Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Awzsome is a hyperlocal deals and services discovery service delivered through WhatsApp, currently serving Manteca, Lathrop, Ripon, Escalon, Tracy, Stockton and Modesto, California. In this policy, “Awzsome”, “we” and “us” mean Awzsome, the business that provides this service, together with the people who operate it.

Our website is awzsome.com. You can reach us at privacy@awzsome.com.

This policy explains what we actually do with your information. Where a practice is less private than you might hope, we say so plainly rather than leave it out.

2. Information we collect

We collect only what the service needs to function.

• Your WhatsApp phone number — stored in ordinary readable form. We are honest about this: a message cannot be delivered to a number we cannot read, so it is not hashed or encrypted at rest beyond our provider’s standard database encryption. It is masked in our operational logs.
• Location — when you share your location in WhatsApp we store the latitude, longitude and the town or city it resolves to. We keep only your most recent location; each new share overwrites the last. We ask again after 24 hours, but the stored record remains until you delete it or share a new one.
• Preferences you mention — for example a dietary preference or the category you last searched, if you say it in conversation.
• Consent record — the date, time and policy version when you agreed to our terms. Required for WhatsApp Business compliance.
• Conversation context — a short, rolling window of recent messages held temporarily so the assistant can follow the thread. It is not written to long-term storage.
• Deals you claim — if you claim a deal we record which deal, which business, the time, and your phone number. This is how a business learns whether Awzsome brought them customers.
• Reservation details — if you ask us to send a reservation request to a business, we store the name you give us, how many people or items, the date and time you asked for, any note you add, and your phone number. We give the business everything on that list except your phone number.
• Voice notes — if voice input is switched on and you send a voice note, the audio is transcribed to text and only the text is kept. The audio is held in memory during transcription and is never written to disk. Voice input is currently switched off.
• Business information (vendors only) — if you list a business with us we store your business name, street address, business phone number, the WhatsApp number you submitted from, and your offer details.
• Operational logs — errors and diagnostics. Phone numbers appear masked (for example 192***9567). If a request to our systems fails a security check, we record the originating IP address of that request.

3. What we do not collect

• Your name — unless you give it to us for a reservation, or you list a business with us
• Payment or financial information
• Medical or health records
• Your browsing history outside Awzsome
• Your contacts, photos, or data from other apps
• Any advertising or tracking identifiers

4. How we use your information

• To find businesses, services and deals near where you are
• To tailor results to preferences you have told us
• To issue and check deal codes when you claim an offer
• To tell a business how many people claimed their deal
• To review, publish and expire deals that businesses submit
• To diagnose faults, prevent abuse, and keep the service secure
• To meet our legal and WhatsApp Business Platform obligations

What we will not do with it. These are commitments, not aspirations:

• We do not sell your personal information. We never have, and we do not disclose it to anyone in exchange for money or anything else of value.
• Paying for placement does not buy your data. A business can pay to appear higher in results as a Featured listing. That changes the order results are shown in — nothing else. A Featured business receives exactly the same information about you as a business that pays us nothing.
• We do not send you unsolicited messages. We reply to messages you send us, and we send updates about claims and reservations you made yourself. We do not broadcast promotions, and we will not start without asking you first and giving you a way to decline.
• We do not use your conversations to train AI models — ours or anyone else’s.
• We do not build an advertising profile on you, and we do not combine your information with data bought from anyone else.

5. Who we share information with

We rely on the following providers to run the service. Each receives only what their function requires, and each is subject to their own terms and privacy commitments.

• Meta / WhatsApp — every message travels through the WhatsApp Business Platform. Meta’s privacy policy governs that transmission.
• OpenAI — your message text is sent to OpenAI twice: once to work out what kind of request it is, and once to turn it into a numeric representation so we can match it against deals we hold. Your phone number is not sent. OpenAI processes this as our service provider. If voice input is switched on, voice notes are also sent to OpenAI for transcription.
• Google — when you share your location, the coordinates alone are sent to Google’s Geocoding service to work out which town you are in. Your phone number and the words you type are not sent to Google.
• Supabase — our database provider, where your record is stored.
• Render — our hosting provider, which runs the service.
• Businesses you claim a deal from — the business sees that a claim was made, and how many in total. They do not receive your phone number or any other detail about you.
• Businesses you reserve with — if you complete a reservation, we send that business the name you gave, how many people or items, the time you asked for, and your deal code, so they can expect you. We do not give them your phone number. Nothing is sent to a business unless you finish a reservation with them, and we show you exactly what will be sent before you confirm.
• Legal — we may disclose information where required by law, court order, or to protect the rights and safety of users, the public, or ourselves.
• Business transfer — if the service is sold or merged, your information may transfer with it. We would tell you first.

6. How long we keep it

• Your record (number, location, preferences, consent) — kept until you delete it, or until the service closes. We do not currently expire it on a timer.
• Claims and redemptions — kept as business records. If you delete your data, your claim records are removed and your phone number is stripped from any remaining entry, leaving only an anonymous count.
• Reservations — kept as a record of the request. If you delete your data, your reservation records are removed.
• Business listings — kept while the listing is live and afterwards as a record of what we published, and when.
• Messages waiting to be delivered — deleted once delivered, or when you delete your data.
• Operational logs — kept while useful for diagnosing faults. They contain masked identifiers only.

7. Your choices and rights

You can do all of this from WhatsApp, at any time, for free:

• STOP — deletes your data and unsubscribes you
• DELETE — deletes your data
• DATA — shows what we hold about you
• PRIVACY — links to this policy

You may also email privacy@awzsome.com to access, correct, export or erase your information. We aim to respond within 30 days.

California residents. Depending on the law that applies to us, you may have the right to know what we collect, to delete it, to correct it, to obtain a portable copy, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by California privacy law, and we do not knowingly process the personal information of anyone under 16 for such purposes.

8. Security

We take reasonable steps to protect your information:

• All traffic is encrypted in transit over HTTPS
• Incoming WhatsApp requests are cryptographically verified so that only genuine messages from Meta are processed
• Database access is limited to our service credentials, which are held as environment variables and never committed to code
• Phone numbers are masked in operational logs
• Rate limits protect against abuse

We do not claim that your phone number is hashed or anonymised, because it is not — we need it to reach you. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

9. Children

Awzsome is intended for adults. You must be 18 or older to use it, matching our Terms of Service. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has provided us with information, email privacy@awzsome.com and we will delete it.

10. WhatsApp

Awzsome runs on the WhatsApp Business Platform as a task-specific local discovery service, not a general-purpose assistant. Using Awzsome means your messages are processed through Meta’s infrastructure and are subject to Meta’s terms and privacy policy in addition to ours.

11. Where your information is held

We operate from the United States and our providers may process information in the United States and elsewhere. If you are outside the United States, using Awzsome means your information may be transferred there, where privacy laws may differ from those in your country.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell active users by WhatsApp message. The current version always sits at awzsome.com/privacy.html with its effective date at the top.

13. Contact

• Email: privacy@awzsome.com
• WhatsApp: Message Awzsome
• Address: Manteca, CA, United States