Pet WalkPrivacy
What Pet Walk knows about you.
A dog-walking app is a location app, so this page is specific rather than reassuring. It says what is stored, who can see each part of it, who else it reaches, and how to take it all back.
Effective 6 September 2026 · Applies to the Android app com.petwalk.app and to petwalkapp.net
Who is responsible
Pet Walk is made and run by Sergei Golovanov, an independent developer in Antalya, Türkiye. There is no company behind it: one person decides what happens to your data, and that person is the one who answers when you write.
support@petwalkapp.net is the address for everything on this page — a question, a request to see or delete what is stored about you, or a complaint. A postal address is given on request to anyone who needs one in writing, including a data protection authority.
What is stored
Your account
An email address and a password, or — if you sign in with Google — the email address, name and profile picture Google hands over. We never see your Google password. We record whether your address has been confirmed.
Your profile
A display name, and optionally a photo, a short bio and a city.
Your dogs
Name, photographs, breed, sex, date of birth, temperament, traits, weight, whether they are neutered and vaccinated, a description, and a walking area — a place name with a radius, or a shape drawn on the map.
Walks you post
A meeting point, optionally an area around it rather than an exact spot, a place label, a date and time, and any notes. Plus who has answered the invitation and how.
Your live position — only when you switch it on
Latitude, longitude and the time it was recorded. This is off by default and is described in detail in the next section.
Messages
The text of what you send, who sent it, which conversation it belongs to, when it was sent, and whether it was delivered and read. Group chats also have a title.
What you do to other people's things
Likes you give to a dog, people you block, and reports you file — a reason, and anything you choose to add.
Your phone, if you allow notifications
A push token issued by Google, and whether the handset is Android. That is what lets a message reach you with the app closed. Decline the notification permission and no token is ever stored.
What never leaves your phone
Your theme, your language, your Discover filter and whether you have seen the introduction are kept in the phone's own storage and are never sent anywhere.
What we do not collect at all
No analytics. No advertising identifier. No third-party tracking or profiling. No crash reporting. No access to your contacts, calendar, microphone or call history. No background location — the app can only see where you are while it is open on screen, and it does not ask for the permission that would change that.
Location, in detail
This is the part worth reading. Three rules, and each of them is enforced by the server rather than trusted to the phone — so nothing the app does, fails to do, or is made to do can get around them.
1. Sharing is off until you turn it on
No position is stored for an account that has not switched live sharing on. Granting the app the location permission is not the same thing as sharing: the permission lets the map centre on you, and it is the switch, not the permission, that puts you on anyone else's screen.
2. It stops by itself
You share for fifteen minutes, thirty, or an hour — nothing longer is offered. The deadline is set and checked on our server, so a killed app, a flat battery or a wrong clock on the phone cannot keep you visible past the time you agreed to. Separately, a position more than thirty minutes old stops being drawn at all.
3. Switching it off deletes the coordinates
Turning sharing off — or letting it run out — does not merely hide your position. The stored latitude and longitude are erased.
What other people see while you are sharing is your name, your picture and a point on the map, and only if you are inside the radius they chose. Your coordinates are never returned by an ordinary query against your profile; they are reachable only through a function that applies the radius, the deadline and the staleness cut-off before it answers.
A dog's walking area is a different thing and is not live: it is the neighbourhood you told us your dog walks in, it is visible to everyone signed in, and it stays until you change it. A walk you post is likewise a public invitation — the meeting point and time can be seen by anyone with an account, which is what makes it an invitation. Post an area rather than an exact point if you would rather not name the spot.
Photographs
Photos of you and your dogs are stored in a file bucket that serves them over a plain public link. This is what lets pictures load quickly throughout the app, and it means that anyone holding the link to a photo can open it without signing in. The links are long and random, and nothing in the app hands them to people who cannot already see the dog — but treat an uploaded photo as public rather than as private.
A photo taken on a phone can also carry the camera's own metadata, which on many phones includes the exact place it was taken. If that matters to you, strip it before uploading, or take the picture with location tagging switched off in your camera app.
