This policy explains what personal information kinl collects, how we use and share it, how long we keep it, and the controls and rights you have. It applies to the kinl app and kinl.me.
Information you give us
- Account details: username, display name, email address, password (stored hashed), language and account type.
- Profile content: bio, avatar or mapkin, links, business details if you add them, and optional details such as gender or interests.
- Content: posts, stories, comments, reactions, messages, message requests, calls metadata, reviews, events, offers, sounds and media.
- Personalisation: your Find my kind answers, saved items, keeps, follows, mutes, blocks and favourites.
- Payments: billing contact and delivery address for physical orders. Card details go directly to our payment processor; we receive only a token and limited details such as the last four digits.
- Support: messages, reports and attachments you send us.
Information collected automatically
- Device and app data: device model, operating system, app version, language, time zone and crash diagnostics.
- Usage data: screens viewed, features used, content shown and interacted with, and approximate session timing.
- Approximate location, only if you turn location features on. We deliberately reduce precision before storing or showing it.
- Network data: IP address, which gives a coarse region and is used for security and abuse prevention.
- Cookies and similar local storage on the web, as described in the Cookie policy.
How we use your information
- To provide, secure and operate kinl, including authentication, delivery of content and messaging.
- To personalise your feed, Explore, map and recommendations using your Find my kind preferences.
- To translate posts and captions into your primary language when you have that turned on.
- To process payments, orders, subscriptions, boosts and refunds.
- To detect, investigate and prevent spam, fraud, abuse, safety risks and breaches of our policies.
- To measure performance of content and promotions, and to improve our features.
- To contact you about your account, security, purchases, and product announcements you have not opted out of.
- To comply with legal obligations and to establish, exercise or defend legal claims.
Legal bases (where the GDPR or similar law applies)
We rely on performance of our contract with you to run the service, our legitimate interests in keeping kinl safe and improving it, your consent for location, optional personalisation and marketing, and legal obligation where the law requires us to retain or disclose information.
Who we share with
- Other members, according to your privacy and visibility settings. Public content may be seen by anyone.
- Service providers acting on our instructions: hosting and database, storage and media delivery, payments, email delivery, mapping, analytics, translation and AI processing, audio recognition and web enrichment.
- Law enforcement, regulators or others where we reasonably believe disclosure is required by law or necessary to prevent serious harm.
- A buyer or successor in a merger, acquisition or restructure, subject to this policy.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising by third parties.
Personalised ads
kinl shows ads in the feed and around discovery. To make them relevant we build a profile of the kinds of things you appear to be interested in — the topics and areas you look at, keep, follow, attend and interact with, and the hours of the day you are usually active.
That profile is about interests and behaviour, not identity. Advertisers never see who you are: they only ever get aggregated results, such as which regions, age bands and broad groups responded to their campaign, and only where the group is large enough that nobody can be picked out of it.
We deliberately exclude sensitive topics — health, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, political views, disability and similar — from ad targeting, even when you have shared them with us elsewhere in the app.
You can turn personalised ads off at any time in Settings. When you do, we stop collecting these signals, delete the ones we already hold, and show you general ads instead. Advertisers can also send us conversions from their own websites using a kinl pixel; that data is used to measure their campaigns and, where they have asked us to, forwarded to their own ad platforms.
AI and automated processing
Some features send content to AI providers to translate text, caption video, generate recommendations or create mapkins. We send the minimum necessary, and our providers are contractually restricted from using your content to train their general models. Automated systems also help detect abuse; where an automated decision materially affects you, you can ask for human review.
International transfers
Our providers may process data outside your country, including in Australia, the United States and the European Union. Where required we use recognised transfer mechanisms such as standard contractual clauses.
How long we keep information
- Posts expire after seven days by default; stories after twenty-four hours. Expired content is removed from the app and purged on our retention schedule.
- Kept and saved content stays until you remove it or delete your account.
- Messages stay until deleted by a participant or on account deletion.
- Account records, transaction and tax records, and safety and moderation records are kept for as long as the law requires, generally up to seven years for financial records.
- Backups are cycled and overwritten on a rolling basis.
Your rights and controls
- Access, correct, download or delete your information from Settings, or by contacting us.
- Withdraw consent for location, personalisation, translation or announcements at any time.
- Object to or restrict certain processing, and lodge a complaint with your local privacy regulator, including the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
- Delete your account permanently from Settings → Account. Deletion cannot be reversed.
Children
kinl is not for people under 18, or under the minimum age in your country where that is higher. We remove underage accounts when we become aware of them. If you believe an underage person is using kinl, contact us and we will act.
Security
We use encryption in transit, row-level access controls, least-privilege access and monitoring. No system is perfectly secure and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a data breach is likely to cause serious harm we will notify affected members and regulators as required.
Contact
Privacy questions and requests: kinl.me/contact (Help & support → Contact kinl in the app), or hello@kinl.me. Legal notices: kinl.me/contact (Help & support → Contact kinl in the app), or hello@kinl.me.