lowk

TallyHQ, Inc.

Privacy Policy

Last updated August 10, 2026

TallyHQ, Inc., a Delaware corporation ("TallyHQ," "we," "us," or "our"), operates lowk. This policy explains the information lowk processes, why we process it, and the choices you have.

1. Who this policy covers

This policy applies to the lowk iOS app, public pages at lowk.link, and related support and invitation services. Lowk is intended for people age 13 and older in the United States. We do not knowingly permit children under 13 to create accounts. If you believe a child under 13 has provided information to us, contact us so we can investigate and delete it where appropriate.

2. Information we process

Account and profile information

We process your phone number for authentication and account security. Your lowk profile may include your first and last name, username, identity category, profile photo, school, grade, and age-eligibility confirmation. Your complete birthdate is used on your device to determine eligibility; lowk stores the resulting 13-or-older attestation rather than your complete birthdate. Other signed-in lowk users may view your basic profile, including your display name, username, profile photo, school, grade, and profile statistics. Blocking prevents either account from viewing the other's profile. Top Flames remain visible only to accepted friends and can also be hidden through profile settings.

Friends, polls, and activity

We process friendships, poll questions shown to you, candidate slates, choices, skips, shuffles, nominations, flames, activity-feed entries, reports, blocks, coin balances, boosts, and related timestamps. These records let us operate the game, prevent duplicate actions, enforce safety controls, and improve which eligible people appear in polls.

School forum

We process forum posts, comments, photos, polls, poll responses, links, votes, reposts, reports, hides, moderation status, and related timestamps. Forum content is shown to other eligible users under the school name or an anonymous commenter label. We retain the author's account identifier privately so we can apply rate limits, identify a user's own content, prevent duplicate voting, investigate reports, enforce our Terms, and comply with law. Authorized moderators may access that relationship when reasonably needed for safety or enforcement; ordinary users do not receive it.

Contacts

Contact access is optional. If you allow it, lowk reads the contact names and phone numbers made available through Apple's contacts system to help find people you may know and let you choose someone to invite or nominate. Names and address-book identifiers remain on your device. Accessible phone numbers are sent to our service in bounded batches, normalized, privately matched using a server-held cryptographic secret, and discarded during the request. Raw contact phone numbers and complete address books are not stored in the lowk application database. With limited Contacts access, lowk reads only the contacts you make available.

You can use school and username discovery without granting Contacts access. Users who do not join a school generally need contacts or existing friends to have enough eligible people to play polls.

Location and school discovery

If you grant location access, lowk uses an approximate, kilometer-level location to rank nearby schools. Location is not proof that you attend a school and is not stored as a continuing location history in the lowk application database.

Public lowk links

A person may visit a public lowk ballot without creating an account. We process a browser visitor identifier, ballot choices or written responses, timestamps, device category, and an approximate city, region, and country inferred from the visitor's public IP address. Network information such as an IP address and user agent may be processed transiently to detect abuse, enforce limits, and create keyed, non-reversible network matching values. We use Cloudflare Turnstile to distinguish legitimate visitors from automated abuse.

Purchases

Apple processes payment details for Lowk+ and coin purchases. We receive and retain transaction identifiers, product identifiers, purchase state, subscription status, expiration or revocation information, and server-authoritative entitlements and coin-ledger entries. We do not receive your full payment-card information from Apple.

Devices, notifications, and analytics

We process device and installation identifiers, APNs tokens, Live Activity tokens, notification preferences, and notification delivery or open events. We also process intentionally defined product events and limited device information to understand reliability and feature use. Lowk does not enable analytics session replay, automatic screen capture, or automatic collection of every tap or screen view. We may record whether the operating system reports that a screenshot or screen recording occurred, but not the captured contents.

Support, safety, and diagnostics

If you contact us or submit a report, we process the information you provide and relevant account or content identifiers. A forum report may preserve a snapshot of the reported content, its private author relationship, report category, status, and moderation actions so the report can be reviewed even if the original content changes or is deleted. We also process bounded server and error records needed to secure, troubleshoot, and operate the service. Our error-monitoring configuration is designed not to send contact books, phone numbers, votes, or private content in diagnostic events.

