LEGAL
Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 14, 2026 · Effective from the day ORVO becomes publicly available.
This policy is written for people, not lawyers. If anything here is unclear, write to us and we will explain it.
The short version
- doneWe never sell your personal data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
- doneWe never use your faith to target ads. Which organizations you follow, what you pray, who you talk to — none of it feeds advertising. Ever.
- doneWe do not read your private messages to build a profile of you or to choose what you see.
- donePrayer times need only a rough location — your city, not your street. We do not keep a history of where you have been.
- doneYou can delete everything. Deleting your account removes your content from ORVO.
This summary is here for convenience. The sections below are the actual terms.
1. Who we are
ORVO is a community app for mosques and other local organizations, and the people around them. It brings together organization profiles, prayer times, community posts, and direct messages in one quiet place.
ORVO is currently built and run by an independent developer, not a registered company. For anything in this policy — questions, requests, complaints — contact support@apporvo.com. We are the data controller for the information described here.
2. What we collect
Information you give us
- Account details — how you sign in (email and password), your display name, and your password.
- Profile — your photo, description and home city, if you choose to add them.
- Content you publish — posts, photos, comments and likes.
- Messages — private chats with other people or with an organization, including photos you send.
- Your connections — the organizations and people you follow.
- Reports and blocks — when you report content or block someone, we keep a record so we can act on it.
Information collected automatically
- Approximate location — only to calculate prayer times, and only if you allow it. See section 6.
- Device and connection data — device model, operating system, app version, language, and IP address.
- Notification token — an identifier issued by Firebase Cloud Messaging, which relies on Apple's Push Notification service, so we can deliver push notifications to your device.
- Diagnostics — crash reports and basic error logs, collected through Sentry, so we can fix what breaks.
What we deliberately do not collect
- Your contacts or address book.
- Your precise GPS trail, or any history of your movements.
- Your card details. Donations are handled entirely by Apple — we never see your payment information.
- Data about you from data brokers or advertising networks.
3. Why we use it, and on what legal basis
If you are in the EU or UK, the law requires us to name a legal basis for every use of your data. Here they are.
| What we do | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Run your account, show your feed, deliver your messages | Performance of our contract with you |
| Show prayer times for your location | Your consent (you grant location access) |
| Process religious-community data — see section 4 | Your explicit consent (GDPR Art. 9(2)(a)) |
| Send push notifications | Your consent (you grant notification permission) |
| Keep the community safe: moderation, reports, blocking, anti-abuse | Our legitimate interest in a safe service |
| Fix crashes and improve reliability | Our legitimate interest in a working service |
| Respond to lawful requests and meet legal duties | Compliance with a legal obligation |
4. Your faith is sensitive data, and we treat it that way
We want to be direct about something most apps would bury. ORVO is built around organizations — mosques today, and possibly other local community groups in the future. When the organizations you follow are mosques, that says something about your religion. The mosques you follow, the prayer times you check, the community you belong to — under European law this is a special category of personal data, and it carries the strongest protections the law offers. We hold ourselves to the same standard for this data regardless of how the rest of the app grows.
That is not a technicality to us. For many people, where they worship is private, and in some places it is genuinely unsafe for it to be known. So we hold ourselves to these rules:
- We ask for your explicit consent before processing this data.
- We never use it to select or target advertising. See section 5.
- We never sell, rent or share it with advertisers, brokers, or analytics companies.
- We do not infer or record your religious affiliation as a label, a tag, or an audience segment.
- Only staff who need it for moderation or support can access it, and those accesses are logged.
Withdrawing your consent
You can withdraw consent at any time, and it must be as easy as giving it was. In practice that means:
- Location and notifications can each be switched off on their own, in your device settings, without affecting anything else.
- The community data itself — the organizations you follow, your feed, your messages — is what the app is. There is no version of ORVO that works without it. So withdrawing that consent means closing your account, which you can do yourself in the app in a few taps. We will not make you email us, wait for approval, or explain yourself.
