Privacy
Frenbar is for organising gatherings with people you already know. Several parts of it are deliberately visible to other people — that is what an invitation is — so this page is mostly about which parts, and to whom.
The short version
- There are no ads, no analytics, no tracking and no crash reporting in this app. Nothing about your use of it is sold, and nothing is measured about how you use it. Once a day we count how much of Frenbar there is altogether — how many accounts, events and answers exist, and how many people opened the app in the last week — and keep those totals. They are whole numbers about the whole platform: no addresses, no titles, and nothing about what any one person did. Beside them we keep one line per account: the name the account was created with, the day it was created, which sign-in it was created with, and how many people it is connected to. Only whoever runs Frenbar can see that list. It holds no email address, no account id and nothing you have written; apart from that one count it says nothing about what you have done, and nothing at all about when — and it is rebuilt from scratch every night, so a deleted account is gone from it within a day.
- Frenbar never reads your device's location. It declares no location permission. Towns are picked from a list.
- Frenbar can read your phone's contacts only if you say yes, and only to show you a list. That list stays on your phone — only the people you tick are ever saved. A file you hand it — such as the list LinkedIn lets you download from your own account — is read the same way, where you opened it, and only the people you tick are saved. Everyone on your list is still someone you chose.
- There is no birth year anywhere — not in the app, not in storage, not in the picker.
- You cannot be searched for by name. But three features publish things on purpose, and each has its own section below: your public card, the ranking, and the links you send.
- You can let a connection see the names and times of the events you're going to — never where, never who else is going. It is off for everyone until you switch it on, one person at a time, and switching everyone off deletes the list.
- One thing here is read by a person on purpose: if you send a bug report, an idea or a word of feedback from inside the app, whoever runs Frenbar reads what you wrote, with your account attached. Nothing else you type is read as a matter of course — the other times are an update or an event's photo somebody reports, which the person who runs Frenbar can then open. Each has its own section below.
Who runs this
Frenbar is an independent app. For anything on this page — a copy of your data, a correction, or deletion — write to privacy@frenbar.app.
What Frenbar stores about you
Your account
Signing in with Google, with Apple, or with an email address and a password, creates an account held by Firebase Authentication (Google), storing your email address and a user id. Signing in with Google gives us your email address, name and profile picture — not your password, and nothing else from your Google account.
Sign in with Apple is offered in the iPhone app. It gives
us your email address and, the first time you use it, your name — nothing
else, and never your password. If you choose Hide My Email,
what we receive and store is Apple's relay address
(something@privaterelay.appleid.com) rather than your real
one; we cannot see the address behind it. One consequence is worth knowing
before you choose: friends look each other up by email address, so an
account created with Hide My Email can only be found by that relay
address. Deleting your account also revokes Frenbar's access to your Apple
account.
The name your account was created with, the day it was created, which sign-in you used and how many people you are connected to also appear on a private list of accounts that only whoever runs Frenbar can see — never your email address, never an account id, and nothing else about what you have done or when you did it.
Your profile
All optional: a display name, a photo, a birthday (day and month only), a country you are from, the towns you live in, up to three social handles, your own phone numbers, a switch to say you are single (a yes or nothing — there is no other answer), and your app settings.
An earlier version also stored a free-text note of where you usually are, which prefilled a new event. No app shows it or uses it any more. If you ever typed one it is still sitting in your own profile record where nothing reads it, and it goes when your account does.
Most of these are copied to a published profile: your name, photo, birthday, handles, country and first town — and that you are single, only if you switched it on; switched off, the profile says nothing about it at all, so nothing can be read into its absence. Your email address and your phone numbers are not in it. It is readable by any signed-in Frenbar user who has your account id — which normally means someone who looked you up by your exact email address, but an account id also travels with an invitation you accept and with a ranking row, so treat the published profile as visible to people you have interacted with. Emptying a field stops publishing it.
The people you add
You may record someone's name, email address, phone numbers, a note, where they live, where they are from, a birthday, and your own private labels for them ("best friend", "work"). This is your address book, stored under your account, and no other Frenbar user can read it. The email address and phone numbers you recorded for someone reach another Frenbar user only when you pass them along — by hand, to one connection at a time, after seeing exactly what leaves; see Passing people along below. Labels never leave it. A note can also be filled from a file you bring in — see Bringing people over from a file below.
