1.Information You Provide
We collect information you give us directly, including: account and profile data (name, username, email, phone number, password, date of birth, photos, bio, occupation, skills, interests, and optional attributes such as languages, industry, and education); content you create (posts, comments, messages, ideas, discussions, projects, tasks, artifacts, reviews, results, notes about your contacts, and media); the Fields, Communities, projects, and Focuses you join or create; the items you check off as bought on a project’s or task’s gear list (only you can see your check-offs); reports you submit; purchase and subscription records if you subscribe to Premium (described in "Purchases and Subscriptions" — we never receive your card details), and payment information you submit to a payment processor (we do not store full card numbers); and communications you send us, including support requests and feedback.
2.Information Collected Automatically
When you use the Platform we automatically collect device and usage data, including device identifiers, push-notification tokens, operating system and app version, IP address, log and diagnostic data, crash reports, the features you use and actions you take (product events), and location as described below. We use SDKs and similar technologies to operate, secure, analyze, and improve the Platform and to deliver advertising.
3.Location Information
With your permission, we collect your device’s location while you use the app, to resolve your Community, show nearby people, projects, and ideas, and power maps. We do not collect location in the background. We store your most recent location on your account, together with a coarser area code, to calculate distances and match you with nearby people and places. When Location Sharing is on, we update it from time to time while the app is open, and it may be used to show other users how far away you are. When it is off, we stop updating it from your device and it is not shared with other users; the last location we stored stays on your account until it is deleted with your account. Location in the product events we keep for analytics is reduced to an approximate area (roughly 5 km) before it is stored; exact coordinates are removed. We do not send your device location to advertisers. Photos you upload have their embedded location data (EXIF/GPS) removed before upload. You can turn Location Sharing off in Settings or revoke the permission in your device settings at any time; location features will then ask for a place instead.
4.No Biometric Information
Colabs does not collect selfies, face geometry, or any other biometric information, and does not compare or verify anyone’s photos or identity. An optional photo-matching feature that was offered until October 2026 has been removed. Selfies taken for it were deleted immediately after each comparison and face geometry was never stored; we are deleting the remaining records of past results (whether two photos matched, and when). You can also ask us to delete yours at privacy@colabs.ai.
5.Contacts
Contact matching is off by default and requires your explicit opt-in. We do not access, transmit, or process your device contacts unless you turn on "Find friends from my contacts" in Settings → Privacy (or accept the in-app consent prompt shown the first time you use contact import). Declining costs you nothing else: the rest of the Platform works normally. What happens when you opt in. With both your opt-in and your device’s contacts permission, the app reads the phone numbers and email addresses in your address book and transmits them to our servers, where we compare them against existing Colabs accounts so we can show you which of your contacts are already here. This matching happens on our servers, not solely on your device. What we do with it. We use the transmitted phone numbers and email addresses only to perform that match and return the results to you. We do not retain your address book, build a social graph from non-users, use your contacts to target advertising, or sell, rent, or share your contacts. We apply rate limits, including a daily limit, to prevent bulk lookups. We never message anyone in your contacts unless you personally initiate an invitation. Being found by your phone number or email is also opt-in. Contact matching shows someone your account only if you have turned on "Let people who have my number/email find me" in Settings → Privacy. It is off by default, so unless you turn it on, people who have your phone number or email cannot use contact matching to find out that you have an account. Deleted accounts, and people you have blocked or who have blocked you, are never shown. You can turn it off at any time, and it takes effect immediately. Contacts belong to other people. Your address book contains information about people who are not Colabs users. Please only enable contact matching if you are comfortable sharing that information with us for the purpose described above, and do not enable it if you are subject to obligations (for example, professional confidentiality) that would make sharing your contacts inappropriate. Withdrawing consent. You can turn contact matching off at any time in Settings → Privacy. Turning it off stops all further contact matching immediately. You can separately revoke the operating system’s contacts permission in your device settings. To request deletion of information previously derived from your contacts, contact privacy@colabs.ai.
6.Camera, Photos, and Microphone
With your permission, we access your camera, photo library, and microphone so you can add photos, video, audio, and documents to posts and messages, and set a profile or cover photo. We access these only when you use those features.
7.What Other Users Can See
Your profile, the posts and comments you make, and the Fields and Communities you join are visible to other users according to your settings. Your date of birth is private: other users see only your age, and only when your profile is visible to them. Community members are listed as "Neighbours," which shows others you are associated with that place. Members of Fields concerning health, identity, and other sensitive subjects are NOT shown in member lists. Artifacts you publish are public, including on public web pages at colabs.ai that search engines may index. Project content is visible to the project’s members and, for public projects, more widely. If you subscribe to Premium, a check appears next to your name for anyone who can see your profile; it means only that you are a Premium subscriber, and your billing details are never shown. Your email address and phone number are not shown to other users. You control profile visibility, activity status, and who can message you in Settings → Privacy & Visibility.
