FollowirePrivacy Policy
Version 1.7 · 24 October 2026 · Excelism Techno Solutions Private Limited
This policy describes what the app actually does as of the date above. Each section opens with an "In short" summary; the full text underneath is the policy.
01What this policy covers
Followire is a social network for families. Instead of "followers", it stores real relationships: that one person is another's mother, spouse or sibling. From those facts it draws your family Wire, shows the path between you and everyone connected to you, and lets you share posts, stories and chats with people at a chosen distance from you on that Wire, and with people you choose to follow. Because the product is built on relationships, some of the personal data we hold is about you, and some is about the relatives you add. This policy covers both.
What it does not cover. Other apps you hand content to through your phone's share sheet, and the sign-in services of Google and Apple, are governed by their own policies. Our Terms of Service at followire.com/terms govern the use of the service itself. followire.com sets no cookies and runs no analytics.
Where to read this. This policy, the Terms, the Community Guidelines and the account-deletion page are inside the app under Settings → Terms and policies, and on the sign-up screen. The app fetches the current text from our server each time and keeps a copy for offline reading.
Words used in this policy. - Member: a person with a Followire account. - Profile without an account: a relative added to a Wire by a member, including a child under 18 or a relative who has died. Such a profile cannot sign in and cannot be messaged. - Wire: the graph of confirmed relationships around a person. - Knot: everyone connected to you by confirmed relationships, however many steps away. - Hops: the number of relationship steps between two people. Your sister is one hop; her husband's mother is three. - Follower: a member who follows you without being related to you. Following is about who sees your posts; it never makes anyone family. - Service provider: a company that processes data for us, on our instructions, to run the service.
02Information you give us
Account. An email address or a mobile phone number, whichever you sign up with, and the one-time code we send to verify it. If you choose a password, we store it only in hashed form. Changing a password requires the old one.
Information from sign-in services. If you use "Continue with Google", Google sends us your name and email address, and we create your account from them. We do not copy your Google profile picture; you add your own photo when you set up your profile. On iPhone, if you choose "Continue with Apple", Apple sends us your name (the first time only) and an email address, which is a private relay address if you choose to hide yours. We fill that name in for you when you set up your profile, so you never have to type it, and we never ask an Apple user for an email address. We receive nothing else from those services and send them nothing.
Profile. A unique username (6 to 25 characters; suggested from your name if you give one, and you can change it) is the only thing needed to finish setting up. Everything else is your choice, now or later: your first and last name (and a middle name if you wish), date of birth, gender (male, female or other), your city or town, a profile photo, family names (surnames) you want to be found by, a mobile number, a short bio, a website, a profession and a cover photo. For bio, website, profession and the other optional fields you choose who can see each one: everyone, followers, family, or nobody. If you give no name, your username is shown wherever a name would be. If you give a date of birth, it must show that you are 18 or older. If your gender is empty when you accept a relationship request whose word implies it (for example "brother" or "sister"), your gender is filled in from that word; you can change it at any time. You → Edit profile; Settings → Account.
Your family Wire. The relationships you assert: parent or child, spouse, and sibling, together with their kind (for example birth, adoptive, step or guardian; married, partner, separated or widowed; full, half or step). A relationship with another member is a request until they accept it; they can decline with a reason you see, and you can withdraw it. A request may be resent at most five times. After the other person accepts, one of their direct relatives who already uses Followire is asked to confirm; the first to answer decides, a confirmation makes the relationship part of both families and a refusal ends it. If nobody is eligible to confirm, the relationship stands at once. When two families join, one direct relative on each side confirms. Ending a relationship keeps a dated record that it existed and how it ended (for example divorce, separation or disconnected); ending a marriage requires the other spouse to confirm.
Relatives who are not on Followire. You can add a relative who has died, so that the Wire is complete, with their name, gender, a username, a photo if you add one and, if you know them, dates of birth and death. Nobody is asked to confirm. We do not contact these people. A relative who later joins can claim such a record, edit it or delete it as their own. See section 8 for the rights of the people concerned.
Children under 18. Followire does not accept members under 18. A parent or guardian can add a child under 18 as a profile they control: name, gender, date of birth, a username and a photo if they add one. The child cannot sign in and cannot be messaged. Both parents on the Wire, or the guardian, control the profile. On the child's eighteenth birthday the app tells each controlling adult that the child may now have an account; the adult enters an email address the young person controls, a code sent to that address confirms it, and the profile becomes their own account without a password. They sign in with Google on that address or set a password. The adults' control ends at that moment.
