Privacy

What other people can see

Cafe Grinds has two levels, and the line between them is the whole design of the app.

Public to anyone browsing: the venue you picked, the time you said, the note you wrote about the plan, the questions you asked, how many seats are left, and one line about the kind of work you do.

Shared only on accept: your name, your company if you gave one, and your description of your laptop. These appear once a host accepts you, or once you accept someone - in both directions at the same moment, never one way.

There are no photos anywhere in the app, of you or of anyone else. There is no chat, so there are no messages to store. There are no ratings, no attendance scores and no public history of who you have worked beside.

What we store

• Your profile: name, company (optional), one line about your work, and your laptop description.
• Your account: an identifier from our sign-in provider. We do not store your password - we never see one.
• Your invites and requests: the venue, time, note and questions you posted, and the answers you gave when asking to join.
• People you have hidden: stored as a pair, so that neither of you sees the other.
• Reports you send: the reason, what you wrote, and who it was about.
• A notification token for your device, if you allowed notifications.

Location

If you allow location access, your coordinates are sent to our server to answer one question - which invites are near you right now. They are used for that query and not written down. They are never shown to another person, including a host whose invite you are looking at.

If you decline, the app is not over: you search an area by name instead, and everything else works the same.

Notifications

Four notifications exist in the entire product: someone asked to join your invite, a host accepted you, a host declined, and a reminder on the day. There are no engagement notifications, no streaks and no badges. If you decline the permission, you will see the same information when you next open the app.

Who else is involved

• Auth0 handles signing in with Apple, Google or email.
• Google Places verifies that a venue is a real public place - a cafe, a library, a co-working lobby - before an invite can be posted there.
• Google Maps draws the map.
• Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers the four notifications.

We do not sell data, we do not run ads, and there is no advertising or analytics SDK in the app.

This website

www.cafegrinds.com uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read. It sets cookies and reports a truncated IP address, a rough location no finer than a city, and which page you came from. It is the website only - the app itself carries no analytics, as above.

None of it is linked to your Cafe Grinds account, because the website does not know you have one. If your browser blocks trackers, the site works exactly the same.

Payments

Cafe Grinds is free and takes no cut. There is an optional donation in Settings, handled by the App Store or Play Store. We never see your card.

Deleting your account

When you delete your account, in this order:

• Your invites are cancelled, and anyone going is told.
• Your requests are withdrawn.
• Your name, company, the line about your work and your laptop description are deleted.
• People you have hidden stay hidden - from a record with no name attached to it.

This cannot be undone. Reports already sent are kept, because they are about someone else’s safety and not only about you. You can sign up again with the same address afterwards; it starts empty.

Children and child safety

Cafe Grinds is for adults arranging to work in public places. You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and the app is not intended for anyone under 18.

Child sexual abuse and exploitation - CSAE - is forbidden on Cafe Grinds without exception. By CSAE we mean child sexual abuse material, grooming a minor, sextortion, trafficking, sexualising a minor in words or in pictures, and any use of the app to reach a child for any of those ends. That the app is for adults and asks your age at sign-up changes nothing here: the ban holds whoever is involved, and an account used this way is removed, not warned.

There is nowhere in Cafe Grinds to post an image and nowhere to send a private message, so there is no surface here for abuse material to sit on. What there is, is text - a profile, an invite note, two questions and two answers - and a table in a public place. These standards cover all of it.

How to report it, and what happens next:

• From inside the app. Report sits behind the ⋯ on every row where a person appears. Pick a reason, say what happened in your own words, and send. If what you need to tell us does not belong to one row, use Settings, then Contact, which writes to the same people.
• From anywhere else. support@cafegrinds.com. You do not need an account, and you do not need to have been there.
• What we do with it. A report naming CSAE is read ahead of everything else. If it holds up, the account is removed and barred from coming back, any invite it posted is cancelled and the people going are told, and the record is preserved rather than deleted - it is evidence, and deleting an account does not erase it.
• The law. We follow child safety law everywhere the app is available. Child sexual abuse material is reported to the authority the law gives it to - the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States, and in India the police and the authorities named under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 - and we pass on what we hold where the law requires or allows it.
• Who to write to about it. support@cafegrinds.com is the designated child safety point of contact for Cafe Grinds. Google Play, Apple, a police force, a child protection body or a person who saw something can all use it, and it reaches the people who build the app.

This section is our published child safety standard. It covers Cafe Grinds on Google Play and the App Store, it is readable by anyone without an account, and if you think something in it is wrong or missing, the address above is the one to say so at.

Asking us something

Write to support@cafegrinds.com. If you want a copy of your data or want it deleted and cannot reach the app, say so and we will do it.