We would rather say that plainly than pretend there is a middle setting that leaves you with a working app and no data.
On selling location data
In 2020, users of a popular Muslim prayer app learned that their location data had been passed to a data broker and ended up with United States defence contractors. The app's privacy policy had not named the broker. Communities were, rightly, furious.
We will not do that. ORVO does not sell, licence, or transfer location data to data brokers, advertisers, defence contractors, or any similar buyer — not in aggregate, not "anonymised", not through an intermediary, not for any price. If a company ever acquires ORVO, this commitment travels with your data, and we will notify you before any change of control takes effect so you can leave first.
5. Advertising
ORVO does not currently show ads. We may introduce them in the future to keep the app free and sustainable. Because we would rather set the rules now than after the fact, here is what we commit to in advance — and what we will be held to if ads ever arrive.
Ads will be contextual, not behavioural
An ad may be chosen based on where it appears — the section of the app, the broad region, the interface language. It will not be chosen based on who you are. We will not build an advertising profile of you.
Never used to select ads
- Your religion, or any inference about it
- The organizations or people you follow
- Your prayer activity or the times you open the app
- The content of your private messages
- Your posts, comments, likes, or photos
- Your precise location
What advertisers get
Aggregate, anonymous counts — how many times an ad was shown or clicked. Advertisers do not receive your identity, your account ID, your contacts, your connections, or any content from the app.
This is possible because we run advertising ourselves rather than plugging in an ad network. There is no third-party advertising or tracking SDK inside ORVO, so there is no other company sitting in the app quietly collecting from your device. That is an architectural choice, not just a promise — and it is the reason the commitments above are ones we can actually keep.
If we ever want to change this
We will tell you before it happens, and it will be opt-in. Silence will never count as agreement, and we will not degrade the app to pressure you into accepting.
6. Location and prayer times
Prayer times depend on where you are, so ORVO needs a rough idea of your location. It does not need anything more precise than your city, and we designed it that way on purpose.
- You can set your city manually and never grant location access at all.
- If you do grant it, we use an approximate position to calculate times.
- We do not store a history of your locations and we cannot reconstruct your movements.
- Your location is never shared with other users, and never used for advertising.
- You can revoke location access at any time in your device settings.
7. Messages
We would rather tell you exactly what we can and cannot see than reassure you with the word "encrypted" and leave it there.
What we can see. ORVO does not currently offer end-to-end encryption. Your messages are encrypted in transit between your device and our servers, and encrypted on disk where they are stored — but the keys are ours, so it is technically possible for us to read message content on the server.
When we actually do. Only in two situations: when we are investigating a report that someone has filed, and when we are compelled by a valid legal order. We do not read messages to profile you, to rank your feed, or to choose advertising. No automated system scans your private messages for advertising or recommendation purposes.
What this means for you. For anything you would not want a company to be technically capable of reading, use a tool built for that — Signal, for example. We would rather lose that message than mislead you about it. If we add end-to-end encryption later, we will say so here and explain what changed.
8. This website
Everything above is about the ORVO app. This page you are reading now is part of our website, and it collects far less.
- We do not use advertising or tracking cookies here, so there is no consent banner to dismiss.
- This site is served from Amazon CloudFront and S3, and our app's API runs on Render — both keep standard access logs, including IP addresses, for security and troubleshooting.
- Fonts and icons are hosted by us, not by Google Fonts or any other third party — your browser does not contact anyone else's servers to render this page.
- We do not run analytics on this site. If we ever add any, it will be a privacy-preserving, cookie-free tool, and we will say so here.
9. Moderation
Organizations are reviewed before they appear in search, and content can be reported by anyone. Moderation on ORVO is done by people, not algorithms: when a report comes in, it goes to a human moderator who looks at what was reported, makes a decision, and records the reason for it.