Reporting that a member has died. Only a direct relative (parent, child, spouse or sibling) with their own account may report that a member has died. The member is told and can reply that they are alive; otherwise the report needs confirmation from other relatives (two direct, or three within three hops, or one direct and two others). Nothing is shown to anyone while the report is pending, and an unanswered report expires after 30 days. Once confirmed, the account is closed to sign-in, the relative who reported becomes the keeper of the profile, and other members see only the date of death and who keeps it. Two direct relatives can reverse this.
Content you create. Posts (text, up to ten photos and three clips, the people you tag, the audience you choose, and optionally the town where it was made), stories (24 hours), comments and replies, likes and reactions, reposts, moods (24 hours), and messages. Messages can carry text, photos, videos, voice notes and documents (PDF, Office and text files), replies, forwards, edits and reactions, and photos or clips sent to be viewed once. Group chats also hold a group name, photo, member list and admin roles. Chat drafts you have not sent stay on your phone only.
Your settings and private lists. Who can see your profile and each optional field, who can send you relationship requests, who can message you, whether read receipts and the typing indicator are on, who can see when you were last online, how many hops your feed reaches, your notification switches, muted people and chats, pinned chats, starred messages, favourites, nicknames you give relatives (visible only to you), and the people you block (never shown to them).
Support requests. When you use Settings → Help, you choose a topic, describe the problem in your words and may attach up to three screenshots. We store the request with your app version and phone model, email it to our support address with your email as the reply address, and send you an acknowledgement.
Information with special protections. Followire does not ask for, and has no field for, religion, caste, health, disability, political opinion, sexual orientation or financial details, about you or about your relatives. Family relationship kinds such as "adoptive" or "separated" are ordinary profile facts here, shown only to the audience described in section 7. Please do not put protected details about relatives into names, nicknames or posts; if you do, they are treated as content you chose to share, and section 8 applies.
If you choose not to provide information. Without an email address or phone number there is no account. Without a username the set-up cannot finish. Everything else is optional: leaving out your name means your username is shown in its place, and leaving out your city only means the city line on your profile is empty.
03Information created when you use the app
Delivery and reading. When a message reaches your phone and when you open a conversation, so that senders see delivery and read ticks. You can turn read receipts off for one-to-one chats, in which case you do not see anyone else's either. Group chats keep counting reads. When you open a photo or clip sent to be viewed once, the opening is recorded and the sender sees "Opened".
Online and last seen. While your app is open it tells the server you are online, and the time you were last active is stored. Both are shown only to the people you choose under Settings → Last seen and online (everyone, your Knot, a number of hops, your followers, or nobody), and only to people who show theirs to you. Typing indicators are sent live and never stored.
Story views. Which stories you have watched, so the author sees who viewed and you see which are new.
Where a post was made. If you allow it, when you compose a post the app reads your phone's approximate position once and turns it into the name of the town or area, which you can remove before posting. Only the town name is stored with the post; the coordinates are not stored by us. To turn the position into a name, the coordinates are sent to a map service (section 9). A refusal is remembered and you are not asked again; you can change it under Settings → Device permissions.
Your phone. Each install generates a random identifier of its own and reads the phone's make and model, for example "Samsung SM-A546E". We store the identifier and name of the phone that currently holds your account, because an account can be signed in on one phone at a time: signing in on another phone signs the first one out, and we email you that a new sign-in happened on the named phone.
Calls. This version of Followire does not offer voice or video calls. The code for them remains in the app but cannot be reached, and no call data is created.
Push notification tokens. A device token from Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging), which on iPhone is delivered through Apple's push notification service, so that notifications can reach your phone when the app is closed. The token is tied to your account and released when you sign out.
Service logs. Sign-in events, changes to your profile, push delivery, device registrations and application errors. An error report contains the error message, a stack trace, your account identifier and the build type. It does not contain message content. No third-party analytics, crash-reporting or advertising software is included in the app.
Words checked before you post. When you post, write a story caption or a comment, or save a name, username, bio or group name, the text is checked automatically against a list of words and phrases that break our Community Guidelines, in English and in Indian languages, in their own scripts and in English letters. If it matches, it is not saved and you are asked to change it; your text stays where you typed it. We keep only a count of how many times each listed word was refused each day and where (in a post, a comment, and so on), never the text itself and never who wrote it. Private chat messages are not checked, and photos and videos are not checked by this version.