Please record only what you have reason to hold. Deleting someone deletes what you wrote — though their name stays on the guest list of events they were already invited to, because those are records of who was asked.
Introducing two people
On the page of somebody you are connected to, you can suggest them to another of your connections. That stores one small record: three account ids — yours, theirs, and the person you suggested them to — and the date. Nothing else is on it. No name, no email address, no photo, and no message: there is no free-text field anywhere in it, so nothing you write can be carried to somebody who never asked to hear from you.
Only the person you suggested somebody to can list these. They see a card and decide. If they say yes, an ordinary friend request goes to the person you suggested, saying that you suggested it — and their app checks that against this record before it shows your name, so nobody can put your name on a request you had nothing to do with. If they say no, you are not told, and the person you suggested never learns they were suggested at all. The record only ever says that it was dealt with, never which way.
These cannot be deleted by anybody — not by you, not by either other person, and not by deleting your account. The record is the only proof that an introduction was real, and a proof that one of the people in it can erase is not a proof. What survives a deleted account is three ids and a date, pointing at an account that can never be signed into again. If you want one removed, write to privacy@frenbar.app.
Passing people along
From the Friends tab you can pick up to twenty people from your list and pass them along to one person you are connected to. For somebody you typed in yourself, what travels is their name, the email address and phone numbers you recorded for them, and their birthday if you recorded one — never your notes, never your labels, never where you said they live or are from, and never a face you drew for them. For somebody who is on Frenbar, you can either suggest them — that is the introduction described above, and nothing of theirs travels — or pass along what is on your own record of them, the same four things and no more: never the email address Frenbar filled in for you when the two of you connected. An address you recorded for them yourself can travel, even when it is the one they sign in with.
Before it goes, the app shows you every line that will leave, and you send it yourself. The person you pass to sees the list inside Frenbar and adds each person or not; what they add becomes part of their own address book, which is theirs. You are not told which they kept, and the people whose details you pass along are not told at all — exactly as nobody is told when somebody types them in. Somebody you suggest learns it was you only if the person you passed to sends them a request; see Introducing two people above.
Frenbar stores one such list per person you pass to: your account id, theirs, the date, and the people on it. Inside Frenbar only the two of you can read it; if the person you pass to reports it, the person who runs Frenbar can open it in the Firebase console to decide what to do, the same place every report is read. A person leaves the list the moment the other side decides about them. The list is deleted when you take it back, when either of you blocks the other, or when either account is deleted; once they have decided about everyone it holds nobody, and your Frenbar app deletes what is left — two account ids and a date — the next time it is open. For now it is the Frenbar app on your phone that sends and shows these lists — an app that has not been updated shows only the suggestions in one — and Frenbar for the web does neither yet; somebody on Frenbar you suggest inside one is introduced the ordinary way, which the Android and iPhone apps show.
Bringing people over from your phone's contacts
The Android and iPhone apps can add people from your phone's address book. Both ask first — Android on a screen that explains what it is about to do, the iPhone through the system's own permission prompt — and you can say no, or back out and be asked another time.
If you say yes, Frenbar reads your contacts on your phone to draw a list: each person's name, their first email address and their first phone number, and nothing else. No postal address, no company, no note, no photo. That list is drawn on the screen and nowhere else. Only the people you tick are saved to your account.
Everything you do not tick simply ends when you leave the screen. Frenbar does not upload your address book, does not keep a copy of it, and does not keep a record of who you skipped. Nothing about a person you did not tick leaves your phone in any form — the import screen never checks any of these addresses against Frenbar's own users.
A person you do tick becomes one of your contacts, exactly like one you typed in yourself, and is treated the same way from then on. That includes, on Android only, a once-a-day check that looks up a small number of your saved contacts' addresses, as scrambled text, so Frenbar can tell you when somebody you already know starts using it. That check has always run on the contacts you typed in yourself, it is capped, and it never runs on anyone you did not save. The iPhone app does not make that check at all.
If you say no on Android, the feature still works a different way: your phone's own contact picker hands Frenbar one person at a time, and only the person you picked. On the iPhone there is no such fallback — saying no means the import screen cannot show you anything, and you add people by typing their details instead. You can change your mind either way in your phone's app settings.