8.Messages, Moderation, and Automated Scanning
We store your messages so they can be delivered and so you can see your history. To help keep people safe and to comply with the law, we automatically scan content, including text and images in messages, for a limited set of serious harms (such as child sexual exploitation, credible threats, and illegal content). Images are scanned with Amazon Rekognition. Text is checked against rules that run on our own servers. Content that users report, and content our tools flag, may be reviewed by our staff. Some moderation actions are automated: for example, content may be hidden automatically when an image classifier flags it or when a number of different users report it, pending human review. You can appeal any moderation decision about your content or account (see "Your Rights"). Disappearing messages are removed from the conversation after the time selected, but we may keep removed messages for a limited period for safety, security, and legal reasons before they are permanently deleted. We report apparent child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as required by law.
9.How We Use Information
We use information to: provide, operate, and secure the Platform; create and manage your account; enable discovery, recommendations, collaboration, and messaging; personalize content and recommendations; show advertising and affiliate offers; process payments and subscriptions; conduct research, analytics, and product development, including developing and training models used to provide or improve the Platform; communicate with you; provide customer support; detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, and safety issues; moderate content and enforce our Terms and Community Guidelines; and comply with legal obligations. We do not use the content of your private messages, or content in projects or conversations that are not public, to train artificial-intelligence or machine-learning models or for advertising, except in de-identified or aggregated form or where needed for safety, moderation, security, or legal compliance. We may create and use de-identified and aggregated data, and we commit not to attempt to re-identify it.
10.How We Share Information
We share information: with other users as described in "What Other Users Can See"; with service providers who process it on our behalf and under our instructions (see below); with advertising partners as described in "Advertising and Analytics"; when you choose to go to a third party (for example, following an affiliate link to a retailer); for legal, safety, and security reasons, including responding to lawful requests, reporting to NCMEC, and protecting rights and safety; and, subject to this Policy, in connection with a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising. Contacts are excluded from all sharing: phone numbers and email addresses transmitted from your address book are used solely to match against existing Colabs accounts and return results to you.
11.Service Providers We Use
We rely on third parties to run the Platform. They process personal information on our behalf and under our instructions. They currently include: Amazon Web Services (cloud hosting, databases, storage, sign-in, email delivery, search, and Amazon Rekognition for image moderation); Cloudflare (storage and delivery of photos and other media); Expo, Apple, and Google (push notifications); Sentry (crash and error reporting); Stripe (payments and subscriptions, when available); Google (sign-in with Google, if you choose it, and AdMob ad serving); Apple (Sign in with Apple, if you choose it); Apple (App Store billing) and Google (Google Play billing), which process Premium purchases, as described in "Purchases and Subscriptions"; LiveKit (voice and video calls, when available); and Google Maps (map display). Amazon Associates receives information about clicks on affiliate links when you follow them.
12.Advertising and Analytics
We show banner ads served by Google AdMob. We request NON-PERSONALIZED ads, which means ads are not chosen based on a profile of your activity across other apps and websites; AdMob still receives device and usage information, and may infer your general location from your IP address, as needed to serve ads, limit how often they appear, measure them, and prevent fraud. Where the law requires it (including the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland), we ask for your consent through Google’s consent form before any ads are requested, and you can change your choice at any time in Settings → Ad privacy choices. If you decline, Google may show only limited ads that do not use device identifiers or storage for advertising, or no ads. We do not currently track you across other companies’ apps and websites; if that changes, we will ask for your permission first (including through Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt on iOS). We record product events in our own analytics system, hosted by Amazon Web Services, to understand how the Platform is used and to improve it.
