Your privacy, plainly.

DogWelly is part of WellyVentures. This notice describes the information used to run the DogWelly community. Contact the DogWelly team with privacy questions.

What we collect.

Your email, name, profile details, town and approximate coordinates; any dog profiles and photos you add; walks, circle memberships, invitations, messages, care arrangements and reports. You may choose to add a phone number and its country code. This is optional: you can register and use every feature without a phone number, and remove it in your contact settings at any time. Your browser provides technical information needed for secure sign in and abuse prevention. If you add a password, we store a salted password hash, never the password itself. Phone numbers are private contact details; they are not verified identity or a way to recover your account.

Who sees what.

Saved walks and saved people are private to your account. Saving someone does not notify them. You can remove saved items in My Pack. Dog introduction preferences and profile notes are visible to signed in members, so do not put private medical instructions, contact details or home addresses there. A walk waiting list records your request for a place. If you choose to join it, you will be added to that occurrence automatically when an eligible place opens, and your attendance becomes visible in the same way as joining a walk yourself. You can leave the waiting list at any time before that happens.

Published walks and their public meeting points can be viewed without an account. Members who are signed in can see member names, town, profiles and dogs. Your email, phone number and precise home address aren't part of your public profile. Circle conversations and care requests are restricted to circle members. Moderators can inspect reported content to investigate concerns. Reports are available to moderators. New photos are visible to their owner and the community team while awaiting approval. Moderators can approve or reject photos and review photos already shared with members.

DogWelly checks shared text on its own server for a limited set of clearly hateful, threatening or sexually explicit wording before saving it. These checks apply to profiles, dogs, walks and circle content, including messages and care arrangements. They are not a complete assessment of meaning or context. Reports and messages to support are not blocked by these text checks, so you can explain a concern and preserve evidence.

How the service uses information.

We use account and community data to provide the service you request, send transactional messages, maintain security and respond to concerns. Optional email updates can be switched off in your account. We do not sell your personal data or automatically share your profile with the other Welly businesses for marketing.

Optional assistant connections.

Public walk information can be read by compatible assistants without an account connection. If you choose to connect an assistant, we record its name, the permissions you grant, connection activity and any walk invitations it prepares. The connection receives public walk information and the status of its own invitations. It does not receive your password, email, phone number, private conversations, circles or photos. You must confirm each invitation on DogWelly before joining a walk.

Access expires within one hour. You can end it earlier in My Pack, Connected apps. Changing your password or email, or signing out on all devices, also ends these connections. Each assistant service has its own privacy practices, which you should review before connecting it.

Services that help us run DogWelly.

Address suggestions favour your current location when you share it through your browser. We round it for the search and keep it only briefly in memory. Otherwise, we use your saved town. You can always search somewhere else. Your browser location is never published on your profile; public meeting points are the ones you choose. In the DogWelly app, if you allow location, your position centres the map on you and is sent to DogWelly as the starting point for the walks search and to Mapbox for walking directions; it is not stored.

When a member publishes a public walk within 25 km of the approximate coordinates saved with your profile, we let you know on your updates page and, if you use the DogWelly app and allow notifications, on your phone. The notice names the walk and how far away it is. That distance is worked out on our server from your saved coordinates and shown only to you; the host and other members are not told where you are.

If you ask for help on the Help wanted board, members within 25 km can see the kind of help, the times, your dog's name, your first name, your town and roughly how far away you are. That distance is worked out on our server from a point rounded to about a kilometre, taken from the approximate coordinates saved with your profile when you ask; your address is never part of a request and is never shown. When a member offers to help, you see their name, a link to their profile and the note they wrote; they are told your first name and that you can see those things. Nothing else is shared until you choose to share it.

Hetzner provides the server that hosts DogWelly, its database and private photo storage. Resend delivers email. Mapbox provides maps and location search and receives the location queries and technical information needed to do that. If you use the DogWelly app and allow notifications, Expo relays them to your phone: it receives the notification title, text and link and a token that identifies your phone. Expo also delivers the app's own updates. These providers may process information in countries other than yours.

On Android, Expo uses Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging to deliver notifications. Firebase processes app installation identifiers and device registration tokens and, when notifications are sent, the notification title, text and link. Notifications are optional and can be switched off in your phone's settings. We do not use Firebase Analytics. Firebase may process information in countries other than yours.

The Android app checks with Expo for updates when it opens and may check again when you return to it. These requests include a randomly generated identifier for your app installation, the Android platform, app runtime, update identifiers and update channel. Where available, they also include identifiers of recent updates that failed to launch and a short startup error description. This information supports delivery of compatible updates and diagnosis of update failures. Update checks work independently of signing in or allowing notifications.

Cookies and photos.

DogWelly uses an essential sign-in cookie to keep your session secure; the DogWelly app keeps a sign-in token on your phone instead. Neither includes advertising pixels or marketing analytics. Photographs uploaded through the interface are resized in your browser or on your phone before storage.

Keeping and deleting information.

We retain your community data while your account is active. You can edit your profile, download your data and delete your account in account settings. Deletion removes your active profile, dog profiles and messages, cancels your hosted walks, and ends your sessions. Reports may remain with the reporter's account reference removed so concerns can still be handled. Encrypted recovery backups rotate through 48 hourly and 30 daily recovery points. Older copies may remain longer if backup rotation is interrupted. These copies are used only for recovery and may temporarily contain information removed from the live service. Security logs have their own operational retention periods. Minimal email delivery suppression records are kept with an active account to avoid repeatedly sending to an address that has bounced or complained; deleting the account removes those records.

For the steps in the app, on the website or without signing in, see delete your DogWelly account. You do not need to reinstall the app to request deletion.

Your choices and rights.

Ask us to access, correct, delete or restrict use of your personal information. Depending on where you live, you may also have rights to object, portability and to complain to your local data protection authority. Use the account controls or contact us above.