3. How we use information

  • Authenticate accounts, restore onboarding progress, and keep accounts secure.
  • Match contacts privately, recommend eligible friends, and operate reciprocal friendships.
  • Issue polls, record choices, deliver flames, and operate activity, coins, boosts, and Lowk+.
  • Operate and rank the school forum, display anonymous labels, and process posts, comments, polls, votes, and reposts.
  • Send requested authentication codes, invitations, notifications, and Live Activity updates.
  • Prevent spam, repeated invitations, fraud, impersonation, automated voting, and other abuse.
  • Honor blocks, reports, notification choices, activity visibility, deletion requests, and legal rights.
  • Measure performance and improve safety, reliability, onboarding, discovery, and poll quality.
  • Comply with law, enforce our Terms, and protect users, TallyHQ, and the public.

4. Anonymous does not always mean unrevealable

Lowk does not display the sender's name with a flame by default. An ordinary registered-user poll vote may be eligible for the limited hint and reveal features described in the app. A Ghost Mode vote, nomination, or public-link submission is never identity-revealable.For public-link activity, Lowk+ may show server receipt time, approximate city, region and country, and a coarse device category, but never the visitor's identity. We do not promise that contextual clues can never allow a user to make their own guess outside the service.

5. Authentication and invitations

When you request a login code, Supabase Phone Auth uses Twilio to send a one-time authentication message. This is separate from invitations. In supported invite flows, a member selects one person; tapping Invite confirms that they know that person and have permission to send a one-time invitation from a lowk number. The message does not identify which lowk member invited them. We use private phone-matching values, confirmation timestamps, provider status, cooldowns, and suppression records to prevent repeated or unwanted messages. Replying STOP suppresses future lowk-sent messages as required; HELP provides support guidance.

Lowk may also open Apple's editable Messages composer. A message sent there comes from the member's own Messages account, not from lowk or Twilio. Message and data rates may apply to any SMS or carrier message.

6. When we disclose information

We disclose information only as needed for the purposes described in this policy:

  • Supabase provides authentication, database, storage, and backend infrastructure.
  • Twilio delivers authentication codes and approved one-time invitations.
  • Apple provides StoreKit, APNs, device permissions, and related platform services.
  • PostHog processes configured product analytics events.
  • Sentry processes configured crash and error diagnostics used to identify reliability problems.
  • Superwall supports paywall presentation and subscription analytics.
  • Cloudflare provides Turnstile abuse prevention for public ballots.
  • Vercel hosts lowk's public web and operational services.

We may also disclose information when reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to valid legal process, investigate abuse, protect safety or rights, or complete a merger, financing, acquisition, reorganization, or sale subject to appropriate protections.

We do not sell personal information, share it with data brokers, or use it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

7. Retention and deletion

We retain account, gameplay, and forum information while your account is active and for as long as reasonably needed to provide the service. Pending phone-linked nominations expire after 90 days. Other short-lived security, rate-limit, session, notification, and boost records expire or are replaced according to their operational purpose.

Forum media associated with deleted or globally removed content is ordinarily scheduled for deletion within 30 days. If content is connected to an unresolved safety or moderation report, we may preserve the reported content, media, author relationship, and review history longer while the report remains open and afterward as reasonably needed for safety, dispute resolution, or legal compliance.

You can initiate account deletion inside lowk. Deletion removes the Auth user and associated profile, friendships, flames, gameplay, forum content and authorship, coins, boosts, entitlements, device tokens, and pending notifications through our deletion process. We may retain limited transaction, suppression, moderation, security, or legal records when reasonably necessary for accounting, fraud prevention, safety, dispute resolution, or legal compliance. We do not use retained records to restore a deleted account.

8. Your choices and rights

  • Change Contacts, Photos, Location, and Notification access in iOS Settings.
  • Control supported notification categories, activity visibility, Ghost Mode, and top-flame visibility in lowk.
  • Block users, hide or report flames, and report accounts or impersonation.
  • Hide or report forum content; hidden or reported content is removed from your view, while TallyHQ may review it separately.
  • Correct supported profile information in the app, subject to disclosed change limits.
  • Request access, correction, or deletion by contacting us.

California residents may have rights to know, access, correct, and delete personal information, and to receive equal service when exercising those rights. Because we do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, there is no such sale or sharing to opt out of. We may verify a request before acting on it and may deny or limit a request where permitted by law.

9. Security and international processing

We use technical and organizational safeguards designed to protect information, including access controls, private backend schemas, cryptographic contact matching, transport encryption, and server-authoritative safety and purchase controls. No system can guarantee absolute security. Lowk and its providers may process information in the United States and other locations where they operate, subject to applicable protections.

10. Changes and contact

We may update this policy as lowk changes. We will post the updated policy here and revise the date above. If a change materially affects your rights, we will provide additional notice or request renewed agreement when required.

Questions or privacy requests can be sent to [email protected].