Privacy Policy

WakaBuddy is operated by Dhreylabs Consulting Limited, registered in Nigeria at 7, Gbolahan Shodipo Street, Millenium Estate, Gbagada, Lagos 100234, Nigeria. We are the data controller for the information described below, and you can reach us at support@wakabuddy.xyz.

WakaBuddy records your steps and the walks you choose to record, host or join, so you can compare with friends and walk with other people. We don't sell your data, we don't use it for advertising, and you can delete your account and everything in it from inside the app at any time.

Account details. Your email address, and the name and profile picture from the provider you sign in with (Google or Apple). If you sign in with an email code, we store your email address only. You also get a username, made from your name, which you can change in Settings. Other people can add you by your exact username or email address; friend search doesn't look anyone up by name.

Activity data. Daily steps, distance, active minutes, floors climbed, an estimated calorie figure, and any water you log. When a watch or health app provides them, also your resting heart rate and how long you slept. This is stored per calendar day. Steps and distance power leaderboards, streaks and challenges; heart rate and sleep are shown only to you (see below).

Walks you record. If you start an On-the-go walk, WakaBuddy uses your phone's GPS while that walk is being recorded and keeps a simplified outline of the route alongside the walk's steps, distance and duration. No other user sees where you walked. If you share a walk with friends or in a chat, or enter it in a shape challenge, other people see its shape only, moved off the map, so it doesn't show the place.

Location outside a recorded walk. Only while you are using these, and only with your permission: finding open walks near you, choosing the spot for walk alerts, and planning a loop from where you are. Each is described on this page. WakaBuddy does not track your location in the background otherwise.

Live links. If you turn on a live link during a walk, your position is sent to us as you walk and anyone you give the link to can see where you are and the path so far, until the walk ends or you stop sharing. While the link is live, the path is held in memory and your latest position is stored with the link; both are cleared the moment it ends. After that, the page only says the walk has ended and when your phone last reported.

Open walks and group walks. When you host a walk we store its title, time, pace, number of places, any note, the meeting point you pick and the name of the area. People nearby see the area and roughly how far away it is, to within about a kilometre; only the people you accept see the exact meeting point and who else is going. Group walks show their meeting point to the group. When you look for walks near you, your current location is sent to find them and is not stored. If you turn on alerts for new walks, we store the spot you choose, rounded to about a kilometre, and the distance you picked.

Ratings and reports. After an open walk, the people who went can rate each other and report a problem. When you ask to join a walk, its host sees your average rating (only once three people have rated you) and how many reports have been made about you — never who gave them. Reports are reviewed by us.

Reporting content. You can report a chat message, a reply from the coach, an open walk someone has posted, or the note on a request to join your walk. The report keeps a copy of what was reported, the reason you picked and who made it, and goes to our team. The person reported isn't told who reported them.

Social activity. Your friendships, the groups and challenges you join, and what you send in WakaBuddy chats: messages, reactions, GIFs and stickers, and the messages you pin.

Your year of birth. The app asks for it once, to check you're old enough for WakaBuddy and for open walks, and to decide whether the coach follows its rules for teenagers. You can change it under Settings → Calories.

Details you choose to add. Your weight, height and sex. All are optional. With your year of birth they are used to estimate calories and by your coach; your sex is also used to show women-only walks to women. None of them is ever shown to anyone else.

Preferences. Your step and water goals, units, theme, reminder and notification choices, and your phone's time zone, so reminders arrive at the right time where you are.

Coach conversations. If you use the AI coach, the messages you send it and its replies are stored against your account so the conversation is still there next time you open it, along with short notes the coach keeps between conversations (an injury, a routine, something you said you'd try). You can see and delete the notes from the coach screen. See below.

Purchases. If you buy WakaBuddy Plus, Google Play or the App Store takes the payment. We, and RevenueCat on our behalf, receive the state of your subscription — which plan, when it renews or ends — never your card details.

Technical data. A push notification token for each device you enable notifications on; the identifiers of any fitness services you connect (such as Fitbit or Whoop), whose access tokens are stored encrypted; a record of which parts of the app are used (screens opened, how far onboarding got), kept for 120 days; and, if the app crashes, a crash report with your device model, operating system, app version and account ID, but not your name or email address.

Checks on Android. When you sign in, and when you save a recorded walk, the app asks Google Play whether it is WakaBuddy as installed from Play on a real phone. We keep Google's answer (passed or failed, and why), not anything else about your phone. It helps stop fake accounts, and cheating in the community challenge.

WakaBuddy reads health data only with your permission, and only what it shows you:

• Health Connect (Android): steps, distance and calories burned, including in the background so your friends see your day without you opening the app, and, once, up to a year of past steps so your history doesn't start empty.
• Samsung Health (Android, if you connect it): steps, distance, floors, calories and, where your watch records them, resting heart rate and sleep.
• Apple Health (iOS): steps, distance, active time, floors, calories and, where available, resting heart rate and sleep.

Floors can also come from your phone's own barometer. WakaBuddy never writes to any of these apps.

What goes to our servers. The daily figures listed under Activity data, including resting heart rate and sleep when your phone has them. They are stored with that day's record so they show in your history on any device you sign in on, and so your coach can take them into account.

Who sees it. Steps, distance and the totals being compared are seen by the people you compete with. Your resting heart rate, sleep, weight and water are seen by nobody but you; they never appear on a leaderboard, in a group or in a chat. If you agree to use the coach, they are also sent to Anthropic to write its replies, as described below.