On your phone only. Your session; a cached copy of your profile, Wire and recent feed, and of your chat list with the newest 300 messages of each conversation, for fast start-up and offline reading; the accounts saved on this phone (email, name, photo link, last used) with the sign-in token for each sealed in the phone's hardware-backed keystore (on Android these are left out of the phone's backups, so a restored phone asks you to sign in again); temporary compressed copies of media before upload; files shared into Followire from other apps, held until you post or send them; unsent chat drafts; how long you have used Followire each day (Settings → Screen time), which is never uploaded; counters that decide when the store's own rating card is shown; and flags recording which permissions you have declined. "Forget this device" on the sign-in screen removes all of this.
The Followire folder. Photos, videos, documents and voice notes you receive or open in chats are kept in a Followire folder on your phone, following the download choices in Settings → Storage and data. On Android, photos and videos you receive also appear in your gallery, as "Followire Images" and "Followire Video", unless you turn off Settings → Chat settings → Media visibility, which applies to media downloaded from then on; voice notes stay hidden from other apps; on iPhone the folder belongs to the app. The folder stays after you sign out or use "Forget this device", until you delete it in Settings → Storage and data or uninstall the app. Photos and clips sent to be viewed once are never saved there.
Sharing into Followire (Android). When you share a photo, video or file from another app to Followire, it is copied into the app's temporary storage until you choose a post, a story or a chat. To make sharing quicker, Android's share menu shows the names and photos of your four most recent chats; they are removed when you sign out.
Update checks. The app asks Google Play, or on iPhone the App Store, whether a newer version exists, and may ask you to update before you continue. Only the app's own identifier is sent, nothing about you.
04Information we do not collect
We do not collect your precise location, and we read your approximate location only for the town on a post, only when you allow it, and only at the moment you compose. We do not run location in the background. We do not read your address book or contacts. We do not read your photo library: the app opens your phone's own photo picker and receives only the picture you choose. We do not use an advertising identifier, show advertising, or sell data. We do not track you across other apps or websites, and we place no tracking code on other people's sites. We do not record calls, because there are none in this version. We do not build profiles of people who are not members beyond the relative records described in section 2.
05Device permissions and why
| Permission | Used for | When asked |
|---|---|---|
| Camera | Taking a profile photo, a post, a story or a picture for chat. Optional. | The first time you choose "Take a photo" |
| Microphone | Recording voice notes in chat. Optional. | The first time you hold to record |
| Photos and videos | Choosing a photo or clip to share. Android's and iOS's own picker opens; only the item you pick reaches Followire. Saving media from a chat to your gallery uses the phone's media store. | Followire's own question the first time you add a photo; no system permission |
| Notifications | Messages, requests and family activity. Each kind can be switched off under Settings → Notifications. | Once, after sign-in |
| Approximate location | The town where a post was made, if you want it on the post. Never precise, never in the background. | The first time you compose a post; a refusal is remembered |
| Network state, vibration, wake lock, boot | Knowing whether the phone is online, vibrating for a notification, and keeping the phone awake for a moment while a notification arrives. | Not shown; standard notification plumbing |
Refusing a permission only disables the feature that needs it: without the camera you can still choose from your gallery, without the microphone you can still type, without location the post goes out without a place. Settings → Device permissions, or your phone's Settings → Apps → Followire.
This version declares no permissions for calls, phone, Bluetooth, contacts, SMS, exact alarms, biometrics or full-screen alerts.
