Legal · Privacy

Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 9, 2026

Vennu ("Vennu," "we," "us," or "our") is operated by Gutenwords LLC, a Wyoming limited liability company, 30 N Gould St Ste N, Sheridan, WY 82801, United States. This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect when you use the Vennu mobile application and related websites and services (together, the "Services"), how we use and share it, and the choices and rights you have.

Vennu is a social and dating app. By its nature, some of the information you choose to put on your profile — such as your dating preferences — may reveal sensitive information about you. We treat all profile information with the protections described in this Policy, and we never require you to share more than the minimum needed to use the Services.

You must be at least 18 years old to use Vennu. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. See Section 11.

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Information you provide

Account data — your sign-in identity (Sign in with Apple, Sign in with Google, or your phone number with a one-time SMS code), your date of birth, and the account identifiers we assign to you.
Profile data — name, gender, photos, prompt answers, bio text, the preferences you set (including who you want to meet), your selected modes (for example dating, friends, groups), and your verification badge status.
Photos and media — the profile photos you upload, photos attached to reports, and the verification selfie described in Section 5.
Location data — see Section 1.3. Location is central to how Vennu works and is handled with the specific safeguards described there.
Trips — the destination and date range of trips you create, so we can show you people and events relevant to where you are going.
Messages — text messages, voice messages, and shared content (such as event or venue cards) you exchange with your matches or groups. Voice messages are stored as audio files in private storage and are accessible only to the participants of the conversation.
Purchases — your subscription tier (Pro/VIP) and any consumable purchases. Payment itself is processed by Apple or Google; we never receive your full payment card details.
Reports and support — reports you file about other users (category, optional free text, and a snapshot of the reported content as evidence), and messages you send us.

1.2 Information collected automatically

Usage data — in-app actions such as likes sent and received, matches, profile impressions and profile views, feature usage, and session information.
Device and technical data — device model, operating system and version, app version, language, time zone, IP address, push notification token, and crash and diagnostic data.

1.3 Location data — how it works

Matching location. With your permission, we collect your device location to show you people, events, and venues near you. Vennu asks for this permission from an explanatory screen inside the app, not on first launch, and location is required for the core discovery features to work. Where a feature allows it, you can set your location manually instead.
What others see. Other users never see your precise location. Your public profile shows only a neighborhood or city name. Distances shown to other users are approximated on our servers, and we deliberately fuzz distance values so your position cannot be triangulated.
Trips. If you create a trip, other users see only that you will be visiting a destination during an overlapping window — never your full trip list or your exact travel plans.
Retention. Your current matching location is stored on your profile and is replaced each time it updates. Archived trips are deleted no later than 6 months after the trip end date.

1.4 Sensitive information

Depending on what you choose to share, your profile may include information that some laws classify as sensitive (for example, information revealing sexual orientation, or precise geolocation). We use this information only to provide the Services (matching, discovery, safety) and as described in this Policy. We do not use sensitive information for targeted advertising, and we do not sell it. Where we build anonymous, aggregated statistics (see Section 6), we never key those aggregates to sexual orientation.

2. How We Use Information

We use the information described above to:

Provide the Services — create and display your profile, compute your discovery feed, and deliver matches, messages, events, venue deals, and trips;
Keep Vennu safe — verify profiles, moderate content, detect and prevent spam, fraud, harassment, underage use, and other violations of our Terms and Community Guidelines; process reports; and comply with our legal obligations regarding child sexual abuse material (see Section 4);
Operate purchases — activate and manage Pro/VIP subscriptions and consumables, prevent purchase fraud, and handle refunds and billing disputes;
Improve the product — understand how features are used, fix crashes and bugs, and test improvements;
Communicate with you — send push notifications and messages about matches, messages, safety, and your account (you can control non-essential notifications in your settings);
Show you your own insights — profile performance statistics such as how often your profile was seen, based on your own activity data; any benchmarks are computed only from anonymized aggregates;
Measure our own marketing — see Section 6.2;
Comply with law — respond to lawful requests, enforce our Terms, and establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.

