Overview
PicShare is a private photo- and video-sharing app for shared albums (“spaces”). This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. PicShare is operated by Assaf Yeredor and Omri Rainman, individuals based in Israel. By creating an account or using PicShare, you agree to the practices described here.
Information We Collect
Account information. Your email address, display name, username, and avatar photo. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive the name and email address associated with that account. Your username is how people find you in the app — anyone using PicShare can search for you by username.
Content you share. The photos and video clips you upload, together with their captions, the comments and likes on them, the time each one was captured, and any drawing or text you add to a photo before uploading it. Video clips include the audio recorded with them.
Membership and social data. The spaces you belong to, the spaces you ask to join and the outcome of those requests, invitations you send or receive, your friends and friend requests, and the people you have blocked.
Usage and technical data. A push notification token (if you enable notifications), your per-type notification preferences, and a record of how much storage each upload consumed, which we use to enforce upload limits and prevent abuse. We also collect analytics and crash reports, described in their own section below.
Moderation data. If you report a photo, comment, or person, we record who filed the report, who and what it concerns, the reason you selected, and any description you write.
Legal Bases for Processing
If you are in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we process your personal data on these legal bases:
- Performance of a contract — creating and running your account and authenticating you; storing your photos and clips and delivering them to the members of your spaces; spaces, memberships, invitations and join requests; friends, comments, likes and captions. This is the processing without which PicShare cannot work at all.
- Legitimate interests — keeping the service secure and preventing abuse; enforcing upload limits; reviewing reports and moderating content; fixing crashes and understanding which features are used so we can improve PicShare; and operating and maintaining the service generally. We weigh these against your rights, and you can object — see Your Choices and Rights.
- Legal obligations — responding to lawful requests from authorities, and keeping records where the law requires it.
- Consent — the device permissions you grant for the camera, microphone, and photo library, and push notifications where you turn them on. You can withdraw either at any time in the app or in your device settings, without affecting anything we did before you withdrew.
We do not ask for consent for analytics or crash reporting, so we do not claim it: that processing rests on our legitimate interest in understanding failures and usage, and the data is limited as described in the next section.
Analytics and Crash Reporting
We use PostHog to understand how PicShare is used — for example that a photo was uploaded, a space was created, or an upload failed. These events are recorded against your account’s internal ID. They never include your photos or clips, your captions or comments, your email address, or your name. PostHog processes this data on servers in the European Union.
We use Sentry to receive an automatic report when the app crashes or an upload fails permanently, so we can fix it. Crash reports are linked to your account’s internal ID and are configured not to carry personal information. Sentry processes this data on servers in the European Union.
We do not use advertising networks, we do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not sell or share your information for advertising.
Camera, Microphone, and Photo Library
PicShare asks for access to your camera to take photos and record clips, your microphone to record the audio in those clips, and your photo library so you can upload photos you already have and save photos back to your device. You can grant or withdraw each of these at any time in your device settings; PicShare works with reduced functionality without them. We only access what you select, at the moment you select it — we never browse or upload your library on our own.
Location Data
We do not collect your location. PicShare never asks for location permission, so photos and clips you capture in the app carry no location data.
Photos are re-compressed on your device before upload, which removes embedded metadata — including any GPS coordinates — from the file we store.
Video clips work differently. A clip you record in PicShare carries no location. A clip you pick from your photo library is sometimes uploaded without being re-encoded, and in that case whatever metadata the app that recorded it embedded — which can include location — travels with the file. If that matters to you, check the clip in your gallery app before uploading it.
When you import a photo from your library we read its capture date so it sorts by when it was actually taken; that date is the only thing we keep from it.
How We Use Your Information
- To provide the service: storing your photos and clips, and showing them to the other members of the spaces you share them in.
- To authenticate you and keep your account secure.
- To send push notifications you have turned on — friend requests, new photos in your spaces, comments, mentions, and requests to join a space you administer. Each type can be turned off in Settings, and all of them in your device settings.
- To enforce upload limits and protect the service from abuse.
- To review reports and act on content or accounts that break our Terms.
- To fix crashes and understand which features are used, so we can improve PicShare.
How Your Photos Are Stored
Photos and clips are compressed on your device and uploaded directly to our cloud storage provider (Cloudflare R2) — the files do not pass through our own servers. They are served back to members through temporary, expiring links.
Your content is visible only to the members of the spaces you choose to share it in. We do not sell your content, use it for advertising, or use it to train machine-learning models.
We do not guarantee that content is stored permanently, and PicShare is not a backup service. How long we keep content, and when it may be deleted, is described under Data Retention below and in Content Storage and Deletion in our Terms of Service.
If you turn on “Save previews for offline” in Settings, copies of previews are kept on your own device so your spaces work without a connection. That cache never leaves your device, and turning the setting off erases it.
Sharing and Disclosure
We share your content with the other members of the spaces you join. We do not sell your personal information.
We rely on the following service providers to run PicShare. They process data on our behalf:
- Supabase — accounts, authentication, and database.
- Cloudflare — photo and video storage, and our website.
