Privacy Policy
Joining does not require an email
You join Yappit with a campus or organisation code and your device. We do not ask for an email address, a phone number, or your real name to create an account. Your device is your login.
There are two places where you may choose to give us an email, both described below. Neither is needed to use the app day to day, and neither is ever shown to other users.
What we collect
- Content you create: Yaps, comments, votes, and messages.
- A username, if you choose to claim one. This is shown to other users on everything you post. You pick it, you can change it, and you can release it and go back to posting as "Yapster" at any time.
- A recovery email, if you choose to add one. This is optional. Its only purpose is to let you get your account back on a new phone — without it, losing your phone means losing your account, which is why the app asks you about it from time to time. You can add or remove it in Settings.
- An email address if you request a move to a different campus or organisation. We send a code to it to confirm it is yours, and store it with the request so we can contact you about it. Our moderators can see this address, and your recovery email if you have one, when reviewing that request — they need a way to reach you before moving your account.
- Basic device and diagnostic data to keep the app running and safe.
- The time you last used the app, so that daily summaries are not sent to people who have just been using it.
- A scrambled identifier for your device, and a record of which devices your account has been used on. We keep this to enforce bans and stop banned users returning. It cannot be turned back into anything that identifies you, it is never shown to other users, and it is not used to track you anywhere outside Yappit.
- The internet (IP) address your device used when your account was first created, kept for 180 days and then deleted automatically. It is stored separately from your Yaps, is never linked to any individual post, and is never visible to moderators. We use it only where the law requires us to respond to a valid legal request.
How we use it
- To confirm you belong to a supported campus or company.
- To operate the app and show content to your community anonymously.
- To restore your account on a new device, if you gave us a recovery email.
- To review and answer a request to change campus or organisation.
- To detect and prevent abuse, and to comply with the law.
We do not use your email address to advertise to you, and we do not send marketing email.
Service providers we use
We use a small set of trusted third-party providers to run Yappit. They process data on our behalf and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes:
- A cloud platform that handles sign-in, stores the database, and hosts images.
- A push notification service, to deliver notifications to your phone.
- An error reporting service, so we learn when the app crashes (IP addresses are not stored).
- An analytics service, to understand how the app is used (location from IP address is disabled).
- Services that carry out the automated moderation described below.
All data is encrypted in transit. We do not sell your personal data.
If you need to know which specific companies these are — for a data request, a security review, or a legal matter — write to us at the address at the bottom of this page and we will tell you.
What others see
Other users never see your real name, your email address, or your device. Posts appear within your community either as "Yapster" or, if you have claimed a username, under that username. Nothing else about you is attached to what you post.
Moderation & safety
Every post — text and images — goes through an automated moderation check before it is published. These checks run both on our own systems and through service providers acting on our behalf, and look for harassment, hate speech, sexual content, threats, targeting of real people, and other violations of our Community Guidelines. Content that fails screening is blocked and never published; borderline content may be published and additionally reviewed by our team.
Direct messages and group chat work differently. They are private conversations, and they are not checked before they are sent — not by our automated systems and not by a person. Nobody at Yappit reads your messages. The only way the content of a message reaches us is when someone in that conversation reports it, and a message can only be reported by someone who did not send it.
The same Community Guidelines apply to messages. You can report any message, block the sender, or mute a conversation at any time. Reported messages are reviewed by our team, and we take the same action we would on a public post.
We may also review reported content, retain records of reports and enforcement actions, and take action against abuse, threats, harassment, or illegal activity — including removing content, restricting or permanently banning accounts and devices. Anonymity to other users does not mean content is unmoderated, and it does not place anyone beyond the law: where required by applicable law, we may preserve content and associated records and disclose them to law enforcement authorities.
Your choices
- You can claim, change, or release a username at any time in Settings.
- You can add or remove your recovery email at any time in Settings. Removing it also stops the app asking you about it.
- You can turn individual notifications off in Settings.
- You can request account deletion at any time — see yappit.app/delete-account.