Privacy Policy
Last updated:
The short version
For a plain-language overview, see Trust & Safety.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Fein is published and operated by Yada Investments L.L.C, a limited liability company licensed in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates ("we," "our," or "us"). We are the controller of the personal information described in this Privacy Policy. We are committed to protecting your privacy and ensuring the security of your personal information. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your information when you use our application.
This Policy is written to give you the information required by the UAE Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data (UAE PDP Law), the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the UK GDPR and Data Protection Act 2018, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
If you do not agree with how we handle your information as described here, please do not use Fein.
2. Information We Collect
2.1 Personal Information
We collect:
Reports and blocks. A report holds who sent it, who it is about, the reason and your note. For a message, it also holds a copy of the text, who sent it and when. For an encrypted message, the copy is the text as your phone shows it, so the Fein team can read it. The copy stays with the report even if the sender later deletes the message; a message that was already deleted for everyone is reported without its text. The Fein team reads reports to deal with them, and the person you report is not told who reported them. A block is visible only to you and lasts until you unblock the person or either account is deleted. It hides that person's chat messages and their notifications from you, except in an SOS chat. It does not stop them seeing your location; to do that, stop sharing your location with the group or leave it.
2.2 Location Data
When you turn on location sharing, Fein collects your location in the background, including while the app is closed, so that live sharing, Place alerts, trips and SOS keep working. We collect your GPS position, your movement history, your arrivals at and departures from Places, and your drives, including speed and driving events.
Your location goes to the people you share it with (Section 4); to your emergency contact, by text message, if you send an SOS and none of the people in your groups is on the way within 60 seconds; and to the service providers that need it for a feature, for example to match a trip to the roads you drove or to look up a speed limit. It is never sold and never used for advertising. You can pause sharing in the app, or turn off the location permission in your phone's settings.
Motion activity. With your permission, Fein reads your phone's motion classification (for example walking, driving or still) to use less GPS and battery. It is processed on your phone and is not part of your shared location history.
Battery optimisation (Android). Fein may ask you to exempt it from Android's battery optimisation so that location sharing and SOS are not suspended. This changes only how Android schedules the app; it gives Fein no extra data.
2.3 Technical Information
We automatically collect your device type, operating system and app version; your IP address and network information; your battery level; and the performance measurements, error reports and crash reports described below and in Section 2.4.
App performance. Fein uses EAS Observe, a service of Expo (650 Industries, Inc.), to measure how fast the app starts and whether an update made it slower. A measurement holds start-up timings, each with its time, and counts of slow or frozen frames; on iPhone, how long the visit lasted; Fein's name, app ID, version, build and app update, and its EAS build ID where there is one; the versions of the software Fein is built with (React Native, the Expo SDK and the Observe client); and the update channel Fein uses; your phone's model, operating system and version, and its language and region setting; a random ID for that launch; and a random ID created when Fein was installed, which Fein's app update checks also use. Expo also receives your IP address and records the country. A measurement holds no account ID, name, contact details, GPS or other precise location, messages or contacts, and we do not link it to your account; because the installation ID stays on your phone, we still treat it as personal data. Expo keeps measurements for at least 60 days. Deleting your account cannot delete them, because they are not linked to it; uninstalling Fein gives your phone a new installation ID. We use them only to keep Fein fast, never for advertising, on the basis of our legitimate interest in a working app, and there is no setting in the app to turn this off.
2.4 Error and Crash Reports
Two kinds of report help us find and fix faults:
| Error reports to Fein | Crash reports to Sentry | |
|---|---|---|
| When | When you are signed in and a screen fails or the app hits an error | When Fein crashes, stops responding, or hits an error it cannot recover from |
| What they hold | The error message, where in the app's code it happened, whether your phone is an iPhone or an Android phone, and the app version. An error message can sometimes include a value that was on the screen. | The fault and where in the app's code it happened; the app version; your phone's model, operating system and technical state (such as free memory, battery level, language and time zone); and a short trail of recent technical events, with web addresses shortened so they carry no IDs |
| Never hold | — | Account ID, name, email address, phone number, location, messages, contacts, photos, screenshots or a recording of your screen. Fein removes anything that looks like one of these before sending, and Sentry filters each report again before storing it. |
| Linked to your account | Yes, so that we can see which faults affect you and help you when you contact us. No other user can read them. | No. Sentry removes the random ID its software creates, and we have set Sentry not to store your IP address. |
| Stored | Our database (Supabase, European Union) | Sentry's European Union data region (Frankfurt, Germany) |
| Kept | 30 days, or until you delete your account if that is sooner | At most 90 days. Because they are not linked to your account, we cannot find one person's reports, and deleting your account does not delete them sooner. |
We use both only to find and fix faults, never for advertising, on the basis of our legitimate interest in a safety app that keeps working. There is no setting in the app to turn them off. Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) processes crash reports only on our behalf, under a data processing agreement that includes the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
3. How We Use Your Information
We use your information for the following purposes:
We process your personal data based on the following legal grounds:
4. Information Sharing
We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information. We share it only in these cases:
Fein does not send your information to emergency services. The SOS screen can open your phone's dialler so that you can call them yourself.
