Privacy Policy

Who we are

BuzzUp is a college-first social discovery app for people aged 18 and over. This policy covers the BuzzUp website and app.

BuzzUp is an independent project operated under the CollegeBuzz name. CollegeBuzz is not currently a registered company or incorporated legal entity. No company registration number or registered office is provided because none currently exists.

For privacy questions, data requests, or anything else in this document, write to khamoshconfess@gmail.com.

Age requirement

BuzzUp is for people aged 18 and over. You must provide your real date of birth, and you must not misrepresent your age. It is checked against the 18+ requirement both when you create your account and any time you would change it, so it cannot later be edited to make you appear younger.

This is a self-declared date of birth checked against a minimum age, not independent age verification. BuzzUp does not verify your age against a government ID or any independent age-verification service, and no part of the product describes an account as “age verified” on that basis.

Information we collect

Everything below is either something you give us or something the service has to record in order to work. We do not buy data about you from anyone else, and we do not sell your data.

• Account information — your email address, your date of birth (used for the 18+ check and to show your age) and your account status. Your password is handled by our authentication provider and is stored hashed; we never see it.
• Profile information — display name, gender, bio, “about me”, occupation, height, hometown, languages, what you are looking for, and optional lifestyle answers such as drinking, smoking, star sign, religion and whether you have or want children. You choose every one of these and can clear them.
• College / education — the college or education detail you type. It is shown on your profile and is what the “same college only” filter matches on.
• Interests and prompt answers — the interests you pick and the answers you write to profile prompts and questions. Shown on your profile and used to rank who you see in Discover.
• Photos — the profile photos you upload. Every upload is decoded and re-encoded on our server, which strips embedded metadata such as camera details and any GPS coordinates saved inside the image file, before the photo is stored.
• Verification selfie — if you choose to verify your profile, a photo captured live from your camera. See Profile Verification below for what it is used for and how long it is kept.
• Activity — likes and passes, matches, messages you send, blocks, reports you file, notifications, and which conversations you have opened.
• Location — see the dedicated section below.
• Technical information — your IP address is used briefly for rate limiting (so one person cannot flood sign-in, sign-up or upload endpoints), and our hosting provider processes it in order to serve the request at all. If you turn on push notifications, your browser gives us a push subscription for your device.

We do not collect a phone number. We do not run advertising or analytics trackers, and there is no third-party analytics or advertising script on this site.

Location, in detail

BuzzUp may use your device’s location to help you discover people near you. Your exact GPS coordinates are never shown to other members, and moderators cannot see them either. Administrators can, in one restricted, logged screen described below — this policy says so plainly rather than promising no one ever can.

• Device location is optional. Your browser asks your permission first, and you can refuse or withdraw it. The app keeps working without it — you simply get a city-based feed instead of a distance-based one.
• What other members see. Never your coordinates. At most an approximate distance, rounded into wide bands, and only when both of you have a current location. You can switch distance off entirely in your settings.
• Manual location. Instead of, or as well as, device location you can choose a city and area from a list. That choice is stored and may be shown on your profile as your general location. It is a place you selected, not a live GPS reading, and it is not precise.
• Travelling. If you set a temporary location, that is the one used for discovery and shown on your profile until you clear it. Your permanent city is not used while it is set.
• Moderators. Moderators have no access to a member’s exact coordinates in any form — no screen, and no database permission either.
• Administrators. A separate, restricted screen in the admin console lets an administrator — not a moderator — look up the exact coordinates of a member who is currently sharing a live device location. It excludes anyone using a chosen city instead, requires the administrator’s own two-factor authentication, and records an audit entry every time it is opened, including who looked and when. It exists for safety and moderation purposes.

Profile Verification

BuzzUp offers an optional verification badge. Nothing in the product requires you to verify your profile in order to use it.

• What you submit. If you choose to request verification, you capture a photo live from your device’s camera — not one chosen from your gallery. You may only submit your own photo for your own account.
• How it is reviewed. This is a human review, not an automated or AI-based comparison. Your live photo is shown to a trained moderator alongside the photos already on your profile, and the moderator decides whether the person in the live photo appears to be the same person shown in those photos.
• Why we do this. To reduce fake or misleading profiles and to improve trust and safety on BuzzUp.
• What it is not. It is not a government identity check, and it does not confirm your legal name or identity documents. A verified badge means a moderator judged your live photo to be consistent with your profile photos — nothing more.
• Accuracy. Human review can make mistakes, in either direction. A verification decision is not a guarantee that the profile is genuine, safe, trustworthy, or that every other detail on it is accurate.
• Who sees what. Other members can see the verification badge on your profile if you are approved. Nobody else — no other member, and no member viewing your profile — is shown the live photo itself. It is visible only to you and to staff reviewing the request.
• What happens to the photo. The live photo is stored only long enough to be reviewed. Access to it is withdrawn as soon as a moderator decides (approved or rejected), and the file itself is deleted by an automated job shortly afterwards — within a couple of days at the outside, whether or not a decision has been made yet. It is not kept as a permanent record and it is not added to your profile photos.
• Who processes it. The photo is processed by our own systems only. It is not sent to any third-party AI, facial recognition, or identity-verification provider — there is no such service in this product to send it to.
• If your account is deleted. A pending or decided verification request, and the live photo behind it, are removed on the same schedule as the rest of your account data described under Deleting your account below.