06How we use information
| Purpose | Information used | Why we may do this |
|---|---|---|
| Draw your Wire and compute relationships and hop distances | Profile, relationships, profiles without accounts | Providing the service you asked for |
| Deliver posts, stories, moods, messages and notifications to the people you chose | Content, audience settings, relationships, follows, push tokens | Providing the service |
| Show who has seen or received what | Delivery, read and view records, online and last-active time, within your privacy settings | Providing the service |
| Enforce audiences, blocks, mutes, message rules and "who can see me" | Settings, block and mute lists, relationships, follows | Providing the service; keeping people safe |
| Verify family membership and death reports | Relationship claims, confirmations, denials, reports | Providing the service; keeping the Wire truthful |
| Keep one phone per account and warn you of a new sign-in | Phone identifier and name, email address | Keeping your account safe |
| Verify sign-ins, detect abuse, investigate reports | Account, sign-in logs, reported content, your report note | Keeping the service safe; legal obligation under the Intermediary Rules |
| Answer your support request | Topic, your words, screenshots, app version, phone model, email | Providing the service |
| Fix errors and improve reliability | Error reports, push and device event logs | Legitimate interest in a working product |
| Send verification codes, new-sign-in alerts, report acknowledgements and service notices | Email address or phone number | Providing the service; legal obligation to notify certain changes |
| Check text against the word list before it is saved | The text of posts, story captions, comments, names, usernames, bios and group names; a daily count of refusals per listed word | Keeping the service safe; legal obligation under the Intermediary Rules |
| Improve features | Aggregate, non-identifying usage information | Legitimate interest |
We do not use your content or relationships to build advertising profiles, and we do not train artificial-intelligence models on your data. We do not send marketing email.
Who at Followire can see your information. Processing is automatic. Reports and appeals are decided by a small number of named reviewers, in a protected review panel that only they can open, with their own Followire accounts. A reviewer sees the report, a copy of what was reported and the account history needed to decide; reported photos and videos open through links that expire after a minute, and the most sensitive ones stay blurred until the reviewer chooses to look. Every decision is recorded with who made it, when and why. A report a reviewer cannot decide alone is passed to the company's management by email, without any photo or video. A small number of staff can read service logs and, when investigating a support request or a legal request, the specific content involved. Staff do not browse members' messages or Wires. Every such access is logged.
Legal bases for users in places that require one (for example the EU or UK): performance of our contract with you; your consent for optional fields, camera, microphone, location, notifications and relationships you assert; our legitimate interests in security, error diagnosis and preventing abuse; and legal obligations.
07Who can see what
- Your name, username and photo can be seen by other members who search for you, so that a relative can find you before you are connected. Your profile link, followire.com/@yourusername, opens the app for members and otherwise shows only your name. A profile with any restriction on "Who can see me" is private: a stranger sees your name, photo and post count, and must send a follow request to see more. Settings → Who can see me.
- Posts and stories are shown to the audience you pick for each one: your immediate family, family within a chosen number of hops, your whole Knot, your followers, everyone on Followire, specific people, or all but specific people. Only that audience is notified. A repost stays inside the original audience.
- Followers. Anyone may follow a public profile; a private profile receives a request. Your followers and following lists are visible to you, your family, your followers and the people you follow.
- Messages are visible only to the members of that conversation. You choose who may start a conversation with you: anyone, your Knot, or followers only; someone outside those groups who is allowed to write gets one message request that you accept or block. Someone who joins a group later cannot see earlier messages; someone removed from a group keeps only what they saw while a member. Messages sent to you while you had blocked the sender are never shown, even after you unblock. Searching your chats looks only through conversations you are a member of.
- Your Wire shows the people related to you and how. Relatives several hops away can see that you exist on the Wire and your relationship to them. Settings → Hops.
- Last seen and online are shown only as you set them, and only to people who show theirs to you.
- Blocking and muting. If you block someone, their messages are never delivered to you, any follow between you is removed and they cannot follow or request you, and neither of you sees the other's profile, profile photo, posts, stories or comments, whatever audience they were shared with and including reposts by others. Nobody is told: to them your profile and posts simply read "not available", as a deleted post does. Muting can hide someone's posts, their stories or their notifications from you, without their knowledge; muting their notifications also silences the notifications for their messages to you in a one-to-one chat, though the messages still arrive. Shared family groups are unaffected by either. Block or mute from a person's profile; see the list under Settings → Blocked accounts.
What others can do with what you share. Anyone who can see a post or message can forward it to another conversation, save a photo or video to their phone, or repost it within the same audience, and can screenshot anything except another person's full-size profile picture, which the app blocks on both platforms. A photo or clip sent to be viewed once can be opened one time by each recipient and is never shown again, but a second phone pointed at the screen is beyond any app's control. Others can also tag you, mention you or name you in their content; you can remove a tag, decide who may tag you, and section 8 covers the rest.
