Privacy

Yala is a small app for making plans with people you already know. This page says what it collects, why, who else sees it, and how to make it all go away. It is deliberately specific — if something is not listed here, Yala does not do it.

Who is responsible

Yala, 1501 Lincoln Blvd #1053, Venice, CA 90292, is the data controller for the information described below. You can reach a person at privacy@ya.la.

What Yala collects

Your phone number

Signing in is a phone number and a code sent by text. There is no password, no email address and no sign-in with Google, Apple or Facebook. Your number is how your friends find you and it is the only thing that identifies your account.

Nobody else can see it. Not the people in your circles, not the people on your plans. The database enforces this rather than the app: the column is not granted to signed-in users at all, and the app cannot read it even if it asks.

Your name and photo

A display name, and a profile photo if you choose to add one. The photo is optional and the app works without it.

Profile photos are publicly readable. A plan shared by link opens on ya.la for anyone who has the link, including people with no account, and the faces on it have to load for them. So avatar images sit at unguessable addresses that do not require signing in. Do not use a photo you would not want a friend-of-a-friend to see.

Your contacts

If you allow it, Yala checks your address book to show you who is already here. It does this by scrambling each number on your phone into a one-way code and sending only those codes — your address book itself never leaves the device, and neither do your contacts’ names or numbers.

There is one exception, and it is worth stating plainly. When you add someone to a circle who does not have Yala yet, that scrambled code is kept on our server together with the name you have them saved under, so they join the right circle if they ever sign up. That is a small amount of information about somebody who has not agreed to anything, so: it is deleted when they join, and otherwise after 90 days. If you are that person and would like it gone sooner, email privacy@ya.la and it will be removed.

Yala never messages your contacts. Texting someone a link opens your own Messages app with the text already written; nothing is sent on your behalf. Yala does send texts to you — your sign-in code, and nudges when they cannot reach you any other way — and to nobody else, ever.

What you write

Plans, messages in plan chats, direct messages, pinned questions and answers, and the place name on a plan if you add one. This is the content of the app and it is stored so the app can show it to the people you sent it to.

Your plans and circles

Which circles you have, who is in them, which plans went where, and who answered what. Circle membership is never shown to the people in a circle — only to whoever made it.

Notifications

If you turn on nudges, a token identifying the app on your device, so a notification can reach it. Turning nudges off removes it; so does logging out.

In a browser there is no such token, because a web page cannot hold one. A nudge that has no device to reach is sent to your number as a text instead. It says who did what — a friend’s first name and a few words of a plan — and carries a link to it. There are never more than five in a day, and none between 10PM and 8AM. Reply STOP to one and they stop. Your carrier’s message rates may apply. Sign-in codes are not nudges and are not affected by stopping them.

How you use the app

Which screens you open, and what you do on them: made a plan, joined one, made a circle, sent a link. It is tied to your account, so we can tell whether the thing we built works — whether people who sign up actually get to a plan, and where they stop if they don’t.

It records what you did, never what you wrote. Not a word of a plan, a message or a note. Not the name of a circle, and not anybody else’s name. A plan going out is recorded as its shape — whether it had a time, whether it capped the spots, how many circles it went to — and nothing else. Links you share are counted; the link itself is never sent, because whoever holds it can open the plan.

Your own display name and username are attached to it, so that the person reading these numbers sees a person rather than a row of identifiers. Your phone number is not — the database does not grant that column to the app at all — and neither is your photo.

Some sessions are recorded as a rough replay of the screens you moved through. Every word and every picture in it is blanked out on your phone before it is sent — it is a wireframe of where you tapped and how the screen was laid out, not a video of what you said. The sign-in screen and the list of contacts we found are left out of it entirely.

When it breaks

If the app crashes or a screen fails to load, a report is sent: what went wrong and which part of the code it happened in. This is the only way we hear about a bug nobody thinks to report. It does not include what was on screen, and console output is deliberately left out of it, because that is where a stray name could hide.

What Yala does not collect

• No location. The app never asks for it and cannot read it. A place on a plan is text somebody typed.
• No advertising, and no tracking. No advertising identifier is read, nothing is shared with data brokers, and nothing you do here follows you to other apps or websites.
• No payment details. Yala does not take money.
• No email address. It is never asked for.

Who else touches it

These are the only companies involved, and each does one job:

• Supabase — the database, sign-in and file storage. Everything above is held here, hosted in the United States.
• Bird — sends the sign-in code to your phone, and sends a nudge as a text when there is no device to reach. It sees your number, and for a nudge sent that way, the words of that nudge: a friend’s first name and a few words of a plan.
• Expo, and then Apple or Google — carry notifications to your device. A notification includes a friend’s first name and a few words of a plan, so that text passes through them.
• Google Places — only if you use the place suggestions when making a plan, and only what you type into that field.
• PostHog — counts what you do in the app, holds the blanked-out screen recordings, and receives the error reports. It sees your display name, your username and the names of the things you did, never what you wrote and never your number. Hosted in the United States.

Nobody else. Your information is not sold, and it is not shared for anyone’s advertising.

How long it is kept

Your account and its contents stay until you delete them. Pending invites for people who are not on Yala are deleted after 90 days. Reports about content are kept after the content and the accounts are gone, because a record that disappears when the person reported deletes their account is not a record.

Getting rid of it

You can delete your account from inside the app — You, then Delete your account. It removes your profile, your circles, your plans and the chats that went with them, your direct messages, and anything holding your number.

One exception, and it exists to keep a promise rather than to break one: if you have replied STOP to a text, that number stays on a do-not-text list after your account is gone. Deleting it would mean forgetting that you asked, and texting you again the next time somebody sent you a link. The list holds nothing but the number and the date.

Messages you have already sent in other people’s group chats stay in those chats, with your name removed from them. That is deliberate: deleting them would rewrite a conversation belonging to several other people, and your identity is severed from them either way.

If you are in the UK or EU you also have the right to ask for a copy of what is held about you, to have it corrected, to object to how it is used, and to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office. Email privacy@ya.la and you will get an answer within a month.

Children

Yala is not for under-13s and accounts are removed when we learn of one.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the app will say so rather than quietly updating the date at the top.