Whether a submitted verification photo, or the fact that a request was made, is considered sensitive or biometric personal data under the law that applies to you is a classification question this policy does not answer. It should be reviewed by a qualified legal professional before public launch; this policy does not claim a legal category for it.

Why we use it

• To create your account and check you meet the age requirement.
• To show your profile to other members and show theirs to you, and to rank Discover by shared interests and proximity.
• To deliver likes, matches, messages and notifications.
• To keep the service safe — reviewing reports, moderating photos, enforcing blocks, detecting abuse, and rate limiting.
• To send account email such as sign-in codes and security alerts.

Who processes your data

We use a small number of service providers. They process data on our instructions in order to run the service. We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising.

• Supabase — database and authentication. Your account, profile, activity and messages are stored here.
• Blob storage — the files you upload. Photos are held in a private store and are served only through our own authorisation check, never from a public link.
• Resend — transactional email, including sign-in codes and security notifications.
• Our hosting provider — serves the site and necessarily processes request data such as your IP address.
• Your browser’s push service — only if you enable push notifications. Delivering a notification to your device means sending it via the push service your browser vendor operates.
• Cloudflare Turnstile — a bot-detection challenge shown on sign-up and sign-in when enabled, to tell a person from an automated script.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect someone’s safety.

Staff access to your data

Staff means a moderator or an administrator — a small number of accounts with elevated database permissions, not a third party. This section says plainly what that access actually reaches, rather than describing only what the console’s screens show.

• Profiles and photos. Staff can view any member’s profile and uploaded photos, including ones not yet or no longer visible to other members, in order to moderate them.
• Verification selfies. Staff can view a live verification photo while the request is open for review, as described under Profile Verification above.
• Messages. Staff accounts have database-level permission to read message content, for investigating reports, abuse and safety issues. The moderation console itself has no screen that browses message content — it shows how many messages an account has sent, not what they say.
• Reports. A report you file, or a report filed against you, is visible to staff so it can be reviewed and actioned. It is not shown to any other member.
• Location. See Administrators, under Location above — the one place exact coordinates are reachable, and only by an administrator, only for a member currently sharing a live position, and only through a screen that logs every use.

Cookies and browser storage

We use cookies only to make the product work: a session cookie set by our authentication provider to keep you signed in, a cookie remembering your light or dark theme, and a separate short-lived cookie for staff who sign in to the moderation console. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

The app also stores a few small things in your browser’s own on-device storage — none of it sent to us or to anyone else. Examples: remembering that you dismissed the install prompt, an unsent draft of a form you were filling in, and a flag that stops the app checking for an update the moment it just reloaded. Clearing your browser data clears these too, with no effect on your account.

How long we keep things

• Your account and profile — for as long as your account exists. See deletion below.
• Messages. Ending a match makes the conversation unreachable in the app immediately, for both people — this is enforced by the database, not only by what the app chooses to show. The message rows themselves are deleted for good when the underlying account is purged, on the schedule described under deletion below.
• Verification selfies — access is withdrawn as soon as the review is decided, and the file is deleted by a scheduled job shortly afterwards. Unreviewed selfies are deleted after a short review window regardless.
• Reports — kept while open, and for one year after they are closed (resolved or dismissed), so a pattern of behaviour cannot be erased by signing up again.
• Audit logs of staff and security actions — kept for two years. They record what a moderator did, not the content of your conversations.
• Read notifications — deleted after 90 days. Unread ones are kept until you read them or your account is deleted.
• Rate-limiting records — short-lived counters that expire on their own.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself from Settings, and there is a fuller explanation on the Account deletion page. In short, when you delete:

• Your profile details are cleared immediately — name, bio, gender, date of birth, occupation, education, city and area, and any stored coordinates.
• Your photos are removed, your interests are removed, your likes are removed, and your matches are ended. Your profile stops appearing in Discover at once.
• Your account is then fully erased by a scheduled job after a short retention period, which also removes remaining records such as your messages.
• Reports and moderation records relating to safety are retained, as described above.

Your choices and rights

• Edit or clear most profile fields at any time.
• Turn device location off, or clear a temporary location.
• Hide your profile, or switch distance display off.
• Block or report another member.
• Turn email and push notifications off.
• Delete your account, as above.

Depending on where you live you may have additional rights over your personal data, such as asking for a copy of it or asking us to correct it. Write to khamoshconfess@gmail.com and we will respond. Which data-protection laws this service operates under, and the response time we commit to, have not been specified in this policy and should be confirmed by a qualified legal professional before public launch.

Security

Access to your data is checked by the database on every request rather than only in the app, photos are stored privately and released only to viewers who are allowed to see them, uploads are re-encoded to strip embedded metadata, and staff access to the moderation console requires a second factor. No service can promise perfect security, and we do not.

Children

BuzzUp is for adults aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly allow anyone under 18 to create an account, and the age check is enforced when your account is created. If you believe someone underage is using the service, report the profile or write to khamoshconfess@gmail.com.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of the page. Significant changes will be brought to your attention in the app.

Contact

Privacy questions, data requests and complaints go to khamoshconfess@gmail.com. You can also use the Contact page.