Privacy Policy
Belay · Effective 28 August 2026
Belay is a habit app for small groups of friends. You check in each day with a photo taken in the app, and the people in your club see it. This page explains exactly what that means for your data, in the order that actually matters: what we never take, what we keep, how long we keep it, and how to get it back or get rid of it.
What Belay never collects
- Your photo library. Belay only uses the live camera and never asks for photo-library permission. There is no way to import an existing picture, by design.
- Your location. We never request it. Check-in photos are re-encoded on your device before upload, which strips the original's EXIF metadata — so the location and device tags your camera wrote are not carried into the file we receive.
- Health or fitness data. Belay has no Apple Health integration.
- Your contacts. Clubs are joined with a six-character code, not by scanning your address book.
- Analytics, advertising and tracking. There is no analytics SDK, no advertising identifier, no third-party tracker and no cross-app tracking in Belay. We do not sell or share personal data, and we do not use it for advertising.
What Belay collects, and why
Your account. You sign in with Apple or Google. Either gives us a stable identifier and, if you allow it, your name and email address. With Apple's Hide My Email we receive only the relay address; with Google we receive the address on your Google account.
Your profile. A username you choose, a display name, an avatar colour, your time zone (detected from your device so that "today" means your today), and your reminder time if you set one. We also keep the last time you opened Belay for the 30-day unattended-Organizer rule, plus a short rate counter for username-availability checks.
Your habits and check-ins. Habit titles, schedules, emoji and colours; and for each check-in, the date, the photo and its thumbnail, and which clubs it was shared with. Days you repaired or that a streak freeze covered are recorded too — those carry no photo.
Your clubs. Club name, emoji, colour, invite code, and who is a member.
Encouragement. Emoji reactions you leave, nudges you send, and a record of things that happened to you (someone reacted, someone joined) so the Activity screen can show them.
A push token for each device you install Belay on, so reminders and nudges can reach you. Turn notifications off in iOS Settings and it goes unused.
We use all of this for one purpose: running Belay for you and the people in your club. Under the GDPR our basis is performance of the contract you enter by using the app, and our legitimate interest in keeping it working and secure.
Your photos, specifically
Check-in photos are the most personal thing Belay holds, and they are treated that way.
- They are stored in a private bucket — never public, never browsable. The app reaches them through short-lived signed links that expire within minutes.
- They are visible only to you and current members of the clubs you shared that habit with. A habit you keep to yourself is seen by nobody else. If you leave or are removed from a club, your photos stop being visible there.
- Full-resolution photos are deleted automatically after 30 days. A smaller version is kept for 12 months so your history grid and recaps still have something to show, and is then deleted too. This runs nightly, on a schedule, without anyone asking for it.
- You can remove any individual photo yourself at any time, from the check-in itself. The day still counts toward your streak — deleting a picture is not a punishment.
Where your data lives, and who else touches it
Belay's database and photo storage are hosted on Supabase, in the European Union (eu-central). We use a small number of processors, each for one job:
- Supabase — database, photo storage, authentication.
- Apple — Sign in with Apple, and delivery of push notifications.
- Google — Sign in with Google, if you choose it.
- Expo — relays push notifications to Apple on our behalf.
- Cloudflare — serves this website.
That is the whole list. Nobody else receives your data, and we do not sell it to anyone.
What other people can see
People in your club can see your username, display name and avatar colour; the habits you shared with that club and whether you met them; your check-in photos for those habits; your streak state; and your reactions and nudges. They cannot see habits you did not share with them, and they cannot see your email address.
Belay has no public feed, no global leaderboard and no discovery. Nothing you post is visible outside the clubs you chose.
Your rights
You can ask us to give you a copy of your data, correct it, delete it, or restrict how we use it, and you can object to our processing. If you are in the EU or UK you also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
To delete your account and everything in it, open Belay and go to Settings → Delete account. It happens immediately, not within 30 days: your profile, habits, streaks, check-ins, photos, reactions, nudges and club memberships are removed, and the account itself is deleted with them. There is no undo. Our database provider keeps encrypted backups for up to seven days for disaster recovery, so deleted database rows roll out of those backups on that schedule. Photo files are not included in those database backups.
Clubs you created survive your departure — they belong to the people still in them — and the club passes to whoever has been in it longest. A club with nobody left in it is deleted with you. Nothing identifying you stays attached to either.
If you have already deleted the app, or you want a copy of your data or any of the other rights above, email privacy@belay.club from the address on your account or with your username.
Children
Belay is not intended for children. You must be at least 16 years old to use it, or older if the law where you live sets a higher age for consenting to online services.
Changes
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top, and we will tell you in the app before any change that affects how your data is used.
Contact
Questions, requests, or anything that reads wrong here: privacy@belay.club.
Belay · belay.club