigate a complaint. We also use the AI service to help interpret guests’ replies. Where a reply is unclear, a person on our side may look at it, and the member is asked.

7. Who we share data with

We use a small number of service providers to run Friendzone. Each processes data only on our instructions, under a contract, and only for the purpose shown.

Venue partners. Some venues give a Friendzone table a perk, and a few pay us for the parties we send them. To let a venue honour the perk and check our monthly statement against its own bookings, we share with that venue, for each plan booked there: the organizer’s first name (the name the booking is under), the party size, the time, a short reference code, and whether the organizer told us the booking went ahead. Nothing about guests is shared with a venue, and nothing is shared with a venue that is not a partner.

We may also disclose personal data when the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or to a buyer if the business is sold, in which case this policy still applies to the data transferred. We do not share data with advertisers or data brokers.

8. International transfers

Some of the providers above are outside the UK. Where they are, we rely on one of the safeguards UK law recognises: the UK’s adequacy regulations (including the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework for certified US providers), the International Data Transfer Agreement, or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. You can ask us for details of the safeguard used for a particular provider.

9. How long we keep data

We keep plans, messages and what the assistant remembers for as long as your account is open, rather than for a fixed period, because that history is what the service runs on: it is how the assistant knows who you have seen, where you have been and what suits you. Nothing is kept for its own sake, and you, or a guest, can ask us to delete any of it at any time (section 10).

Backups are kept for a further short period and are overwritten on a rolling basis.

10. Your rights

Under UK GDPR you can ask us to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you, and get a copy.
• Correct anything that is wrong. What the assistant remembers can be removed in the app, line by line.
• Delete your data (“the right to be forgotten”). You can delete your account inside the app; guests can email us or reply to a message.
• Restrict how we use it while a question is sorted out.
• Move it: receive the data you gave us in a common machine-readable format.
• Object to processing based on legitimate interests, including guest outreach.
• Withdraw consent where consent is the basis, at any time, without affecting what was done before.

To exercise any of these, email hello@getfriendzoned.com. We will reply within one month. We may need to confirm it is you; for guests, replying from the number we have on file is usually enough.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113. We would appreciate the chance to sort it out first.

11. Security

Data travels encrypted (TLS) between your device, our servers and our providers, and is stored encrypted at rest. Phone numbers and other sensitive fields are additionally encrypted in our database. Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it and protected by multi-factor authentication. The waitlist form is rate limited and bot checked, and the API never confirms whether an email address is already on the list. No system is perfectly secure; if we discover a breach that puts you at risk we will tell you and the ICO as the law requires.

12. Children

Friendzone is for adults. You must be 18 or over to have an account. We do not knowingly hold data about anyone under 18, and if you tell us we do we will delete it.

13. Cookies

This website sets no cookies of its own. If Turnstile is shown on the waitlist form, Cloudflare may set a cookie strictly needed to complete the bot check. The app does not use cookies.

14. Changes to this policy

We will update this page when our practices change and will tell members in the app about any change that matters. The date at the top is the date of the current version.

15. Contact

Instauratio Ltd, 66 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NA, United Kingdom. Email: hello@getfriendzoned.com