Privacy Policy

Who we are

Bower is a private app for family and close friends, run by Curious Lab. We handle your personal information under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles. You can reach us at [email protected].

What we keep

• Your account: your email address, your name, a profile photo if you add one, and your time zone, which your browser tells us on your first visit so times show correctly.
• What you post: photos, files attached to events, events, lists, messages, comments, reactions and RSVPs, along with who posted what and when, and the notifications this creates for other members.
• Photos you send from the Android app wait on your phone until they upload, in the app's private storage, and are deleted from there once they're sent or you discard them. A send that fails and that you never discard is deleted after 8 days. If you choose "Upload photos only on Wi-Fi", they wait until your phone is on Wi-Fi, and the send fails if it can't upload within a week. Download saves a copy of a photo to your phone's Pictures folder, where other apps on your phone can see it.
• Signing in: for each device you're signed in on, its IP address and a description of the browser or app. For each phone signed in to the Bower app, Bower also stores a push token. Sign-in codes are stored only in scrambled form and expire after 15 minutes.
• Invites: the name, and the email address if you give one, of each person you invite.
• Reports: when you report a message, photo or member, we keep who made the report, the reason and any note you add, who it's about, and a copy of the message's text or the photo's album title, and we email them to ourselves to review. The person you report isn't told who reported them. Reports stay after the reported content, the pod or either account is deleted, as our record of what happened.
• Suspension: if we suspend an account, its content stays until we remove it, and we keep the time it was suspended with the account until the suspension is lifted.
• Usage counts: Bower counts how its features are used from its own records (who did what kind of thing, in which pod, when), without the content of messages, events, lists or photos. We keep those counts after content or an account is deleted. Only Bower's staff see them, and nothing is sent to an analytics service.
• Your settings: notification choices and quiet hours.
• Calendar links: when you open a Calendar screen (on You or in a pod's settings), Bower makes you a private link. Whoever has it, and any calendar service you add it to (such as Google Calendar), can read the titles, times, places and details of events in your pods, except ones you said you can't make. That service keeps its own copy. When you leave a pod, reset the link, delete your account or we suspend it, Bower's feed empties and the service removes those events at its next refresh, which for Google can take about a day.

Photos and location

Phone photos often record where they were taken. Bower removes that: every photo you add to a pod or a chat is re-encoded when it's uploaded, and its location, camera details and other hidden data are dropped. The only thing we keep from it is the time it was taken, so photos sort in the right order.

Files attached to an event are kept as they're uploaded. A photo attached to an event is cleaned like any other photo, but a PDF is stored exactly as it was uploaded, and PDFs can carry details in their properties, such as the name of the person or program that made them. When a pod member forwards an email to their pod, the PDFs in it are attached to the events Bower adds or updates from it.

Your profile photo is shown to other members only as a resized copy, without its location or other hidden data.

Who can see it

What you post is seen only by the members of the pod you posted it in. There are no public profiles and no search: people outside your pods can't find you or see anything you've shared. Members of pods you share can see your name and profile photo.

We access your information only to run, support and secure Bower, or when the law requires it.