13.Purchases and Subscriptions
Premium is sold only inside the Colabs iOS and Android apps, through Apple’s App Store and Google Play billing. We do not sell Premium on our website. Apple or Google takes your payment under your App Store or Google Play account and their own terms and privacy policies. Colabs never receives your card number or other payment-card details. We check Premium purchases with Apple and Google directly; no other company is involved. When you buy, restore, renew, cancel, or are refunded for Premium: • The app sends us the store’s record of your purchase (a Google Play purchase token, or the App Store’s signed transaction), and we confirm it with Apple or Google. Apple and Google also notify us directly when a subscription renews, is cancelled, has a billing problem, is refunded, or expires. • From this we receive and keep, linked to your Colabs account: the plan and the store; the store’s transaction identifiers and purchase token; and the status of your subscription (any free trial, renewal, cancellation, billing problem, refund, or expiry). We do not give Apple or Google your name, email address, or the content of your Colabs account for this. • We store on your account your subscription tier, its status, and when the current period ends. We use these only to provide Premium — to stop showing you ads and to show the Premium check next to your name — to keep one store purchase tied to one Colabs account, and to keep our records. Apple and Google keep their own records of each transaction under their own retention policies. You manage or cancel a subscription in your App Store or Google Play account settings; deleting your Colabs account does not cancel a store subscription.
14.Data Retention
We keep personal information only for as long as we need it for the purposes in this Policy. The criteria we use are: how long your account is active; how long content remains on the Platform or in a shared project; how long we need it to protect users and the Platform, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements; and any period the law requires. In practice: account and profile data is kept while your account exists and deleted or de-identified after you delete it; content is kept until you or we delete it (subject to the shared-project rule below); messages removed by disappearing timers or deletion are kept for 30 days for safety and legal reasons (hidden from everyone) and then permanently deleted, along with their photos and files; contact-matching data is not retained after the match; logs, crash reports, and analytics events are kept for a limited period and then deleted or aggregated; and backups are overwritten on a rolling schedule. De-identified and aggregated data may be kept longer. Legal preservation. When the law requires us to preserve information — for example, after we report apparent child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (U.S. law requires us to keep that report and related data for one year), or in response to a valid law-enforcement preservation request — we keep the relevant content and account information, securely and with restricted access, for the period the law requires, even if it is deleted from the Platform or the account is closed.
15.Security
We use technical and organizational measures designed to protect information, including encryption in transit, access controls, and monitoring. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you and regulators as the law requires. You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials.
16.Your Choices and Rights
You can access and update your profile in the app; control location, contacts, camera, photos, microphone, and notification permissions in your device settings; manage visibility and contact matching in Settings → Privacy & Visibility; download a copy of your data in Settings (Download My Data); and delete your account in Settings. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to: access your personal information and receive a copy in a portable format; correct it; delete it; restrict or object to certain processing; withdraw consent at any time (without affecting processing before withdrawal); opt out of targeted advertising, "sale," or "sharing" of personal information; limit use of sensitive personal information; not be subject to certain decisions based solely on automated processing; and appeal our decision on a request. To exercise a right, contact privacy@colabs.ai or use the in-app tools. We will verify your request using information associated with your account, respond within the time the law requires (normally one month in the EEA and UK and 45 days in U.S. states), and not discriminate against you for exercising your rights. You may use an authorized agent where the law allows. If we decline your request, you may appeal by replying to our decision; if you are not satisfied, you may complain to your data protection authority or state attorney general.
17.Additional Information for Users in the EEA and UK
This section applies if you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom. The controller of your personal data is Colabs World, Inc., 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, DE 19808, USA. You can contact us about data protection at privacy@colabs.ai. Legal bases. We process your personal data on these legal bases under the GDPR and UK GDPR: • Performance of our contract with you — to create and run your account, provide the features you use (profiles, projects, tasks, messaging, Fields, Communities, discovery, notifications), provide and manage a Premium subscription you buy, and provide support. • Legitimate interests — to keep the Platform and its users safe (security, fraud prevention, moderation, including automated scanning); to understand and improve the Platform (analytics and product development); to personalize recommendations; to show non-personalized and contextual ads that fund the service (the device access AdMob needs to serve them is covered by consent, below); to preserve shared project records after a member leaves; and to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims. Where we rely on legitimate interests we have balanced them against your rights, and you may object at any time. • Consent — for location access, contact matching, push notifications, joining a Field that concerns health or another sensitive subject, the device storage and identifiers AdMob uses to serve ads (asked through Google’s consent form), and any personalized advertising or non-essential tracking we may introduce. You can withdraw consent at any time in the app or by contacting us. • Legal obligation — to respond to lawful requests, keep required records, and report illegal content where the law requires. Special category data. Joining some Fields may reveal information about your health, beliefs, or other special categories of data. We process this only with your explicit consent, or where you have manifestly made it public. Members of sensitive Fields are not shown in member lists. Automated decision-making. We do not make decisions based solely on automated processing that produce legal or similarly significant effects on you. Automated moderation tools may temporarily hide content pending human review, and you can ask for a human review and appeal any decision. Model training. We may use public content and usage data to develop and train models used to provide and improve the Platform, on the basis of our legitimate interests. You may object to this at any time by contacting privacy@colabs.ai. Private messages and non-public project content are not used for this purpose. International transfers. We are based in the United States, and your personal data is processed in the United States and other countries where we or our service providers operate. Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA or UK to a country without an adequacy decision, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and, for the UK, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, with supplementary measures where appropriate. You can ask us for a copy of the relevant safeguards. Your rights. You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability, and objection (including an absolute right to object to direct marketing), the right to withdraw consent, and the right not to be subject to solely automated decisions with significant effects. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ico.org.uk); in the EEA, the data protection authority where you live or work. We would appreciate the chance to address your concern first. Is providing data required? Your email address, a password (or a sign-in provider), and your date of birth are required to create an account, because we cannot provide the Platform or confirm you are an adult without them. Everything else is optional, though some features will not work without it.