Media files: what you should know today. Photos, videos, voice notes and documents you upload to posts, stories, chats and your profile are stored on our storage provider at web addresses that are long and not guessable, but that do not require a sign-in to open. Anyone who obtains such an address, for example if a recipient forwards it, can open the file. Photos and clips sent to be viewed once, and screenshots attached to support requests, are stored privately and are reachable only through short-lived links. We are working to restrict all media files so that they can be opened only by signed-in members who are allowed to see them.
08Information about other people
When you add a relative, tag someone, mention them or name them in a post, you are giving us information about another person. Please do this only for your own family and only in ways they would expect. A person who is on Followire is always asked before a relationship with you is confirmed, and a member reported as deceased is told and can object.
If you are not a Followire member and believe a member has entered information about you, or if you are the family member of a deceased person whose record you want corrected or removed, write to us at the address in section 18. We will verify your identity or relationship and act within 30 days.
09Service providers and other sharing
| Provider | What it does | Data involved | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, sign-in, file storage, scheduled jobs and server functions | All account, profile, Wire, content, support and log data | Tokyo, Japan |
| Google Firebase Cloud Messaging | Delivers push notifications | Device token; for a message notification, the sender's name and up to the first 180 characters of the message; for family events, one sentence naming the people and the claim | Google data centres, mainly USA |
| Google Sign-In | Optional sign-in | Your Google name and email | |
| Resend | Sends email: sign-in and password codes, new-phone sign-in alerts, report acknowledgements, copies of reports to our team, support requests, appeals and their acknowledgements, child-account codes, and reports escalated to our management | Your email address, the code or notice, for support requests and appeals your words, app version, phone model and screenshot links, and for report copies the names involved, the reason, the note and the reported text; for an escalation, the report's reference, reason and the reviewer's note | USA |
| Photon (komoot) | Turns the city you type into suggestions, and turns a post's coordinates into a town name | The characters you type in the city field; the approximate coordinates of your phone when you add a place to a post. No account identifier is sent. | Germany |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, and delivering push notifications to iPhones | As Google Sign-In and Firebase above | Apple |
LiveKit Cloud, which carried voice and video calls in earlier test builds, is not used by this version. Each provider works under a data-processing agreement, may use the data only to provide its service to us, and must delete it when the service ends. Photon is a public service used under its published terms.
At your request. When you use "Share profile", the share sheet or the QR code, or share a document from a chat to another app, the content goes to the app you pick, under that app's privacy policy. When you tap a link in a post or on a profile, your phone's browser opens it.
No affiliates. Followire is run by one company. We have no group companies, partners or advertisers with whom data is shared.
If the company changes hands. If Excelism Techno Solutions Private Limited, or the Followire service, is sold, merged or transferred, your information may pass to the new owner. It stays subject to this policy unless you are told otherwise, and we will tell you in the app before the transfer takes effect, with the choice to delete your account first.
10Legal requests and preventing harm
We may access, preserve or disclose your information when we reasonably believe it is necessary to comply with a valid legal order from a court or authority with jurisdiction, including orders under the Information Technology Act, 2000, the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, or the equivalent laws of your country; to enforce our Terms and investigate reports of abuse; or to prevent a genuine risk of death or serious injury to any person.
We check that every request is valid and disclose only the minimum it covers. Where the law allows, we tell the affected member before or after disclosure. Information subject to a lawful preservation request is kept for the period the request specifies and then deleted. Requests from outside India are assessed under the same standard and Indian law.
11Where your data is stored and international transfers
Our servers are provided by Supabase in Tokyo, Japan, and notifications, email and place names pass through the providers in section 9 in the USA and Europe. If you are in India, this means your personal data is transferred outside India; we do so under contracts with these providers and in line with the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. If you are in the EU or UK, transfers rely on the providers' standard contractual clauses. Data is encrypted in transit on every leg.