We do not:

sell your personal information;
share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising;
use facial recognition or compute any biometric identifiers or "face templates" from your photos (see Section 5);
score your physical attractiveness, algorithmically or otherwise.

3. Content Moderation

To keep the community safe, content you upload or send may be reviewed by automated systems, by our trained team, or both:

Photos you upload may be screened by automated image-safety classifiers before or shortly after they become visible;
Text you write (bio, prompt answers, comments on likes, and chat messages) may be screened by automated text-moderation classifiers;
Content that is flagged automatically or reported by users may be reviewed by our moderation team, and enforcement decisions (removal, warnings, bans) may follow. Where we remove your content, we tell you the category of the reason and give you a way to request a review.

Moderation data (flags, decisions, and report evidence snapshots) is retained as described in Section 8.

4. Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) — Detection and Reporting Disclosure

We have zero tolerance for child sexual abuse and exploitation. You should be aware that:

Images uploaded to Vennu are automatically checked against hash lists of known child sexual abuse material using industry-standard hash-matching technology operated by our media delivery provider, Cloudflare, on our media zone. Hash matching compares digital fingerprints of images against fingerprints of previously identified illegal material; it does not interpret your photos beyond that comparison. When a match is detected, the image is blocked and we are notified so that we can report it as described below.
If we obtain actual knowledge of apparent CSAM, we are required by U.S. federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2258A) to report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), and we will do so. In connection with such a report, we preserve the relevant content and associated account data for the period required by law (currently one year), even if the account is deleted, and we may suspend or terminate the account and cooperate with law enforcement.
Our full child safety standards, including how to report concerns to us, are published at https://www.vennuapp.com/child-safety.

5. Photo Verification and Biometric Information (including Illinois BIPA)

Vennu offers optional photo verification: to earn a verified badge, you take a selfie in the app matching a randomly assigned pose, and a trained human reviewer compares that selfie side by side with your profile photos.

We designed this feature deliberately so that no biometric identifiers or biometric information are collected, captured, computed, stored, or used:

Verification decisions are made exclusively by human visual review. We do not run facial recognition, face matching, or face analysis software on your verification selfie or on your profile photos.
We do not extract, generate, or store any face geometry, faceprint, face template, face embedding, or any other biometric identifier from any photo, for verification or for any other purpose.
The verification selfie is stored in a private, access-restricted bucket, is never shown on your profile or to other users, and is deleted after the verification decision — retained no longer than 30 days after the decision so that you can appeal — after which only a non-photographic record of the decision remains.
You are asked for your express consent on a dedicated screen immediately before taking the verification selfie, which explains that a human will review it and that it will be deleted afterwards.
Optional on-device photo-quality checks (for example blur or brightness detection) use only aggregate pixel statistics; at most, a device-local yes/no "contains a face" signal may be computed on your device, and no facial landmarks, measurements, or embeddings are created, transmitted, or stored.

If we ever introduce any automated face-comparison step, we will update this Policy first, obtain any legally required consent (including a written release where required by the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, the Texas Capture or Use of Biometric Identifier Act, or the Washington My Health My Data Act), and make such processing strictly optional.

6. Analytics, Insights, and Marketing Measurement

6.1 Product analytics and your profile insights

We do not embed a third-party analytics SDK in the Vennu app. Product analytics are collected in our own database on our own infrastructure: the app sends a fixed, code-defined list of events (for example "paywall viewed," "onboarding step completed," "feature opened") to our servers, and we aggregate them into daily statistics. Raw analytics events are deleted after 180 days. Beyond that we keep two things that are no longer linked to you: anonymous daily aggregates, and de-identified event records that carry no user, device, or account identifier — only a timestamp, which event or surface it was, and coarse audience attributes (an age band such as "25-29" and gender). We use those to study how the product is used and to improve ranking and safety. Because they contain no identifier, they cannot be traced back to you and are not affected by account deletion.

