Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 5, 2026

PawMatch (joinpawmatch.com) is a marketplace that connects dog owners with professional dog trainers. This policy describes exactly what information we collect, why, who touches it, and the choices you have. It is written to match how the product actually works today — nothing here is boilerplate.

Information you give us

Account: your email address, a password (stored only in hashed form by our authentication provider — we never see or store it in plain text), a display name, your role (owner or trainer), and an optional profile photo. When you add a photo in the app, your browser resizes and re-encodes it before it is uploaded — this removes the file's embedded metadata, including any GPS location your camera recorded, before the file leaves your device. Photos are served from public storage (anyone with the link can view them) and are published as you submit them: we do not review images before they appear, and we remove images we become aware violate our terms.
Dog profiles (owners): your dog's name, breed, date of birth, and temperament notes. Visible to you and to trainers you interact with (for example, when you request a booking). (There is no dog-photo upload today; if we add one, we'll update this policy.)
Messages: the messages you exchange with the other party in a conversation, with read timestamps. Messages are visible only to the two participants. Our database access rules are configured so that even our own backend service role cannot read message bodies through the API layer. One flow leaves that system: the new-message notification email includes a short preview of the message (up to 160 characters), delivered like all our email through Resend to the recipient's inbox.
Bookings: who booked whom, the service, the time, the price at the time of booking, and status history (confirmed, cancelled, completed).
Trainer business information (trainers): your bio, experience, certifications, specialties, services and prices, weekly availability, an approximate service location with a service radius, and any training photos you publish to your profile gallery (the same photo rules above apply: metadata stripped by the app's uploader, public storage, published as submitted). This is public directory content by design — publish the service area and photos you are comfortable sharing (for solo trainers an approximate point can resemble a home area, and a photo taken at home can show it, so choose accordingly).
Payment instructions (trainers): free-text payment instructions and optional Venmo/PayPal usernames. These are handles only — PawMatch never collects card numbers or bank details and never processes money. An owner sees your payment instructions only after you confirm their booking.
Calendar data (trainers, optional): if you connect an external calendar, the secret calendar URL you paste is stored server-side; it cannot be selected by any client-facing API role, and only our server's dedicated calendar-fetch path can retrieve it to check your busy times. From it we derive busy blocks that are start/end times only — no event titles, no attendees — refreshed when your availability is viewed (at most once per 15 minutes) and generated only for the near-term booking window. Outbound calendar feed links use tokens we store only in hashed form.

Information collected automatically

Server logs: our hosting providers keep standard request logs (IP address, request metadata) for operations and abuse prevention.
Bot protection: we use Cloudflare Turnstile to block automated signups and password-reset requests. When you submit either of those forms, Turnstile receives your IP address and a challenge token.
Aggregate usage analytics: we use Vercel Web Analytics to count page views. For each page view it records the page visited (including its query string, with sensitive parameters filtered out by Vercel), the referrer, your country, region, and city (derived from your IP address — Vercel states the IP itself is not stored), your browser, operating system, and device type, and an anonymized visitor identifier that resets every day and cannot be traced back to you across days or across sites. It is cookieless — it stores nothing on your device — and it is never linked to your account, name, or email. We see only aggregate counts, not individual browsing histories.
Product funnel events: when a marketplace step succeeds, we record a named event in our own database (hosted with the rest of the app on Supabase): trainer account created, trainer profile completed, a ZIP search on /trainers, the first conversation between an owner and a trainer, and a booking request. If you are signed in we store your account id with the event; a logged-out search stores no account id. Search events include the ZIP, radius, specialties, how many trainers matched, and whether the ZIP is in our Nashville launch market. We do not store message bodies, calendar URLs, emails, or payment details in these events. The same event names may also be sent to Vercel as custom analytics events (still cookieless). The database row is the copy we use to understand the funnel.
Cookies: only strictly necessary cookies — your login session and Turnstile's challenge cookie. No advertising or analytics cookies (the analytics above is cookieless), no ads, and no tracking pixels.