Bringing people over from a file
You can hand Frenbar a file of people — in the Frenbar app on your phone, once it has been updated, and in the browser — such as the list of people LinkedIn lets you download from your own account. Frenbar never talks to LinkedIn — or to whichever service the file came from — to do this: you download the file yourself, and Frenbar reads it where you opened it, on your device, to draw a list. Only the people you tick are saved.
The file is not uploaded and not kept, nothing about a row you did not tick leaves your device in any form, and no row in the file is checked against Frenbar's own users. What the file says about a person that has no field of its own — a job title, an employer, the date LinkedIn recorded beside them, the address of their LinkedIn page — goes into that person's note, each line labelled with the file's own column name — a column the file itself calls Notes copied as it is, and the address of their LinkedIn page standing bare as the last line — and the screen shows you every line before you tick. Frenbar drops the columns it recognises, by their names, as a postal address, a second email address or phone number, a fax or pager number, a gender, an age, a relationship, a photo, or a group or category from the other service; a birthday column it recognises fills the birthday alone — day and month, never a year, never a note — and a column named DOB is dropped, never read. It knows the column names the files it was built for use, and a few more that other services use for the same things, so a column it does not recognise goes into the note, labelled, and the row shows it before you tick.
A person you tick becomes one of your contacts exactly like one you typed in, and is treated the same way from then on, including the once-a-day check described in the section above, and the note reaching Ask as the section below says. One thing is stored for the feature itself: a random key under your account that lets a second import of the same file recognise the people the first one added — those with a LinkedIn page address or an email address. It says nothing about anybody and goes with your account.
Ask, the chat about your people
When you type a question into Ask, the app sends your question, the conversation so far, and a digest of your address book — your friends' names, notes, places, nationalities, birthdays, who has said they're single, and your labels — to Google's Gemini model to compose the answer. Never their email addresses or phone numbers, and only at the moment you ask.
The conversation lives on your phone and nowhere else — Frenbar's database never sees it, and it is gone when the app's process ends. The one thing Frenbar keeps is a count of how many questions you asked today, because there is a daily cap. Under Google Cloud's terms the content of a request is not used to train Google's models.
Your events
An event holds its title, place, street address and map coordinates if you add them, time, notes and guest list. Creating one publishes a copy that the invitation link opens.
That copy carries the event details and guest names — never guest email addresses, because a link can be forwarded. Each guest's answer also carries their Frenbar account id, which is how the app finds your own row. Anyone holding the link can read all of it; the link carries a long random token and is not indexed. If the host adds a WhatsApp group link, anyone holding the invitation link can see it, join that group, and see its members' phone numbers.
A photo on the event, if the host adds one. The host can put one photo on an event they are hosting, and replace or remove it. It is shown inside the Frenbar app to the host and to the people they invited who are on Frenbar — the server refuses everyone else, anyone the host has blocked, and everyone but the host once a day has passed since the event started — and it is never on the invitation page or the ask-to-come page. Nobody checks it before it goes up. Any location a camera wrote into the photo is removed before it is saved. A day after the event starts the photo is deleted, the next time the host opens Frenbar on their phone; cancelling or deleting the event deletes it too, and a cancelled event's photo is hidden from everyone but the host at once, even before that. If somebody reports it, the person who runs Frenbar can open it in the Firebase console, the same place every report is read.
Pictures you send from an event. “Send the picture” makes one image on your phone — the photo, the event's title, its day and time, the location you typed for it, the first line of your notes if you switch that on for the picture, and the Frenbar helmet and name; never guest names, the address you added, or the rest of your notes — and hands it to the app you pick. The notes switch is off every time you make a picture, and you see the whole picture before anything leaves your phone. Frenbar keeps no copy and no record that you sent it. Removing the photo or deleting the event cannot reach a copy you have already sent.
Their events, if you say so. For each person you are connected to there is a switch, off until you turn it on. On, Frenbar writes a short list — the title and time of each upcoming event you are hosting or have said yes to, and whether you are hosting — and that one person can read it. The server refuses everyone else, and blocking someone stops them there too. The list carries no place, no address, no map pin, no notes, no guest names, no host's name and no link; it includes events that person was not invited to, which is why it is one person at a time. Frenbar sends it when you open it, so it can be behind, and the person reading it is shown which day it was sent. Switch everyone off and the list is deleted. It goes with your account.
Deleting an event deletes everything underneath it — the public page, every answer on it, and every request left through its ask-to-come link, including the email addresses in them.