We record when and where your profile is shown to someone in the app and when someone opens it, together with the mode (dating or friends) and the part of the app it happened in. From these we build a daily summary for each member: how often the profile was shown, how many distinct people saw it, likes and passes received and sent, matches, and messages sent and received. These summaries power feed quality, safety, and the profile-insights features we show to you about your own profile. Members with a VIP subscription can see their own summary in the app; nobody can see another member's figures, and we never show you who viewed you unless they liked you.

Comparisons against other members, where offered, are computed from anonymized, aggregated data and are only shown when the comparison group is large enough that no individual can be singled out. We also compute internal quality and ranking signals from this engagement data to decide the order in which profiles and listings are shown. These internal signals are never displayed to you or to anyone else, never shared, and never sold. We do not rate your physical appearance, and we do not produce any "attractiveness score." If we ever decided to show you a standing relative to others, it would be a broad band (such as "above average"), never a rank or a raw percentile.

6.2 Marketing measurement (Meta Conversions API)

To measure whether our own advertising works, when you finish creating your account our server may send a single "sign-up completed" event to Meta Platforms through Meta's Conversions API. That transmission contains a hashed (SHA-256) form of your email address or phone number — never the plain value, never your name, photos, messages, location, or profile content — plus basic device context (platform, operating system version, language, screen size, time zone). We use it only to attribute sign-ups to our own campaigns. We do not send Meta any in-app behavior beyond that single event, and we do not receive advertising audiences or profiles back from Meta.

7. Service Providers (Processors) and Other Sharing

We share personal information with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contracts that restrict their use of your data. Our current providers:

Supabase Inc. — core hosting: database, authentication, file storage, and realtime messaging. Data involved: account, profile, messages, location, purchase metadata, moderation records. Location: United States (US East).
Cloudflare, Inc. — media storage and delivery, network security, and CSAM scanning on our media zone. Data involved: photos, voice messages, media delivery logs including IP addresses. Location: global edge network; primary storage in the United States.
Twilio Inc. — delivery of the one-time SMS codes used for phone sign-in. Data involved: your phone number and the verification code. Location: United States.
OpenAI, L.L.C. — automated text moderation (safety classification of bios, prompt answers, comments, and chat text). Data involved: the text submitted for classification. OpenAI does not use data submitted through its API to train its models. Location: United States.
Microsoft Corporation — Azure AI Content Safety — automated image moderation (safety classification of uploaded photos). Data involved: the images submitted for classification. Location: United States.
Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) — crash and error reporting, configured for errors only, with no session recording of message content. Data involved: device and technical data and crash traces. Location: United States.
RevenueCat, Inc. — subscription and in-app purchase management. Data involved: a pseudonymous app user ID and the purchase/entitlement data Apple and Google report. Location: United States.
Google LLC — Firebase Cloud Messaging — push notification delivery only. We do not use Firebase Analytics. Data involved: push token and device data. Location: United States and global.
Meta Platforms, Inc. — marketing measurement as described in Section 6.2. Data involved: a hashed email address or phone number and basic device context. Location: United States.

In addition, we may share information:

With Apple and Google as sign-in providers and as the payment processors for subscriptions and consumables bought through the App Store or Google Play (governed by their own terms and privacy policies);
With other users — the profile information you choose to display, your approximate location as described in Section 1.3, and the content you send them;
For safety and legal reasons — with law enforcement or others where required by law (including NCMEC reporting under Section 4), to respond to lawful requests, or where necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of our users, the public, or Vennu;
In a corporate transaction — if Gutenwords LLC is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction, subject to this Policy;
With your consent — in any other case, we will ask you first.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for their own advertising purposes.