How we use information

To operate the marketplace (search, profiles, messaging, bookings, calendars), to send transactional email (signup confirmation, password reset, booking updates, new-message notifications), to understand in aggregate which pages are visited and which marketplace steps happen (the product funnel events above), and to prevent abuse. We do not send marketing email, and we do not sell your information to anyone.

Who we share it with

Service providers (processors)

Supabase (on AWS, US East) — our database, authentication (including delivery of some authentication emails), and file storage for uploaded photos.
Vercel — hosting and content delivery, including server logs, and the usage analytics described above (Vercel Web Analytics, including the optional custom-event mirror of our product funnel events).
Resend — email delivery (the recipient address and the content of the emails we send you).
Cloudflare — DNS for our domain, the Turnstile bot challenge at signup and password reset (your IP and a challenge token), and routing of email you send to our own addresses (such as privacy@joinpawmatch.com).

If you connect an external calendar, we fetch busy times from the calendar URL you provide — that is us contacting your calendar provider at your direction, not your provider processing PawMatch data.

Other users

Marketplace counterparties see what the product shows them: owners see trainer directory profiles (including the trainer's profile photo); a trainer you message or book sees your display name, your profile photo if you set one, your messages, relevant dog profile details, and the booking; an owner whose booking you confirm sees your payment instructions.

We do not sell personal information, and we have no advertising partners. Our analytics is the usage analytics and product funnel events described above.

Retention and deletion

Account data is kept while your account exists. Honest detail: account deletion is currently a manual process — email us at privacy@joinpawmatch.com and we will delete your account, including your uploaded photos; there is no self-serve deletion yet. In the app today, removing dogs and services uses soft-deletion (records are flagged deleted and hidden, not immediately purged). Replacing your profile photo overwrites the old image file, and removing it deletes the file from storage. Messages are retained indefinitely (there is no message-deletion flow yet). Derived calendar busy blocks are generated only for the near-term booking window (roughly three weeks) and replaced on each successful refresh; if your profile isn't viewed for a while, the last-derived blocks simply sit until the next view refreshes them or you disconnect the calendar. Product funnel events are kept for product metrics; if we delete your account we unlink your account id from those events and keep the anonymous count.

Your choices

You can access and edit your profile (including your photo), dogs, services, and availability in the app. For a copy of your data, corrections we don't expose in the app, or deletion, email privacy@joinpawmatch.com — we will respond to every request.

Security

Every database table is protected by row-level security. Passwords are stored only as hashes. Calendar feed tokens are stored only as hashes. The calendar URL you paste cannot be selected by any client-facing API role — only our server's dedicated calendar-fetch path can retrieve it. Uploaded photos can only be written to your own storage folder, and photos added through the app are content-verified — not just checked by name or declared type — before your profile points to them. No security is perfect, but access to your data is deliberately narrow by construction.

Age requirement

PawMatch is for adults: you must be 18 or older to create an account. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the product changes. The effective date above always reflects the current version, and material changes will be noted on this page.

September 5, 2026: we added first-party product funnel events (trainer signup, profile completion, search, first conversation, booking request), stored in our database and optionally mirrored to Vercel as custom events. Described under "Information collected automatically".

August 26, 2026: we added photos (profile photos and trainer gallery photos). New: what photos we store and where they appear, browser-side metadata stripping (including GPS location), that photos are published as submitted and removed when we become aware of a problem, and that account deletion includes uploaded files. We also corrected several details this policy previously under-described: the deletion section now says precisely what happens today (dogs and services soft-delete in the app; account removal is a manual process on request); Turnstile also runs on password-reset requests; new-message notification emails include a short message preview; and calendar busy blocks refresh on view rather than on a fixed timer.

August 25, 2026: we added cookieless, aggregate usage analytics (Vercel Web Analytics), described under "Information collected automatically". Earlier versions of this policy stated we ran no analytics; that was true until this date.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@joinpawmatch.com. General questions: hello@joinpawmatch.com.