An event can also be put on your friends' Opportunities as a post, if you switch that on for it; what that carries, and to whom, is under Posts just below.
Posts
An opportunity you throw — a job, a business idea, a trip, or something else — is a post: a kind, a title, a few lines, a day or a month if you chose one, a town picked from a list if you chose one, and your published name. It is shown to the people you were connected to when you posted it, or the ones among them you picked, and never to more: somebody you connect with later does not see it, and nothing you do afterwards widens it. Nobody checks it before it goes up.
Saying you are interested writes one record at your own account id, readable by you and by the poster and nobody else, and you can take it back. The poster sees the names of the people who said so, by the name they call them, and nothing about anybody who did not.
A post leaves the feeds of the people it was shown to when you close it or when its day goes by, and stays under Your posts until you delete it, which deletes it and every answer on it with it.
If you switch on Put it on your friends' Opportunities for an event, the people you were connected to at that moment — never somebody you had blocked — see the event's name, its day and what you wrote under Where as a post; never its street address, its map pin, its notes, its guest list or its WhatsApp link. Saying you're interested tells the host and nobody else; only the host can put you on the guest list. While it stands, the post follows the event's name, day and Where; switching it off, calling the event off, or the day going by takes it down, and deleting the event deletes it.
Personal updates
An update is a photo and a few words, shown to the people you are connected to. Nobody checks it before it goes up. If somebody reports it, the person who runs Frenbar can open it in the Firebase console to decide what to do; that is the only time anyone outside your connections looks at it, and it is the same place every report is read. Taking an update down removes the photo and the words for everyone, and that is the only removal there is: the date you put it up stays behind, because otherwise the thirty-day wait could be reset by deleting and starting again. Deleting your account leaves that date behind too, and nothing in the app can remove it. It holds nothing but a date.
Your public card
The card is a page at frenbar.app/c/… that you can hand out
as a link or a QR code. It is readable by anyone who has that code,
with no account and no sign-in — that is its purpose.
It can carry your name, photo, one line about you, your three handles, and — only if you switch them on — your email address and phone number. It is off until you create it, and turning it off blanks the published page. Only put on it what you would put on a business card.
The ranking, only if you switch it on
Off by default. Switching it on publishes one row — how many different countries your friends live in and come from, and up to twenty country flags per view — visible to any signed-in Frenbar user, beside your published name and photo. It never names your friends, but the flags do reveal the set of countries they live in and come from. Switching it off deletes the row.
This is the only part of Frenbar that can be browsed by someone who does not already know your email address.
Telling us about a bug or an idea
The app has a Tell us form: you choose bug, idea or feedback, write a title and a description, and send it. This is the one thing in Frenbar that a person reads because you meant them to. Nothing else you type is read by us.
What is sent is exactly what you typed — the kind, the title and the description — and your Frenbar account id, so it can be followed up and so two reports from the same person can be recognised, and which of the two apps you sent it from — the word “Android” or the word “iOS”, and nothing else about your phone. Your email address is not on it — only the account id, which whoever runs Frenbar can match back to your account, and so to the address you signed in with. The name shown beside it is the one on your published profile. Nothing else is attached: no screenshot, no logs, no device model or version number, and nothing else from your account.
One person reads these — whoever runs Frenbar. They are not published, not shown to other users, and not passed to anyone else. They are held in the same database as everything else on this page.
Once you send it you cannot change it, take it back, or read it again from inside the app — the app keeps no history of what you sent. That is deliberate rather than missing: it is a note to a person, not a support ticket, and nothing here can promise you a reply. Whoever reads it can mark one as dealt with. That changes nothing about what you wrote — not a word of it can be edited by anyone, and nothing is ever removed. Please do not put anything private in one. The form says the same thing, above the button, every time.
Submissions are kept until they have been dealt with, and deleting your account does not remove them — they carry only your account id, which stops pointing at anything once the account is gone, so what is left is the text with no name on it. If you want one deleted, or want to know what you sent, write to privacy@frenbar.app.