Our service providers
| Provider | What it does for Fein | What it receives |
|---|---|---|
| SupabaseSupabase Pte. Ltd, Singapore; servers in Ireland (EU) | Hosts our database, sign-in and file storage, and runs our server code | The information described in this Policy |
| Expo650 Industries, Inc., United States | Delivers push notifications and app updates, and measures app performance (Section 2.3) | The text of push notifications; the random installation ID, each time your phone checks for an app update; performance measurements |
| Apple and Google | Deliver push notifications to iPhones and Android phones; provide Sign in with Apple and Google sign-in if you use them; turn coordinates into a street address for your phone | The text of push notifications; your sign-in; coordinates for address lookups. Their own privacy policies also apply |
| MapboxMapbox, Inc., United States | Provides the map, finds the places you search for, gives a street address when your phone cannot, and matches your trips to the roads you drove | Your device's IP address, the map area on your screen, the text you search for, and the coordinates of those lookups and of your trips |
| TomTomTomTom Global Content B.V., the Netherlands | Looks up the speed limit of the road you are on while you drive, for speeding alerts | Your device's IP address and your coordinates while you drive |
| TwilioTwilio Inc., United States | Sends the SOS text message to your emergency contact | Your contact's phone number and the message, which includes your name and last known location |
| Amazon Web Services and Microsoft | Send our emails: sign-in links and codes, password resets, security notices and the message that your data export is ready. Amazon sends from the European Union (Sweden) | Your email address and the email |
| SentryFunctional Software, Inc. | Receives crash reports (Section 2.4). It lists its own service providers at sentry.io/legal/subprocessors | The crash reports described in Section 2.4 |
| Microsoft | Hosts our support mailbox, [email protected] | What you write to us. When someone sends a report, our server emails the mailbox the report's ID, reason and time, never a name or the reported text |
| Cloudflare | Hosts our website | The IP address and request of each visit |
5. Data Security
We protect your personal information with these measures:
No way of sending or storing data is completely secure. If a personal data breach affects you, we will tell you, and the authorities, where the law requires it.
6. Export, Deletion and Retention
6.1 Exporting your data
You can request a copy of your data from Settings in the app. We build a ZIP archive containing your profile, groups and memberships, saved Places, location history, trips and driving events, the messages you sent, your help and SOS requests, your consent records, device and delivery records, and the photos you uploaded. We email you when it is ready, and the download link is short-lived and only valid for you. Archives expire after seven days, and you can delete one yourself at any time. One request per 24 hours.
6.2 Deleting your account
Deleting your account in Settings is immediate. There is no waiting period and we cannot undo it, so export first if you want a copy. We email you to confirm that it is done. If you are the last owner of a group, ownership passes to another member; if you are its only member, the group is deleted with you.
6.3 Deleting messages
In a group or direct chat, you can delete a message you sent for everyone within 24 hours of sending it. We erase its text from our database, and the people in the chat see “Message deleted” in its place. After 24 hours you can delete it only for yourself. If someone reported the message before you deleted it, the report keeps its own copy of the text until the report is a year old; a report made after you deleted it holds no text, only the reporter's note, who sent the message, and when it was sent and deleted.
Deleting a message for yourself, or clearing or deleting a chat for yourself, only hides it from you; the other people in the chat keep their copy. Messages in an SOS chat cannot be deleted, and you can remove an SOS chat from your inbox once the request has ended.
Deleting a message does not take it back from a notification that already showed it on someone's phone, and our hosting provider's daily backups keep its text until they expire (7 days).
6.4 Device backups
Fein does not operate a cloud backup service, and we do not copy your app data to iCloud or Google Drive. The app's local database is excluded from your phone's automatic backups, so reinstalling starts from your account rather than from a device backup. Your phone's operating system may still back up other app state according to its own settings, which are outside our control.
6.5 Retention
We keep your personal data while your account is active, and remove it when you delete your account (Section 6.2). Some data expires sooner, automatically: your movement timeline is kept for 30 days, and your arrivals at and departures from Places for 90 days. This table lists every period.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| An account below the minimum age, which is then deleted (Section 9) | 14 days after the age answer |
| Movement timeline (raw location points) | 30 days |
| The speed along each trip's route, which its replay uses | 30 days |
| Error reports the app sends to our servers (Section 2.4) | 30 days |
| The record that a notification was sent to you | 30 days |
| Arrivals at and departures from Places | 90 days |
| Driving incidents | 90 days |
| Changes between hidden and visible | 90 days |
| The record that an email was sent, sign-in emails included. It never holds a sign-in link or code, and its address is removed once the account it belonged to is gone | 90 days |
| A report about a message or a person, whether or not we acted on it | 1 year from when it was sent |
| A Lost & Found report that has not been re-alerted. It leaves the community feed, and you can re-open it | Closed after 30 days |
| Trips in Reports. The app cannot delete a single trip yet; if you want one removed, contact us (Section 10) and we will delete it | Until you delete your account |
| If you are 13 to 17 and not below the minimum age: the country codes and minimum age behind your age band, the year you turn 18, and the times you shared your location with no one (Section 9) | Until your account becomes an adult account, in the January after the year you turn 18 |
| Everything else in your account | Until you delete your account |
| Our hosting provider's daily backups of the database | 7 days |
| Crash reports at Sentry (Section 2.4) | At most 90 days |
| App performance measurements at Expo (Section 2.3) | At least 60 days |
Expiry runs as part of normal app activity rather than on a clock, so a record can outlive its window by a short time when the service is quiet. We keep a minimal marker that an emergency SMS or a welcome email was sent, so that it is never sent twice; the marker holds no message content after its window. Anonymised, aggregate counts that cannot identify you may be kept for service improvement. Some records may be retained longer where the law requires it.