Who can see what
| This | Is visible to |
|---|---|
| Your name, picture, bio and city | Anyone signed in |
| Your dogs, their photos, details and walking area | Anyone signed in |
| Walks you post — place and time | Anyone signed in |
| Photo files themselves | Anyone holding the link, signed in or not |
| Your live position, while sharing | People within the radius they chose, until your deadline |
| Messages | The people in that conversation |
| Who liked a dog | That dog's owner |
| Who is coming to a walk | The organiser and the people it was sent to |
| Your email address | You. Nobody else in the app, ever. |
| Your sharing settings and map radius | You |
| Who you have blocked | You. The person blocked is not told. |
| Reports you file | Us, for moderation. Not the person reported, and not you afterwards. |
Blocking someone removes their dogs from your Discover deck and their pin from your map, takes yours off theirs, ends the direct conversation for both of you and stops a new one. It does not separate you inside a group chat you both chose to join.
Who else your data reaches
Pet Walk sells nothing to anybody and shares nothing for advertising. These are the services the app is built on; each one gets only what it needs to do its job.
| Service | What for | What it gets |
|---|---|---|
| Supabase | Database, sign-in and file storage | Everything listed above. Hosted on Amazon Web Services in Tokyo, Japan. |
| Google — Firebase Cloud Messaging | Delivering notifications with the app closed | Your device's push token, and the title and text of the notification |
| Google — Sign-In | The "continue with Google" button, if you use it | Confirms who you are; hands us your address, name and picture |
| Twilio SendGrid | The two letters the app sends: password reset, address confirmation | Your email address |
| OpenStreetMap Foundation | The map imagery itself | Your IP address and which part of the map you are looking at |
We will also hand data over where the law requires it — a valid order from a court or an authority with jurisdiction over us.
Where it is stored, and crossing borders
The database, the accounts and the photographs live on Amazon Web Services infrastructure in the Tokyo region of Japan, operated on our behalf by Supabase. If you use the app from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Türkiye or anywhere else, your data is transferred to and processed in Japan. Our providers offer standard contractual clauses for those transfers.
How long it is kept
Everything above is kept for as long as your account exists. There is no separate retention clock: nothing is archived and nothing is kept "for analytics" after you go.
Deleting your account removes the account itself, and with it your profile, your dogs, your walks, your likes, your blocks, your membership of every conversation and every message you have ever sent — including messages in group chats other people are still reading. The app empties your photo folder as part of the same action. Reports naming you are removed along with the account.
Deleted data can survive for a short while in our hosting provider's routine backups, which are rotated and overwritten. It is not restored to the app, and it is not used for anything.
Deleting your account
In the app: Settings → Delete account. It asks you to confirm, and then it is done — there is no waiting period and no recovery.
Uninstalled the app already? The full route, including how to ask us to do it for you, is on the account deletion page.
Uninstalling the app on its own deletes nothing — the account stays on the server until it is deleted.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to correct it, to have it deleted, to receive it in a portable form, to object to how it is handled, and to complain to a data protection authority. Most of these you can do yourself from inside the app — your profile and your dogs are editable, and deletion is one screen away.
For anything the app cannot do, write to support@petwalkapp.net. We answer within 30 days. We do not charge for it, and we will not ask you why.
Children
Pet Walk is not meant for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly keep an account for a child. If you believe a child has signed up, write to us and the account will be removed.
Security
Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted with HTTPS. Access rules are enforced by the database itself rather than by the app, so a rule holds whether a request comes from the app or from anything else. Private fields — your coordinates, your settings, your email — are not readable by an ordinary query at all, and are reached only through functions that check who is asking first.
No system is beyond reach. If you find something wrong, tell us at support@petwalkapp.net and we will fix it rather than argue about it.
Changes to this policy
If what the app does with your data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves. A change that affects you materially — a new recipient, a new purpose — will be announced in the app before it takes effect, not slipped in.