Links you send to other people
| Link | Who can read it | What it collects |
|---|---|---|
| Invitation | Anyone holding it | The guest's yes/no and date choices, stored against the name you already had for them. No account needed. |
| Ask to come | Anyone holding it — shows the event without the guest list | The asker confirms their email address first (through Google, or by clicking a verification email — which creates a Firebase account for them). The address is stored on the request and only you can read it. Accepting them puts them on the guest list by name, not by address. |
| Add me | Anyone holding it — shows your name so they know who they are giving details to | They type their own name, email address and optionally a birthday, verify the address the same way, and it lands in a queue only you can see. Accepting it adds them to your address book. |
Verification for the last two works by creating an account for that address so the system can send it a one-time email. If the person never finishes, that account is left behind with nothing attached to it.
The Google Play list
The public pages offer a box for hearing when the Android app is on Google Play (until 25 September 2026 it asked to hear when Frenbar launches). Submitting it stores your email address, plus which link you arrived through and when, so we can email you once when Frenbar is on Google Play. It is not a newsletter and it is not shared.
An address stays on the list until that one email has gone out, and is deleted after it. That includes addresses left before 25 September 2026 under the old wording: instead of a launch email they get the one Google Play email, so they are kept until then, although the iPhone app is already out.
Nobody can read the list back — not other users, and not you through the app. To be removed, write to privacy@frenbar.app.
Notifications and reminders
The app checks periodically — roughly every fifteen minutes, and only while your phone allows it — whether anyone has answered your events, and reminds you the day before and a few hours ahead. These are produced on your phone. There is no push server, and no notification content leaves your device.
Invitation emails
When you send invitations, the app asks our server for them to be sent. The server reads the guest list from your own event and passes each guest's name and email address, the event details, your name and your address as the reply-to, to Resend, the email provider that delivers them. One message per guest — never a single message addressed to everyone, which would show the guest list to all of them. We keep a per-day count of how many recipients you have mailed, to stop the endpoint being abused.
Some builds instead hand the invitation to your own mail app for you to send. If yours does, nothing goes through our server or Resend.
Who else your data reaches
| Who | What they get | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Google (Firebase) | Everything described above | Authentication, database and hosting, on our instructions |
| Google (Gemini, on Vertex AI) | The Ask digest — friends' names, notes, places, nationalities, birthdays, who has said they're single, your labels — plus your question and the chat so far. Never their email addresses or phone numbers. | Answering the questions you type into Ask. Sent only when you ask; not used to train Google's models. |
| Resend | Guest names and email addresses, event details, your name and reply-to address | Delivering invitation emails you chose to send |
| OpenStreetMap | The coordinates of an event's pin, and the requesting device's IP address | Drawing the small map preview. Only when an event has a pin. |
| Other Frenbar users | Only as described above | Invitations, your published profile, your card, your ranking row, your update, the events list you switch on for them, the photo on an event they are invited to, a post you put up, including one made from an event, and the people you pass along to a connection you pick |
Nothing is sold. There are no advertising or analytics recipients.
Choosing a town uses a list that ships with the app and is also served from our own site; the towns themselves come from GeoNames under CC BY 4.0. If you type an address for an event, your phone's own geocoder (part of Android) turns it into coordinates.
Backups
Android may back the app up to your Google account, as it does for most apps. That backup includes the app's local data — on a phone signed out of Frenbar, that is your whole address book. Your signed-in session is excluded, so a restored backup does not carry your account with it. You can turn app backup off in Android's own settings.
Keeping and deleting
Your data is kept while your account exists. You can delete individual pieces from inside the app — a person, an event, a photo, a field, your card, your ranking row, the events list (switch it off for everyone), an event's photo, a list of people you passed along, a post. Three things cannot be deleted from inside the app at all: anything you sent through the Tell us form, the date you last put up an update, and any introduction you made — see those sections above. Taking an update down removes the photo and the words; the date stays.
The private list of accounts described at the top of this page is not a fourth: it is rebuilt from scratch, every night, from the accounts that exist — so deleting your account removes you from it within a day, and there is nothing to ask for.
To delete the whole account and everything stored under it, use Delete account on the You tab — in the app, or at frenbar.app/app in a browser with nothing installed. What that removes is spelled out in full. If you cannot sign in, write to privacy@frenbar.app from the address you signed in with. You can also ask for a copy of what is stored, for a correction, or for us to stop — under the GDPR these are your rights to access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability and objection, and you may complain to your national data protection authority.
Children
Frenbar is not intended for children under 16 and is not directed at them. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who can see it, the date at the top changes and the app will say so before the change takes effect.