7. Your Rights
Under applicable data protection laws, you have the following rights:
To exercise these rights, please contact us using the information provided in Section 10.
8. International Transfers
Fein's database is hosted in the European Union (Ireland). Yada Investments L.L.C is in the United Arab Emirates, and our staff work with your data from there. Some of the service providers in Section 4 are in the United States or have staff there: Supabase's staff may access data from outside the European Union, including from the United States and Singapore, to run and support the service; Expo, a United States company, processes the data it handles for us in the United States; and Sentry stores crash reports in Frankfurt, Germany, but its staff and some of its service providers may access them from outside the European Union, including from the United States. So your personal data is processed in countries other than the one you live in. For users in the UAE, storing your data in Ireland and using these providers transfers it outside the UAE.
When personal data from the UK, the EEA or Switzerland goes to a country without an adequacy decision, we rely on the provider's certification under the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, its UK Extension and the Swiss-U.S. Data Privacy Framework, or on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses (with the UK and Swiss additions) in the provider's data processing terms. Expo and Sentry are certified under the Data Privacy Framework, and our agreement with Sentry also includes the Standard Contractual Clauses.
9. Children and Teenagers
Fein is for people aged 13 and over, or 16 and over if you live in the European Economic Area (the European Union, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway, as the EEA Agreement defines them) or in Switzerland. This minimum age applies when you create a Fein account, and we check it when you sign up. The age rating that the App Store or Google Play shows for the app is the store's guide for downloading it; it does not change the minimum age for a Fein account.
When you sign up, we use your date of birth once to work out your age band (under 13, 13 to 17, or 18 and over) and we keep the band, not the date. If you are 13 to 17, we also keep the year you turn 18, so that your account becomes an adult account on its own in the January after it. We also look at the country you choose, the countries your phone's time zone and region settings point to, and, where available, the country of your internet connection. The highest minimum age among them applies. Older versions of the app ask only for your date of birth; with them, we use the country of your internet connection where it is available, and if it is in the European Economic Area or Switzerland, you need to update the app to finish signing up.
If you are under 18, we keep these country codes and the minimum age that applied, and delete them with your account or when it becomes an adult account. We do not keep them for anyone who was 18 or over when they answered, and we never keep your IP address for this. We use your date of birth and these countries only to apply the minimum ages and the protections for 13 to 17s in this section, never for advertising, on the basis of our legal obligations and our legitimate interest in keeping young people safe. Everyone in a group with you also receives your age band (the app does not show it to them), but never your date of birth, the year you turn 18 or the country codes. You cannot change your answers in the app; if they are wrong, write to [email protected] and a person at Fein will check them.
If you are below the minimum age, you cannot use Fein. We remove the name and photo you entered straight away, the account cannot share or store anything, and we delete it 14 days after your answer. Until then the account keeps your age band, the country codes above, your sign-in email and the technical records that signing in leaves, so you can tell us if the result is wrong, whether it came from your date, your country, your phone's settings or your connection; a person at Fein will check it. We do not offer accounts with a parent's consent. Apart from what we need to block and delete the account, we do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone below the minimum age; if you believe someone below the minimum age has given us personal data, contact us at [email protected] and we will delete it.
If you are 13 to 17, location sharing starts off. None of your family, friends and colleagues sees your location, trips or arrivals until you turn sharing on for a group, and you can turn it off again at any time. Your movement history, trips and arrivals recorded while you share with no one stay hidden, even after you turn sharing on; to do this we keep the times when you shared with no one (never where you were), and delete them at the latest when your account becomes an adult account. An SOS or help request you send shows the people it reaches where you are (or the last place your phone knew, if it has no fresh location). If you are under 18, you need your parent's or guardian's permission to use Fein (see our Terms of Service).
A parent or guardian can write to [email protected] about a teenager's account.
10. Contact Information
If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us:
If you are in the EU, the EEA or the UK, you also have the right to complain to the data protection authority where you live or work (in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office).
In Québec, the person in charge of the protection of personal information is the Manager of Yada Investments L.L.C, whom you can reach at [email protected].
This Privacy Policy is effective as of the date listed above and will remain in effect except with respect to any changes in its provisions in the future.