On Android, if you turn on step tracking, WakaBuddy counts steps using a service that keeps running while the app is closed, and sends your daily total to our servers periodically so your leaderboard is not stale. You can stop this at any time from the sync screen in Settings, and the ongoing notification Android shows is how you can tell it is running.

Health and fitness data is never used for advertising or marketing, never sold, and never shared with data brokers. We do not use it for any purpose beyond providing the features you can see in the app.

The coach's replies are written by a language model run by Anthropic. Before your first message the app asks whether you agree to this, and nothing is sent to Anthropic until you do. Each time you send it a message, and once a week for the Sunday review if you're on Plus, we send Anthropic:

• Your name, and your steps, walks and water going back a few months: a summary of your daily steps and water over the last 30 days, average steps in four-week blocks over about four months, and the date, distance, duration and pace of the walks you recorded. Not their routes.
• Your goals, your streak, and the challenges and groups you're in, with your place in each, and the next group walk you could go on.
• Your weight and height if you've added them, and the BMI and resting-calorie figures worked out from them with your birth year and sex. If you're 13 to 17, none of these is sent: only that you're in that age range.
• Your resting heart rate and sleep, if your phone or watch records them.
• The names and step counts of the friends and group members just ahead of you, just behind you and in the lead on the boards you're on, so the coach can say how close you are. On a board that hides scores, only your place is sent.
• What you write to the coach: your message, the recent conversation, and the notes the coach keeps about you.

We don't send your email address, your messages to other people, your location or your walk routes. Anthropic uses this only to write the reply and does not use it to train its models.

Coach conversations are deleted after 180 days, and the coach's notes a year after they were written. You can delete any note sooner from the coach screen, and all of it goes when you delete your account. If you would rather nothing was sent, don't agree to the coach: every other part of WakaBuddy works without it. To take your agreement back, go to Settings → Coach data sharing: nothing more is sent, and the coach's notes are deleted.

For people aged 13 to 17 the coach follows extra rules: it doesn't give advice on dieting, losing weight, calories or body shape, keeps to activity, sleep, water and enjoying walking, and suggests talking to a parent, guardian or another trusted adult about eating, body image, mood or self-harm.

The coach is software, not a clinician. It can be wrong, it is not medical advice, and it is built to decline anything clinical and point you to a professional. If a reply looks wrong or unsafe, press and hold it and tap Report.

Other people in the app. Friends, group members and challenge participants can see your name, username, profile picture and step totals for the periods being compared. People in a chat see what you send there. People looking for open walks see what's described under Open walks above.

Our team. When a message, a coach reply, an open walk or a walker is reported, we look at what was reported and the account involved, to decide what to do. For a chat message that includes the two messages either side of it; for a coach reply, the question you asked just before it. We don't read chats or coach conversations otherwise. If you're among the top walkers in a month's community challenge, a member of our team may look at the routes of the walks that counted, to check they were walked, before rewards go out.

Companies that run the service for us. Hetzner (application hosting), PlanetScale (database hosting), Expo and Firebase Cloud Messaging (push notifications), Resend (sign-in emails), Anthropic (the AI coach, described above), Sentry (crash reports) and RevenueCat (subscription status). They process data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.

Services the app loads content from. These see your phone's IP address, as any website you visit does, but not your account:

• CARTO (and Stadia Maps as a backup) supply the map images. Your phone downloads the part of the map on screen, so they see which area is being viewed.
• GIPHY supplies GIFs and stickers. Your searches go to GIPHY from our servers, not from your phone; the images you see load from GIPHY directly.
• OpenRouteService plans “a loop from here”: our servers send it the starting point and the length you ask for. OpenStreetMap supplies the street data for the streets you've walked, asked for by area from our servers.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety.

Open Settings in the app and tap Delete account, or follow the steps at wakabuddy.xyz/delete-account. This permanently removes your profile, activity and health history, walks and their routes, the walks you host, water log, groups, challenges, friendships, messages, coach conversations and notes, and push tokens.

A few records stay, as listed on that page: a report you made about someone after a walk (without your name), the store's record of each payment (without your name or email address), a note of the deletion if you asked us by email, and your username, held for 30 days so nobody else can take it. Deletion is immediate and irreversible — we cannot restore an account afterwards. If you can't access the app, email us at support@wakabuddy.xyz and we'll delete it for you.

Depending on where you live — including under Nigeria's Data Protection Act 2023 and the GDPR — you may have the right to access, correct, export or delete your personal data, to object to certain processing, and to complain to a data protection authority. You can do most of this directly in the app; for anything else, email support@wakabuddy.xyz.

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. That includes the walks you record and their route outlines, which stay until you delete the walk or the account — keeping every walk is what the walks features are for. Notifications are cleared after 90 days, the record of which parts of the app are used after 120, coach conversations after 180, and the coach's notes a year after they were written. A live link's path and latest position are cleared as soon as the link ends; the link itself, with when it started and when your phone last reported, is deleted 30 days after that. When you delete your account it is removed from our live database immediately; copies may persist in encrypted backups for up to 30 days before those expire.

WakaBuddy is for people aged 13 and over. Open walks are for people aged 18 and over, because they mean meeting people you don't know; the app won't let anyone whose birth year says they're younger host, join or be accepted on one. People aged 13 to 17 can use the coach, with the extra rules described under Your AI coach, and their weight isn't sent to it.

We don't knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you're a parent or guardian and your child has an account, email support@wakabuddy.xyz and we'll remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that materially affects you, we'll update the date at the top of this page and tell you in the app.

Questions about any of this? Email support@wakabuddy.xyz.