12How long we keep information
| Data | Kept until |
|---|---|
| Account, profile, Wire, posts, comments, messages, follows | You delete them, or 30 days after you ask to delete your account |
| Stories and moods | Hidden after 24 hours; a daily clean-up then deletes each story and its files, usually two to three days after it was posted. A story that has been reported is kept until the report is decided |
| Messages you unsend | "Delete for everyone" removes them for all members immediately |
| Messages you delete for yourself | Hidden for you only; other members keep their copy |
| Photos and clips sent to be viewed once | Unreadable after each recipient's single opening; the file itself is removed with your other media as section 13 describes |
| Ended relationships (divorce, separation, disconnected) | Kept as dated history until your account is deleted |
| Relationship requests, confirmations, denials, death reports | Until your account is deleted; an unanswered death report expires after 30 days |
| A child's email entered by a parent | Until that email is verified and the account is created, or the profile is removed |
| Reports you make or that are made about you | Two years after the report is closed, with the copy of the reported text; your identifier is removed if your account is deleted |
| Copies of reported photos, videos and documents | 180 days after the report is decided, then deleted |
| Strikes on an account | A strike stops counting after 90 days (one given for a severe breach does not); the record is kept with the report |
| Appeals | Twelve months after the appeal is closed, as support requests |
| Support requests and their screenshots | Twelve months after the request is closed |
| Daily counts of refused words | Kept while the word is on the list; they hold no text and no person |
| The record of each review decision | 12 months, as service logs |
| Push tokens | Released at sign-out; stale tokens are dropped when a phone stops responding |
| Phone identifier and name holding your account | Replaced at each sign-in; removed with the account |
| Platform logs (server requests and failures) | 30 days, pruned daily |
| Service and error logs | 12 months, then deleted |
| Uploaded media files | See section 13 |
| Provider backups | Our database provider keeps recovery backups for 7 days; deleted data disappears from them at the end of that window |
| Records we must keep by law, or under a lawful preservation request | For the period the law or the request specifies |
| Local data on your phone | Until you clear the app's storage, sign out with "Forget this device", or uninstall; the Followire folder until you delete it in Settings → Storage and data or uninstall |
13Deleting your account
Open Settings → Delete account and type your username to confirm. You are signed out everywhere and told the date, 30 days from now, on which the erasure happens. Signing in before that date and choosing "Keep my account" cancels it. On the date, a scheduled job permanently removes your sign-in credentials, profile, Wire relationships, profiles without accounts that you created (deceased relatives and children, with any email stored for them), follows, posts, comments, likes, reactions, RSVPs, stories, messages you sent, notifications, relationship requests, your confirmations and votes, and device registrations.
Group conversations you were in continue for the other members without you. Relationships that other members hold with each other are not affected. Anything another member saved outside the app, such as a forwarded photo, is beyond our reach. Reports you made, or that were made about you, are kept with your identifier removed, so the record of a complaint is not lost. A copy of deleted rows survives in our provider's recovery backups for up to 7 days and is then gone. If a lawful request requires us to preserve specific records, section 10 applies.
Media files. Photos, videos, voice notes and documents you uploaded are not yet removed from storage automatically when the account is erased. Until automatic removal is in place, write to us after the deletion date and we will remove them within 30 days. You can also ask us to delete your account by email; we will verify that the request comes from the account's email address or phone number.
14Your rights and choices
Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete, restrict or export your personal data, to object to processing, and to withdraw consent. In the app you can already:
- edit your name, date of birth, gender, city, family names, mobile number, bio, website, profession, photo and cover, and set who sees each optional field (You → Edit profile; Settings → Account);
- change who can see your profile, who can send you requests, who can message you, who sees your last seen, and how far your feed reaches (Settings);
- choose the audience for every post and story, and who may tag you (the audience picker when posting; Settings);
- turn read receipts and the typing indicator off (Settings → Chat);
- edit a message within 15 minutes, unsend it, delete it for yourself, or clear a chat (long-press the message; chat menu);
- follow and unfollow, block, unblock and mute people (their profile; Settings → Blocked accounts), and leave or delete groups (group info);
- see what was removed from your account and any strike, and appeal a strike (Settings → Account status);
- switch each kind of notification off (Settings → Notifications), review and change device permissions (Settings → Device permissions), see your screen time, sign out another phone by signing in, forget a device, and delete your account (Settings).
A copy of your data. Write to us and we will send you a copy of your profile, relationships, follows, posts, comments and messages in a machine-readable file within 30 days. An in-app export is planned.
For anything else, write to us (section 18) or use Settings → Help. We answer within 30 days and never charge for a first request. If you are not satisfied, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India, or if you are in the EU or UK, to your national data protection authority.
15Children
Followire is for people aged 18 and over. You confirm that you are 18 or older when you sign up. Giving a date of birth is optional; if you give one, it must show that you are 18 or older. If we learn that a person under 18 has created an account, we delete it.
