Privacy Policy

Information we collect

Account details you provide: name, email address, phone number, and profile photo. Listings you create: title, description, price, category, photos you upload, and the approximate neighbourhood-level location you set — we do not track your GPS continuously. Chat content: messages, photo messages, and offer amounts exchanged between you and other users. Saved items: listings you bookmark and search filters you save. Recently viewed listings. A device push token, used to send you notifications: new messages, a reminder before your listing expires, changes to a shop team you are on, and messages from Hatiwal Support. Activity signal: the last time you used the app is stored and shown to others only as a coarse label such as active this week — never an exact timestamp. Safety data: reports you submit against listings or users, blocks you place, and blocks placed against you.

Getting verified (optional)

If you apply for the Verified badge, we ask for photos of an identity document (your e-Tazkira, front and back), a selfie holding that document, your name as it appears on it, and the document's number. We use these only to check, by hand, that you are a real person and that the name on your profile is yours. Nothing is checked automatically, and we do not use face recognition or keep biometric data. We keep your ID number, encrypted, to protect buyers; photos are deleted after 90 days. Only Hatiwal's own reviewers can see your photos and number (never a shop's team), every time a reviewer opens one it is recorded, and they are never shown to other users or shared with anyone. Other users only see the badge. If you verify a shop, we also ask for a document proving the business is yours (a licence, a rental contract, a tax paper…); it follows the same rules. A shop's badge is applied for by its owner or a manager, with their own documents as above. Your name as it appears on the document and the last digits of its number are shown only to you, never to the rest of the team. The shop keeps its badge while the person who applied stays its owner or a manager.

Your location

To show you things for sale near you first, Hatiwal uses an approximate location. If you set an address in your profile, we use that. If you haven't, we estimate your area from what you do in the app: where you post a listing, the area you search in, or your phone's location, but only if you already allowed location access. We never ask for location just for this. This estimate is only used to sort listings. It is never shown on your profile or to other users. You can change your area at any time with "Change" in the Bazaar, and locations outside the areas Hatiwal serves are not used. When you delete your account, your saved and estimated locations are deleted.

Shops

If you open a shop, the shop's name, logo, cover photo, category, address and map location, and opening hours are public: anyone can see them in the app and on hatiwal.com, and they can be shared as a link. The shop's phone number is shown only if you choose "Show phone on shop page". Listings you post as the shop show the shop's name instead of yours. In chats with your shop, buyers see the shop's name and logo, not your personal details. A shop can have a team. The owner (or a manager) invites people by link or by email, and nobody joins without accepting. Every member (the owner, managers and staff) can read and answer the shop's chats and manage its products; inside the team, each reply shows which member wrote it, while buyers only ever see the shop. Members never see each other's personal chats, and someone who leaves or is removed loses access at once. Only the owner changes roles, hands the shop to another member, or closes it. When you close the shop, the shop page is removed at once. What your team wrote as the shop stays under the shop's name; new messages in its chats come from you personally, under your own name. When you delete your account, the shop's products are hidden at once and its page is removed when the deletion becomes final, after 30 days. Inside the team, members also see who posted each product and the shop's numbers per member. The shop has its own conversation with Hatiwal Support, read by the whole team: it carries Hatiwal's messages about the shop, such as its verification decision. Products a member posted stay with the shop when they leave, are removed or delete their account. Moving one of your listings between you and a shop closes its open chats with a short notice; those chats stay with whoever they began with.

How we use it

To run the marketplace: displaying listings to buyers, enabling chat and in-person meetup arrangement, and saving your preferences such as language and theme. We keep smaller copies of your photos so the app loads quickly. Seller tools: how many people viewed each of your listings, your listing counts and your response rate — shown only to you. For a shop, the shop's numbers, including how many products each member posted and how many sales each member recorded, are shown to the shop's whole team. Safety and moderation: using reports and blocks to enforce community rules and hide blocked users listings from each other. We do not use your data for advertising and do not sell it to any third party.

What others see

Publicly visible to all users: your name, profile photo, active listings, and seller response-rate badge. Visible only to the people in a conversation: messages, photo messages and offer amounts. In a chat with a shop, the shop's whole team counts as the shop (see Shops). If you block someone, neither of you can see the other listings or send messages. We never sell or share your personal data with advertisers or data brokers. Products posted for a shop show the shop, never the member who posted them.

Keeping and deleting your data

You can delete your account anytime from Profile then Delete account. Your account is hidden immediately and permanently deleted after 30 days. Log back in within 30 days to restore it. After deletion, messages you sent appear as Deleted user so the other party keeps their conversation history. Archiving a conversation hides it from your list only — the other person still sees it. Deleting a conversation hides it from your view and permanently removes it only when both participants delete it. The conversation with Hatiwal Support can be archived but not deleted; it comes back when Hatiwal writes to you. Listings stay live for 90 days, then expire: buyers no longer see them, and you can renew them in one tap. We remind you a week and a day before.

Verification photos are deleted 90 days after we decide on your request, or straight away if you cancel it. Your ID number is kept encrypted for as long as your account exists. If you delete your account, we delete the number and your name on the document, and keep only a one-way fingerprint of the number with the decision, so a banned person cannot verify a new account with the same ID.

Your choices and controls

Location, camera and notification permissions are controlled from your device settings. You can edit or delete any listing at any time. Block a user from their profile or from inside a conversation — this hides their listings from you and yours from them. Report a listing or user if it violates community rules. Set Seller Away mode from your profile to pause new enquiries temporarily. Archive or delete conversations from your chat list. Delete your account permanently from Profile then Delete account.

Contact us

For privacy questions, data requests, or to request account deletion without the app, email us at infohama99o@gmail.com.