Privacy Policy
What this covers
Veni Inc operates the Veni service and is responsible for the personal data described in this policy. This policy explains what we collect, why, and your rights. It applies to the Veni app and website.
Data we collect
Account & verification: your name and phone number, and the one-time codes we text you to verify it. Your number is used for sign-in and to show others your account is verified — we never display the number itself publicly.
Profile: handle, photo, bio, city, and anything else you choose to add.
Spiritual affiliation (optional): if you choose to share it, your faith tradition and, for some traditions, a denomination. This is special-category data, so we only collect it with your explicit consent, when you actively select it at sign-up or in your profile. You can skip, change, or clear it at any time. See “Your spiritual affiliation” below for how we protect it.
Gatherings: events you create, join, or apply to, including the locations you set for events you host.
Approximate location: to show gatherings near you we use your IP-based or device location. For approval-based gatherings, the exact address is only visible after host approval; open gatherings may show location details to people who can view or join them.
Payments: when a host charges for a gathering, payments are processed by Stripe. Stripe collects your card and billing details directly to complete the payment — we never see or store full card numbers. We receive limited records of the transaction (such as amount, status, and the gathering it relates to) to run the booking and support refunds or disputes.
Technical: device and usage data needed to run and secure the service, error reports if something crashes, and masked recordings of how the app screens are used (which screen is shown, where you tap, and scrolling). Anything you type and the text on screen are masked before a recording leaves your device.
How we use it
To run Veni: verify your phone, sign you in, show gatherings on the map, let hosts approve attendees, and connect friends.
To surface gatherings that fit you: if you share a spiritual affiliation, we use it only to order what you see, so gatherings that align with you appear higher. It never hides a gathering. You can browse and join anything, and filter by tradition yourself if you want.
To keep the community safe: enforcing our Terms, handling incident reports, and preventing fraud and abuse.
To fix problems: crash and error monitoring, and masked session recordings that show us where the app stopped responding or looked wrong, without the text or the data on the screen.
To understand whether onboarding works: product analytics for steps such as opening an invite, viewing a gathering, sending a phone code, verifying, and requesting to join. Analytics events use IDs, codes, booleans, and environment labels; we do not send phone numbers, names, exact locations, or message contents in these events.
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.
Your spiritual affiliation
Faith is personal, so your spiritual affiliation gets extra protection beyond the rest of your data. Sharing it is optional. You can use Veni fully without it, and skipping is never held against you.
It stays private to you. Your tradition and denomination never appear on your profile, and are never shown to hosts or any other user. We enforce this in our database at the record level, so only you can read your own affiliation. It is not merely hidden by an app setting.
We never sell it, use it for advertising, or disclose it to hosts, other users, or partners. Our legal basis for holding it is your explicit consent.
You stay in control. Change it anytime in your profile, or choose “Prefer not to say” to erase it from our records.
SMS messages
We text you one-time verification codes when you sign up, sign in, or change your number. These are transactional messages, not marketing. Message frequency depends on how often you sign in; message and data rates may apply. We will not share your phone number or SMS consent with third parties for their marketing.
Who we share it with
Service providers who process data on our behalf — such as our hosting, database, SMS delivery, map, payment-processing (Stripe), error-monitoring, and bot-prevention providers. Each receives only what it needs to do its job, under contracts that restrict how they may use it.
Bot & abuse prevention: when you request an SMS code we run Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-preserving challenge that helps us tell real people from automated abuse. It runs invisibly, with no puzzle for you to solve, and Cloudflare processes limited technical signals (such as your IP address and browser characteristics) to score the request; it does not use this to track you across sites. See Cloudflare’s Turnstile Privacy Addendum: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/turnstile-privacy-policy/.
Other users: your profile (name, handle, photo, bio, city) is visible according to your privacy settings; gathering location visibility depends on whether the gathering is open or approval-based. Your spiritual affiliation is never included in what other users or hosts can see.
Authorities, if the law requires it or to protect people from serious harm.
Retention & deletion
We keep your data while your account is active. If you delete your account we delete or anonymise your personal data within 30 days, except where we must keep it for legal reasons (e.g. safety reports). You can delete your account in Profile → Account.
Age
Veni is not for children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone below the minimum age set out in our Terms. If we learn that we have, we delete the account and its data.
Your rights
Depending on where you live (including under GDPR / UK GDPR) you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your data, and to object to or restrict certain processing. Most of this you can do directly in the app; for anything else, email us and we will respond within 30 days.
Where we process special-category data such as your spiritual affiliation, our legal basis is your explicit consent. You can withdraw it at any time by clearing your affiliation in your profile, and we will erase it. Withdrawing does not affect anything we did while the consent was in place.
If you are unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to your local data-protection authority.
Changes & contact
We will notify you in the app of material changes to this policy.
Data questions or requests: hello@veni.org.