8. Data Retention

We keep personal information only as long as needed for the purposes above:

Account and profile data — until you delete your account (see Section 9), then deleted subject to the legal holds below.
Verification selfies — deleted after the verification decision; no longer than 30 days after the decision, to allow an appeal.
Archived trips — deleted no later than 6 months after the trip end date.
Messages, including voice messages — until you delete your account or the conversation is removed, subject to the other participant's copy and to legal holds.
Moderation and report records — up to 24 months after the decision, so that we can enforce bans, handle appeals, and answer legal requests.
CSAM-related preservation — as required by 18 U.S.C. § 2258A (currently one year from the report).
Per-member daily summaries (the figures behind profile insights) — kept while your account exists and deleted with it; the underlying raw impression records are deleted after 30 days.
Raw analytics events — 180 days. Anonymous daily aggregates and de-identified event records (no user, device, or account identifier; timestamp, event, age band, and gender only) are kept longer, as described in Section 6.1.
Purchase records — as required for tax, accounting, and dispute-handling obligations.
Backups — deleted data disappears from our provider's rolling backup window, currently 7 days, as those backups age out.

Legal holds: we may retain limited data beyond deletion where required by law or necessary for safety — for example, records connected to an open investigation or report, CSAM preservation obligations, records of enforcement actions (so that banned users cannot simply return), and transaction records.

9. Deleting Your Account

You can permanently delete your account directly in the app: Profile → Settings → Delete account. Deletion is real deletion: your profile, photos, messages, trips, and related personal data are erased from our production systems, not merely deactivated or anonymized, except for the narrow legal-hold categories listed in Section 8.

If you no longer have the app installed, you can request deletion on the web at https://www.vennuapp.com/delete-account.

If you purchased a subscription, deleting your account does not automatically cancel it — cancel it through your Apple or Google subscription settings (see our Terms of Service for step-by-step instructions).

10. Your Privacy Rights (U.S. State Privacy Laws)

Depending on where you live (including under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA, and comparable laws in states such as Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Texas, and Oregon), you may have the right to:

Know / access the personal information we hold about you;
Correct inaccurate personal information;
Delete your personal information (see Section 9 — deletion is available in-app to everyone, regardless of state);
Portability — receive a copy of your personal information in a usable format;
Opt out of the sale of personal information, of sharing for cross-context behavioral advertising, and of certain profiling — note that we do not sell or share personal information for those purposes;
Limit the use of sensitive personal information — we already use sensitive information only to provide the Services;
Non-discrimination — we will not treat you differently for exercising your rights;
Appeal — if we decline a request, you may appeal by replying to our decision, and we will respond as required by your state's law.

How to exercise your rights: use the in-app tools (account deletion, profile editing, settings toggles), or email support@vennuapp.com with the subject "Privacy request". We will verify your request using your logged-in account or equivalent verification. You may use an authorized agent where your state's law provides for it.

Global Privacy Control (GPC): because we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, there is currently nothing to opt out of via GPC on our Services. Where a browser-based service of ours falls within a GPC obligation, we honor the signal.

California residents: the categories of personal information we collect, the sources, the purposes, and the recipients are described in Sections 1, 2, 6, 7, and 8. We have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding 12 months.

11. Age Policy — No One Under 18

The Services are strictly for adults 18 and older. We require a date of birth at sign-up, we deny access to anyone under 18, and reports of suspected underage users are our highest-priority moderation category. If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone under 18, we delete it and terminate the account. To report an underage user, use the in-app report flow or email reports@vennuapp.com.

12. Security

We protect your information with technical and organizational measures appropriate to the risk, including encryption in transit, access-restricted private storage for photos, voice messages, and verification selfies (served through signed, expiring URLs), row-level access controls in our database, an encrypted local message cache on your device, restricted internal access, and audit logging of administrative actions. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affecting your personal information occurs, we will notify you and the regulators as required by law.

13. International Users

The Services are operated from the United States, and your information is processed and stored in the United States. If you use the Services from outside the United States, you understand that your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy laws may differ from those of your country.

14. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app or by other means before the changes take effect, and we will update the "Last Updated" date above. Continued use of the Services after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy.

15. Contact Us

Gutenwords LLC 30 N Gould St Ste N Sheridan, WY 82801 United States

General support and privacy requests: support@vennuapp.com
Safety and child-safety concerns: reports@vennuapp.com