18.Additional Information for U.S. Residents
This section applies to residents of California and other U.S. states with comprehensive privacy laws. Categories we collect (in the last 12 months): identifiers (name, username, email, phone, device and push identifiers, IP address); personal records (profile information); commercial information (Premium purchase and subscription records, if any); internet or electronic network activity (usage and product events); geolocation data (including precise location, with your permission); audio, electronic, and visual information (photos and media); professional or employment-related information (occupation, skills, industry); education information you choose to add; inferences (recommendations and interests); and sensitive personal information (account login credentials, precise geolocation, the contents of your messages, and any health or other sensitive information revealed by Fields you join). We collect it from you, your device, other users, and our service providers, for the purposes in "How We Use Information," and disclose it to the categories of recipients in "How We Share Information" and "Service Providers We Use." Retention is described in "Data Retention." No sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we have no actual knowledge of selling or sharing the personal information of anyone under 16. Because we do not sell or share, there is nothing to opt out of today; if that changes, we will provide an opt-out link and honor Global Privacy Control (GPC) signals as a valid opt-out. Sensitive personal information. We use sensitive personal information only to provide the features you request, keep the Platform secure, and as otherwise permitted by law — not to infer characteristics about you. Consumer health data (Washington, Nevada, and similar laws). Joining a Field about a health subject (for example, mental health, addiction, women’s health, long COVID, or a rare disease) may be treated as consumer health data. We collect it only with your consent when you join, use it only to provide the Field membership you asked for, do not sell it, do not use it for advertising, and do not show it in member lists. You may withdraw consent by leaving the Field, and you may request access to or deletion of this data at privacy@colabs.ai.
19.Account and Data Deletion
You can delete your account at any time in the app’s settings, or request deletion by contacting privacy@colabs.ai. You do not need the app to request deletion: the steps, and what is deleted and kept, are at https://colabs.ai/delete-account (Settings → Account → Delete Account in the app). After you delete your account it is hidden from everyone at once, you can restore it by logging back in within 29 days, and it is then permanently erased. When you delete your account, we delete or de-identify your personal information, except where we must retain it to comply with law, prevent fraud or abuse, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements, and except for de-identified or aggregated data, models already trained, and standard backups (which are overwritten on a rolling schedule). Content you contributed to shared projects. Colabs is a collaboration platform, and work contributed to a shared project forms part of that project’s record for the other people working on it. When you delete your account we remove your personal information — your profile, your personal photos, and the link between you and your contributions — but files, images and posts you added to a shared project remain with that project, no longer attributed to you. We rely on our legitimate interest in preserving the integrity and continuity of collaborative work for remaining members. Comments and discussions. Comments, replies and discussion threads you wrote stay in place so that other people’s conversations still make sense. They no longer carry your name, username or photo, and show as written by a deleted account. If contributed content itself contains your personal information — for example a photograph showing you, or a document containing your name — contact privacy@colabs.ai and we will review it individually. The same applies if content contributed by someone else contains your personal information. Artifacts published under an open license may already have been copied by others, which we cannot undo.
20.Children’s Privacy
The Platform is intended for adults 18 and older and is not directed to children. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn we have collected such information, we will delete it. Contact privacy@colabs.ai if you believe a minor has provided us information.
21.Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the Platform or by email before they take effect and, where the law requires, ask for your consent. The version and date at the bottom show when it last changed.
22.Contact Us
For privacy questions or requests, contact privacy@colabs.ai. For other matters — Support: support@colabs.ai | Legal: legal@colabs.ai | Safety: safety@colabs.ai | Mail: Colabs World, Inc., Attn: Privacy, 251 Little Falls Drive, Wilmington, DE 19808, USA.
Last updated: November 5, 2026 (v2.3.5).