- Expo — push notification delivery. Your push token and the notification text pass through Expo’s push service on the way to Apple’s and Google’s notification systems.
- PostHog — product analytics (European Union).
- Sentry — crash reporting (European Union).
- Discord — we receive an internal alert in a private channel when someone signs up, creates or joins a space, a space gets its first photo, or someone files a report, plus a once-daily summary of which spaces received uploads, so we can keep track of the service and act on reports quickly. These alerts contain display names, usernames, space titles, upload counts and storage totals, and — for a report — the reason given, any description the reporter wrote, and internal identifiers for the content concerned. They do not contain email addresses, and they never contain your photos or clips.
Apple and Google receive what is needed to deliver a push notification to your device and, if you use their sign-in, to authenticate you.
If you choose to share a photo to Instagram, the image is handed to the Instagram app on your device at that moment and the app switches. What happens to it from there is governed by Instagram’s own privacy policy. We do not upload anything to Instagram ourselves, and we share nothing else with Meta.
We may disclose information where required by law, or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to protect the rights, safety, and security of our users, the public, or the service.
International Transfers
PicShare is operated from Israel. Our providers process data in different places, and we would rather tell you where than generalise:
- Supabase (accounts, authentication, database) — Singapore.
- PostHog (analytics) — European Union.
- Sentry (crash reports) — European Union.
- Cloudflare (photos, clips, website) — Cloudflare operates a global network and stores and serves data from multiple regions.
- Expo, Discord, Apple, and Google — primarily the United States.
This means your personal data is transferred internationally, including outside the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom. Where that happens we rely on the data-protection terms our providers make available to their customers, which for these providers include the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses. If you would like to know more about the safeguards for a particular provider, contact us.
Data Retention
How long we keep information depends on what it is. In general we keep personal data for as long as necessary for the purposes described in this policy, and no longer.
Your photos and clips. We store them while your account is active and while we operate the service, and we intend to keep them available for as long as you use PicShare. We do not guarantee permanent or indefinite storage, and we may change how long content is kept — see Content Storage and Deletion in our Terms of Service. If we discontinue PicShare you may lose access to content stored in it; where reasonably practicable we intend to give advance notice and an opportunity to save it first.
Content you delete. Deleting a photo or clip removes it from the space and deletes the file from active storage. Copies may persist for a limited time in our providers’ operational backups, logs, and caches until those are overwritten or expire in the normal course; we do not use them to restore individual deleted content. Copies other members have already saved to their own devices are outside our control and are not affected.
Your account. We keep your account information while your account exists. Deleting your account removes your profile and login, your avatar files, your comments and likes, your friendships and blocks, your space memberships, invitations and join requests, your notifications and notification preferences, your push tokens, and your upload records.
Photos you uploaded to shared spaces. Deleting your account does not delete photos and clips you uploaded to spaces that still have other members. Those stay in the space for the people you shared them with, and we remove the link between them and your profile, so they are no longer attributed to you. A space where you were the last remaining member is deleted along with you, its photos and their stored files included. A space with other members remains, and its admin role passes to the longest-standing member. If you want that content gone as well, delete it before you delete your account.
Reports. A report is kept after the reported content is deleted, so there is a record of the moderation decision. It is deleted if the account that filed it, or the account it concerns, is deleted.
Activity notifications. Deleted automatically after 30 days, and only the most recent notifications for each person are kept.
Analytics and crash reports. Held by PostHog and Sentry under their own retention settings, keyed to an internal account identifier rather than your name or email address.
Your Choices and Rights
In the app you can edit your profile, change your username and avatar, set notification preferences per type, leave spaces, delete your own photos and comments, block people, and clear the offline preview cache.
You can delete your account at any time in Settings → Account → Delete Account. It takes effect immediately and cannot be undone. Read the Data Retention section above first, so you know what it does and does not remove — or see Delete Your PicShare Account for the steps and the same summary on one page.
Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, to object to or restrict certain processing, to withdraw consent where we rely on it, and to complain to your local data protection authority. Contact us at the address below to exercise any of these and we will respond within the period your law allows.
Security
Access to a space is enforced on our servers, not only in the app: the database applies row-level security rules, and the functions that issue photo links check that you are a member of the space before signing anything. The links that serve photos and clips are temporary and expire.
Passwords are handled by our authentication provider, Supabase, and stored hashed — we never see them. Traffic between the app and our providers is encrypted in transit.
No service can promise perfect security, but we take reasonable measures to protect your information.
Children’s Privacy
PicShare is not directed to children. You must be at least 13 years old to use PicShare. If you are under 18, you should use PicShare only with the involvement of a parent or guardian.
Some countries set a higher minimum age, or require a parent’s consent below a certain age, for services like PicShare. Where that is the case, you may use PicShare only if you meet that requirement.
We do not ask for your date of birth, so we cannot verify age — we rely on the confirmation given when an account is created. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below the applicable age. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above, and we will tell you in the app if the change is significant. Your continued use of PicShare after changes take effect means you accept the updated policy.
Contact Us
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, or want to exercise any of your rights, contact us at support@picshare.app.