Children under 18 appear on Followire only as profiles created and controlled by a parent or guardian, as section 2 describes: they cannot sign in, cannot be messaged, and are added without asking the wider family. A controlling adult may remove the profile at any time by disconnecting it. From the child's eighteenth birthday the controlling adult may hand the profile over as described in section 2; from then on the account is the young person's own.
We do not show advertising to anyone, do not track behaviour for advertising, and do not create accounts for children, so the obligations that India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act places on processing children's data with parental consent apply to Followire only through the parent-controlled profiles, where the parent's own action is the consent.
16Security
All traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Data is encrypted at rest by our storage provider, and the text of every message is additionally encrypted in the database with a key held on our server, so a copy of the database alone does not reveal message text. A tiny blurred preview of each photo or clip, used to show it while it loads, is stored with the message without that extra encryption. Every table is protected by row-level access rules that are enforced on the server, so the app cannot be modified to read another person's data. Passwords are hashed; changing one requires the old one; a password or sign-in token remembered on your phone is sealed with a key held in the phone's hardware. Session tokens are short-lived and refreshed. An account can be signed in on one phone at a time, and you are emailed when a new phone signs in. Photos and clips sent to be viewed once are stored privately and opened through links that expire within minutes.
Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: our servers hold the key and can technically access message content in order to deliver it, and we access it only to operate the service, to investigate abuse reports, or when the law requires (section 10).
No system is perfectly secure. If we learn of a breach affecting your data we will notify you and the relevant authority as the law requires.
17Reporting abuse
Posts, stories, comments and profiles, and the photos, videos and documents in a chat, have a Report action, with reasons such as a child's safety, a private or intimate photo, threats, harassment, hate, pretending to be you and spam, and room for your own words. Each report is stored as a record of who reported whom, the reason, your note and a copy of what was reported, so that the evidence survives if the original is deleted. You receive an email acknowledging it, and the members of our team who review reports receive a copy with the reported text; photos, videos and documents are never sent by email. A report about a child's safety or an intimate image hides the item at once while we review it, and its author is told only that it is hidden while we review it, never why or by whom. Only you and those team members can see your report; the person reported is never told who reported them.
Reports are acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days, by the named reviewers section 6 describes. If a hidden item turns out not to break the rules, it comes back and its author is told it is visible again. If we find a breach we remove the content, and the account may receive a strike, which can lead to suspension or closure as our Terms (section 8) describe; the person sees what was removed, and any strike, under Settings → Account status, and can appeal a strike inside the app. For anything the app cannot report, write to support@followire.com with the username involved.
18Contact and grievance officer
Excelism Techno Solutions Private Limited Hyderabad, Telangana, India Privacy questions: support@followire.com Support: support@followire.com, or Settings → Help in the app Account deletion: in the app under Settings, or support@followire.com
Grievance Officer (Information Technology Rules, 2021 and Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023): the Grievance Officer of Excelism Techno Solutions Private Limited, support@followire.com, +91 70930 94135. Grievances are acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days.
19Changes to this policy
We will post any change here with a new effective date and, for material changes, tell you in the app at least 15 days before they take effect, so you can review them and decide whether to continue. Continued use after the date means the new policy applies. Every previous version is available on request from support@followire.com. This is version 1.7, issued 24 October 2026. It describes Followire 1.0.3: only a username is needed to set up, and name, gender, date of birth, city and photo are optional (section 2); text you post is checked against a list of words (section 3); reports are decided by named reviewers in a protected review panel (sections 6 and 17); blocking works both ways, and muting someone's notifications also silences their messages (section 7); and the sign-in tokens on an Android phone are left out of its backups (section 3). Version 1.6, issued 19 October 2026, described Followire 1.0.2: reporting comments and chat media, strikes, suspension and appeals (section 17), the profile photo and city needed at set-up, usernames of 6 to 25 characters, the Followire folder and recent chats kept on your phone, sharing into Followire, update checks, and when stories are deleted. Version 1.5, issued 17 October 2026, corrected section 17 to match the app (a relationship request is declined, not reported; reports are acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days) and no longer describes Followire as private. Version 1.4, issued 6 October 2026, corrected version 1.3 (3 October 2026, the first public release) to say that the Wire shows the path between people rather than working out how they are related, and describes the iPhone app. Versions 1.0 to 1.2 of September 2026 were drafts and were never published.