Decisions that meaningfully affect you — removing your content, restricting or closing your account — are made or confirmed by a person, not by an algorithm alone. If we take action against your account, we will tell you what happened and why, and you can ask a human to look again by writing to us.
10. Who we share data with
We share as little as possible, with as few parties as possible.
- Other users — whatever you choose to publish or send. Your posts are visible to those who follow you; your messages go to the person or organization you write to.
- Service providers who run the infrastructure on our behalf: Render (hosting), Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront (storing and delivering photos and other files), Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple (push notifications), and Sentry (crash and error diagnostics). They may only use the data to provide that service to us.
- Apple — if you make a donation, Apple processes the payment under its own privacy policy. We receive confirmation that a purchase occurred, not your payment details.
- Authorities — only where we are legally required, and only after checking that the request is valid and properly issued.
Who we never share with
Data brokers. Advertising networks. Marketing companies. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with a parent company or corporate family for their own purposes.
11. How long we keep things
ORVO is early-stage, and we would rather not promise exact day-counts we might not actually be able to keep once the service is running at real scale. So instead of numbers we cannot yet guarantee, here is what governs each type of data.
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account, profile, posts, messages | While your account exists |
| Everything, after you delete your account | Removed from the live service without undue delay; backups catch up on their normal rotation, not indefinitely |
| Server and security logs | Only as long as needed for security and troubleshooting |
| Crash and diagnostic reports | Only as long as needed to diagnose and fix the issue |
| Moderation reports and enforcement records | Long enough to recognise repeat behaviour, not indefinitely |
| Dormant accounts, unused for a long time | We will warn you by email before we ever delete an inactive account |
Two honest limits. Messages you sent to someone else, and content others have already saved or screenshotted, are not ours to erase from their side. And deletion from live systems takes effect immediately but is not instant everywhere — backups roll over on their own schedule rather than being wiped on demand.
12. Your rights and controls
Wherever you live, you can use these. If you are in the EU, UK or a similar jurisdiction, they are also legal rights you can enforce.
- See your data — request a copy of what we hold about you.
- Correct it — fix anything inaccurate, mostly from your profile directly.
- Delete it — remove your account and content from within the app.
- Take it with you — receive your data in a portable, machine-readable format.
- Object or restrict — ask us to stop or limit certain processing.
- Withdraw consent — turn off location or notifications at any time, in your device settings.
- Complain — to your local data protection authority, if you think we have got it wrong.
Write to support@apporvo.com and we will respond within 30 days. We will not charge you, and we will not make the app worse for you because you asked.
13. If you are in the United States
California, Colorado, Virginia and a growing number of other states give you specific rights. You have them regardless of which state you are in, because we would rather not run different rules for different people.
The categories of personal information we collect are listed in section 2: identifiers, your account and profile details, content you create, approximate location, device and connection data, and — because ORVO is a religious community app — information that counts as sensitive personal information under California law. We use sensitive information only to provide the service you asked for, never to infer characteristics about you, so the right to limit its use does not change anything about how we behave.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — as those terms are defined in the CCPA. We have not done so in the past twelve months. There is no "Do Not Sell or Share" toggle in ORVO because there is nothing to switch off.
You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your information, and you can appeal if we refuse. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of this — no worse service, no missing features. Write to support@apporvo.com.
14. Children
ORVO is not intended for children under 16. We do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it promptly.
15. Security
We encrypt data in transit and at rest, restrict internal access to those who need it, and log access to sensitive records. No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise — but if a breach ever affects your data, we will notify you and the relevant authority as the law requires, and we will tell you what actually happened.
16. Where your data is stored
Your data is stored on servers in the United States.
17. Changes to this policy
We will update this page when things change. For anything significant — especially a change to how we handle advertising or religious data — we will notify you in the app before it takes effect, and we will keep the previous version available so you can see what changed.
18. Contact us
Questions, concerns, or a request about your data — write to support@apporvo.com. A real person reads it.