Services we use

• Photon by komoot suggests places when you add an event's location or a trip idea's place, and looks up the address of a place an event or trip idea has without a map pin, whether you typed it or it was read from something you shared or emailed to a pod. Our server sends it what you type and a rough point near your time zone's city, or, when it looks up an address, the place's name and address and a rough point near the city of the event's or trip's time zone. For a trip with no place of its own, it receives a point about a kilometre from the trip's first stay, to name its town. It never receives your name, email address or IP address.
• MET Norway (the Norwegian Meteorological Institute) provides the forecasts shown on upcoming events and trips and in their reminders, under CC BY 4.0. Our server sends it only the rough location (about 10 km) of places on pods' upcoming events and trips, never names, addresses, titles or anything about you.
• AeroDataBox provides live status for flights on pods' trips. Our server sends it only a flight number and date, from about a day before departure until take-off, never names, bookings or anything about you.
• OpenFreeMap provides the map tiles shown for an event's place. Your browser loads them directly, so OpenFreeMap sees your IP address and the part of the map you're looking at.
• Our email provider sends your sign-in codes and invitations, so it receives your email address and those messages. It also receives the emails pod members forward to their pod, and the reports members make, which it delivers to us.
• Google Maps opens at an event's place when you tap Directions on it.
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers push notifications to phones signed in to the Bower app, including reminders the evening before and an hour before an event you said you're going to or might make (the evening one also lists what you've claimed on its lists). Each push carries the pod's name, a short preview (for example who said what, or the event's name) and the link it opens. Bower keeps a token for each signed-in phone and deletes it when that phone signs out.
• Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Web Services' AI service, reads emails that pod members forward to their pod's email address, to find events and add them to the pod. It receives the email's subject, sender, text, links and any attached PDFs, and the titles and dates of events the pod recently added from email, so it can recognise changes. We may instead use Anthropic's API, and would then name it here. When you share something to Bower from another app, the AI service reads the text, links, PDFs and images you shared to suggest events, and ideas for an upcoming trip, which you check or add to the pod yourself; so it can recognise something already on the board, it also receives the titles, start times and places of the pod's upcoming events (and booking references from emailed bookings), and the titles, places and links of the ideas for its upcoming trips; Bower keeps what you shared for a day, unless you attach the files to an event. When a trip has a place, the AI service receives only that place's name and the trip's month, to suggest local food and things to do, which members can add to the trip as ideas. Bower also fetches the pages those emails and shares link to itself, so the sites behind those links see a request from our servers, and passes what it finds to the AI service. Bower keeps the original forwarded message for 7 days and its record of the email (subject, sender, what happened to it) for 30 days. Only pods whose managers turn on pod email have an address.
• A network security service carries every request between your device and Bower, to protect it from attacks. It sees your IP address and the addresses of the pages you open, and passes photos and pages through without keeping them.
• An error-reporting service receives a report when something goes wrong in Bower: the address of the page (with sign-in, invite, upload and calendar links masked), your IP address and browser, and technical details of the request. It doesn't receive passwords, codes, or what you typed into events, lists, messages or searches.
• Our hosting providers run Bower's servers and database and store photos, files and backups. They keep Bower's data in the United States, so your information is stored and processed outside Australia.

What we don't do

Bower has no ads. We don't sell or rent your information, we don't show it to advertisers, and we don't track you across other websites. We use no analytics or advertising cookies: Bower's cookies only keep you signed in and protect forms from forgery.

Deleting things

• When you remove a message, photo, event or list, it's removed from Bower, along with its activity and notifications.
• When you remove an event, its attached files go with it. Photos added to its memories stay in the pod's Photos as an ordinary album.
• When a pod is dissolved, everything in it, including its photos, is removed.
• To have a message, event or list erased without deleting your account, remove it before you go, or ask us.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account in the app (You, then Settings, then Delete account) or start from getbower.app/delete-account. We email a code to confirm it's you.

• Your photos, comments, reactions, RSVPs and chat messages are removed, and their files are deleted from storage within a day and from our backups within 30 days. Chat cards for events and lists stay in the chat.
• Events and lists you made stay with their pods, shown as made by a former member. So do the files you attached to events and the items you added to lists.
• Your name and email address are removed and can't be recovered, and you're signed out everywhere. Your sign-in details, devices, push tokens, connected accounts and calendar link are deleted, and the invites you sent are cancelled.
• If you ran a pod, it passes to the next person in line, or is dissolved if you were its only member.

Backups

We back up Bower's database every day and keep earlier versions of stored files, so we can recover from a mistake. Both are kept for 30 days: anything removed from Bower, including a deleted account, is gone from them within 30 days.

Your choices and rights

You can see and correct your name, email address and profile photo in Bower at any time. You can ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, or ask us to correct it, by writing to [email protected]. To get a copy of your data, email us and we'll send your photos and messages.

Young people

Bower is for people 16 and older, or younger with a parent or guardian's involvement.

Questions and complaints

If you have a question or a complaint about how we handle your information, write to [email protected]. We'll reply within 30 days. If you aren't satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes. If a change matters, we'll tell you in Bower or by email.