Your Privacy Controls

When your account is private:

• Your posts, and your follower and following lists, are visible only to you and the followers you have approved. Your posts never appear in search, and appear in feeds, Explore, and the Map only for approved followers.
• Following you sends a follow request, which you can approve or decline. The person asking can withdraw it.
• Your profile itself, meaning your username, display name, photo, bio, and follower and following counts, stays visible, so people can recognize you and ask to follow.
• Your posts cannot be reposted.

People who already follow you keep their access when you go private; remove any you no longer want. If you switch from private to public, every pending follow request is approved automatically.

Every post starts with your account’s audience: everyone if your account is public, or your approved followers if it is private. When you post, or later from the post’s ⋯ menu, you can narrow it:

• Friends: only people you follow who follow you back. If either of you unfollows the other, they lose access at once.
• Only you: nobody else can see it.

Friends and Only you posts show a small icon, and they cannot be reposted. They stay that narrow whatever happens to your account: going public or private moves only the posts shared with your account’s audience.

Your profile has four lists: your likes, your ratings, your followers, and the people you follow. Each has its own setting, either Only you or your account’s audience, which means everyone while your account is public and your approved followers while it is private.

• Likes start as Only you. Ratings, followers, and following start with your account’s audience.
• Showing a list reveals your choices, never other people’s content. Each post in your likes or ratings is shown only to people who could already see it.
• Switching your account between public and private never changes these settings, only who your account’s audience is. A list set to Only you stays that way.

Adding a location to a post is always optional. When you add one, you choose a city or a region, and we save only that place, never where you were.

Posts cannot be edited after they are published. To remove or change a post’s location, delete the post and post it again. To stop sharing your device’s location with Wavely altogether, turn off location access for Wavely in your phone’s settings; you can still pick a place by hand.

A public folder appears on your profile and in search. A private folder is visible only to you and the contributors you have invited. You can change a folder’s privacy, remove contributors, and remove any post from a folder you own at any time. Putting a post in a folder never changes who can see the post itself.

People who have your mobile number or email address in their phone’s contacts can find your Wavely account when they look for friends. In Settings you can turn this off for your number, for your email address, or for both. An email address can be matched only once you have confirmed it.

Turning this off only stops these lookups. It does not change who can see your profile, and people can still find you by your username or display name.

You can remove anyone from your followers. They are not notified. If your account is private, they lose access to your posts until you approve them again.

• Who can comment. Choose Everyone, Followers, or No one, for all your posts. On a private account only followers can see your posts, so Everyone is not offered. A change applies to new comments; the ones already there stay.
• Turn off commenting on a post, from the post’s ⋯ menu. While it is off, nobody can comment and the post’s comments are hidden, but nothing is deleted: turning it back on brings them back.
• Hidden words. Add up to 100 words or phrases. Comments on your posts that contain one are hidden from everyone except the person who wrote them, and you can review them under View hidden comments.

Blocking someone hides their content from you and yours from them, and stops either of you from interacting with the other, including following, commenting, and sending messages. Existing messages between you are hidden.

You can report a post, a comment, an account, a community, or a message. Reporting and Appeals explains what happens next.

• Interested asks for more like a post.
• Not interested hides that one post for good and tells the ranking you want less like it. It does not hide the author or the topic. You can undo it.
• Interests are the topics you chose. Change them in Settings at any time; nothing the app learns ever rewrites them.
• The Following Feed shows posts from the accounts you follow, newest first, with no personalization at all.

Your recent searches are kept so you can repeat them, up to your 20 most recent. Clear them at any time and they are gone on your next search. Search activity used for recommendations is kept separately for 30 days, as the Privacy Policy explains.

When notification settings are available, each kind of notification, such as new followers, comments, ratings, invites, and messages, can be turned off on its own. Message notifications say who wrote to you, never what they said.

• Deleting a post also deletes its comments, ratings, likes, saves, and reposts, and removes it from every folder that held it.
• Deleting a comment also deletes its replies. Deleted text is not kept, except in backups for up to 7 days, or where we must keep it as evidence, as the Terms explain.
• You can delete any comment on your own posts, and pin one.
• You can change or withdraw a rating you gave on a community rated post at any time.

Until a download option is available in the app, email privacy@usewavely.com from the address on your account and ask for a copy of your information. If your account has no email address, tell us your username and mobile number, and we will tell you how we will confirm it is you. We will confirm the request comes from you and send it in a commonly used format.

You can delete your account in Settings at any time. It is deactivated at once and permanently deleted after 30 days. Deleting Your Account explains what is removed and what transfers to other people.