Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Lunchd is operated by APT53 Ltd, company number 16566206, registered in England and Wales. Our registered office is 86–90 Paul Street, London, England, EC2A 4NE.

APT53 Ltd is the controller of your personal data under UK data protection law. You can contact us at lorenzo@lunchd.uk.

2. The service

Lunchd connects people aged 18 and over for in-person lunches nearby. This policy applies when you use the Lunchd app, website or waitlist, contact us, or participate in testing.

3. Personal data we collect

Account and identity

When you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive your name, email address and an authentication identifier. We do not receive or store your Apple or Google password.

Profile

We collect the profile information you provide, including your first and last name, birthday, gender, industry, interests, bio and optional profile photo. Your age is derived from your birthday. Profile information is visible to other Lunchd members in relevant lunch contexts.

Location

With your permission, the app requests location coordinates using your device's balanced-accuracy setting, typically accurate to around 100 metres. We use them in the foreground to show lunches and venues near you and store your most recent location with a timestamp to decide which lunch suggestions to send. We do not request background location or keep a movement history; a new stored location replaces the previous one. App-store privacy forms may classify these coordinates as “Precise Location” because they are sent as latitude and longitude.

Lunches, messages and safety

We collect lunches you create, join, leave or attend; related timestamps and memberships; group-chat messages; quoted reply previews; blocks; and safety reports. A quoted reply preview contains a copy of the replied-to message author's first name.

Device, diagnostics and product analytics

We collect a push-notification token, platform, app version, notification preferences, an internal account identifier, screens visited, selected in-app events, app lifecycle events, and crash or error data. Product analytics sent to PostHog are linked to an internal Firebase user identifier, but we configure the app not to send your name or email, use session replay, capture touches or enrich events with location inferred from your IP address.

Content, feedback and surveys

We collect your bio, chat messages, feedback, survey answers and other information you choose to enter in free-text fields. Feedback is stored in Lunchd's database and may be synced to Linear with your name or email where needed to respond or investigate. Post-lunch survey responses are relayed to Google Sheets. Please do not include sensitive information unless it is necessary.

Waitlist

The website stores your email address and signup time in Supabase. It also sends PostHog limited website events such as the page, basic browser and device context, acquisition category, waitlist call-to-action placement, submission attempt, and whether a signup was new or already subscribed. We do not send the submitted email address to PostHog, and you can opt out as described in section 12.

We receive data directly from you, from your device and from the sign-in and service providers listed below.

4. How and why we use personal data

We use personal data to:

• create and manage accounts, profiles, lunches and chats;
• show lunches and venues near you;
• send requested reminders and activity notifications;
• prevent abuse, enforce blocks, investigate reports and keep Lunchd safe;
• provide support and respond to feedback;
• diagnose faults and understand whether product flows work;
• manage the website waitlist; and
• comply with legal obligations and establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

Our legal bases under UK GDPR are:

• Contract: providing the account, profile, lunch, chat and related service you request.
• Consent: accessing device location, sending device notifications and storing a voluntarily submitted waitlist email where consent is required. You can withdraw device permissions through your device settings or contact us.
• Legitimate interests: keeping Lunchd safe, preventing misuse, improving the service, measuring aggregate website use, monitoring reliability and responding to feedback. We limit the data used for these purposes.
• Legal obligation and legal claims: where the law requires processing or records are necessary to handle a dispute or safety matter.

Information marked as required during signup is necessary to create an account. Location and notifications are optional, but related nearby-lunch and reminder features may not work if permission is refused. We do not make decisions that have legal or similarly significant effects using solely automated processing.

5. Service providers

We disclose personal data only where needed to providers that operate parts of Lunchd for us:

We do not sell personal data and do not use it for third-party advertising.

6. International transfers

Some providers operate outside the UK or allow authorised support or subprocessors to access data from other countries, including the EEA and United States. Where UK personal data is transferred internationally, we use a lawful transfer mechanism such as UK adequacy regulations, the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where applicable, or approved contractual safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or UK Addendum. You may contact us for information about the safeguard used for a particular transfer.

7. How long we keep personal data

We keep personal data only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this policy, including providing Lunchd, maintaining safety and security, resolving disputes, complying with law and establishing, exercising or defending legal claims.

• Account and profile data is generally kept while your account is active and deleted when you delete your account, subject to the limited exceptions below.
• Your stored location is overwritten by each new update and deleted when your account is deleted.
• Messages you sent in group chats may remain visible to the other lunch members after your profile and account link are removed. If another member replied to one of your messages, your first name may remain in that quoted reply preview.
• Safety reports may be retained without an account link for as long as reasonably necessary to protect members, investigate misconduct, enforce our Terms, comply with law or handle legal claims.
• Analytics, diagnostics, feedback and survey records are kept only while reasonably needed to operate, secure and improve Lunchd or respond to an issue.
• Waitlist emails are kept until you ask us to remove them or the waitlist is no longer needed.

Historical session recordings collected before session replay was disabled expire under PostHog's 30-day recording-retention setting. We assess whether retained information is still necessary and delete or anonymise it when it is no longer required.

8. Deleting your account

You can delete your account in Profile → Settings → Delete account. We delete your Firebase authentication identity, account, profile, profile photo and stored avatar, stored location, notification preferences, push tokens and lunch memberships so that a later sign-in starts fresh.

Messages you sent in lunch group chats may remain visible to the other members because they store the former Firebase user identifier, send time and message text. Your name and profile are no longer resolved for those messages. However, your first name may remain in quoted reply previews created by other members because those previews store a separate copy of the sender name. Safety reports may remain stored without your account link where necessary for the purposes described above.

You may also email lorenzo@lunchd.uk to request deletion or ask us to review retained information.

9. Your rights

Subject to the conditions in data protection law, you can ask us for access to your personal data, correction, erasure, restriction or portability, or object to processing. Where processing relies on consent, you can withdraw consent at any time without affecting earlier lawful processing.

Email lorenzo@lunchd.uk. We normally respond within one month. You can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, although we would appreciate the opportunity to address your concern first.

10. Security

We use access controls, signed photo URLs, encrypted network connections and provider security controls intended to protect personal data. No system is completely secure.

11. Age

Lunchd is only for people aged 18 and over. The app blocks people under 18 from signing up. If you believe someone under 18 is using Lunchd, contact lorenzo@lunchd.uk.

12. Website technologies

The Lunchd website uses Supabase to store waitlist email submissions and PostHog for limited internal analytics intended to improve the website. PostHog records page paths, basic browser and device context, referrer domains, privacy-reduced acquisition categories and explicit waitlist events. It does not receive the submitted email address, use session replay or autocapture, create a PostHog person profile, or store PostHog cookies or analytics data in your browser's local or session storage. We use technical controls to disable IP-based location enrichment and configure PostHog not to store client IP addresses with events.

Google Analytics is optional and does not load until you select “Allow analytics.” If allowed, Google Analytics uses first-party analytics cookies and records page views, basic browser and device information, referrer and acquisition information, waitlist interactions and successful new waitlist signups. Lunchd disables Google Signals and advertising personalisation and does not send the submitted email address. Selecting “Limited only” leaves Google Analytics off.

You can change your selection at any time through “Analytics choices” in the website footer. “Turn all analytics off” also stops the limited PostHog website analytics. We store your selection in your browser's local storage so the website can remember it, and remove Google Analytics cookies when Google Analytics is turned off. Your choice does not affect the website or waitlist.

13. Changes

We may update this policy when the service, our data practices or the law changes. We will post the current version here, update the “Last updated” date and provide additional notice where a change is significant.