Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy explains how CometFare collects, uses, stores, protects, shares, and deletes personal information when you use CometFare.

This Privacy Policy applies to CometFare's website, web app, desktop app, mobile app, accounts, profiles, habitats, channels, messaging features, group chats, voice and video call and streaming features, support features, blog features, premium features, subscriptions, and related services.

By using CometFare, you understand that your information will be handled as described in this Privacy Policy.

2. Who We Are

CometFare is a service operated under the public service name CometFare.

If CometFare is not registered as a separate company or legal entity, then "CometFare" is the brand/service name used by the person or entity responsible for operating the Service.

Privacy contact: larisah@cometfare.com

CometFare does not publicly list a business address unless required by law, payment-provider requirements, valid legal process, or mandatory consumer protection rules.

3. Information We Collect

We may collect the following categories of information.

4. Account Information

When you create or use an account, we may collect:

• username;
• display name;
• email address;
• password or authentication information;
• account ID;
• profile image;
• bio or profile details;
• account settings;
• language, appearance, notification, or privacy preferences;
• verification status;
• login history;
• security settings, including two-factor authentication (2FA) settings.

We never store your password. Passwords are put through PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 with a random per-account salt and a server-side secret, and only the resulting hash is stored. The original password cannot be recovered from it, not by you and not by us, which is why a forgotten password is reset rather than looked up. See Security.

5. Profile and Public Information

Depending on your settings and activity, other users may see:

• username;
• display name;
• profile picture;
• bio;
• public posts;
• public comments;
• habitat membership where visible;
• roles, traits, labels, or badges;
• visible account status or presence indicators;
• public support posts or blog replies.

Do not add information to your public profile that you do not want other users to see.

6. Content You Provide

We may collect and store User Content, including:

• messages;
• direct messages;
• channel messages;
• habitat posts;
• public posts;
• private posts;
• support posts;
• blog comments and replies;
• reports;
• appeals;
• uploaded images or files;
• moderation notes submitted by authorized users;
• custom roles, traits, labels, and habitat settings;
• any other content you submit through CometFare.

Content may include personal information if you choose to include it.

7. Habitat and Community Information

For habitats, we may collect:

• habitat name;
• habitat description;
• habitat icon or image;
• owner and staff information;
• member lists;
• invite links;
• join and leave records;
• role assignments;
• traits and labels;
• permission settings;
• moderation actions;
• ban, kick, warning, mute, or restriction records;
• reports and report outcomes;
• admin or staff action logs;
• configuration and customization data.

This information is used to operate habitats, enforce permissions, investigate abuse, and maintain community safety.

8. Messages and Communications

CometFare may process messages and communications so they can be delivered, displayed, stored, moderated, reported, synced, searched where permitted, and protected from abuse.

Private messages and private channels may be restricted from ordinary user visibility, but they may still be stored and may be accessed in limited circumstances such as safety investigations, legal compliance, abuse reports, security events, or technical maintenance.

CometFare is not end-to-end encrypted. Messages are encrypted in transit, but our servers can read message content in order to deliver and display it. Terms of Service, Messages, Privacy, and Encryption Limits explains what that does and does not mean.

Voice and Video Calls and Streaming

If you use voice calls, video calls, camera sharing, or screen streaming:

• your device may request microphone and/or camera permission, which you control through your browser or device settings;
• audio and video are transmitted in real time through third-party real-time communication infrastructure (currently Agora), which processes the media streams and connection data needed to deliver the call;
• CometFare does not record or store the audio or video content of calls or streams;
• CometFare stores call and stream metadata, such as participants, the space where the session happened, start and end times, duration, and daily usage totals used to enforce quotas;
• other participants may capture or record calls using their own devices, outside CometFare's control.

9. Payment and Subscription Information

CometFare uses Paddle as its payment provider for paid features and subscriptions.

We do not store full payment card numbers ourselves.

Paddle may process payment and billing information according to its own terms and privacy policy.

We may receive and store limited payment-related information such as:

• billing email;
• payment provider customer ID;
• subscription ID;
• plan name;
• subscription status;
• renewal date;
• cancellation date;
• payment status;
• invoice or receipt references;
• transaction IDs;
• refund status;
• tax or country information provided by Paddle;
• fraud, dispute, or chargeback indicators.

This information is used to activate, manage, cancel, refund, investigate, or verify paid features and subscriptions.

10. Technical and Usage Information

When you use CometFare, we may collect technical and usage information such as:

• IP address;
• device type;
• browser type;
• operating system;
• app version;
• language settings;
• approximate location based on IP address;
• pages or features used;
• timestamps;
• session information;
• crash reports;
• performance logs;
• error logs;
• security logs;
• API requests;
• rate-limit events;
• anti-abuse signals;
• referral source;
• cookie or local storage identifiers.

This information helps us operate, debug, secure, and improve CometFare.

The CometFare mobile app may request operating-system permissions such as photo library, camera, or microphone access to provide features like media uploads and calls. These permissions are controlled by you through your device settings, and the app accesses only what is needed for the feature you are using.

11. Cookies, Local Storage, and Analytics

CometFare may use cookies, local storage, session storage, and similar technologies to keep users signed in, remember preferences, store security tokens, prevent fraud, and support billing sessions.

CometFare uses Cloudflare for hosting, security, infrastructure, database/auth-related services, and analytics. Cloudflare may process technical information such as IP addresses, request data, device/browser information, performance data, and security signals to provide these services.

Strictly necessary cookies and storage are used without a consent banner, as the law allows, because the Service cannot function without them: they hold your login session, security tokens, and interface preferences such as theme and image quality.

CometFare does not currently use advertising cookies, marketing pixels, cross-site trackers, or any analytics that require consent. Cloudflare’s analytics are privacy-preserving and aggregate, and are not used to build a profile of you. If that ever changes, we will show a consent banner and obtain your consent before setting any such technology, and we will update this policy at the same time.

You may be able to disable cookies in your browser, but parts of CometFare may stop working properly.

Where Your Data Is Stored

CometFare runs entirely on Cloudflare. Accounts, messages, habitats, and settings are held in Cloudflare D1 databases; uploaded media, profile scenes, and app builds in Cloudflare R2 object storage; live chat sessions in Durable Objects; and short-lived tokens and counters in Cloudflare KV. Application code runs on Cloudflare Workers at the edge location nearest to you, which means a request may be processed in your region even though the stored data lives in the database’s home region. See International Transfers.

12. Information From Third Parties

We may receive information from third parties such as payment providers, authentication providers, hosting providers, security tools, analytics tools, support tools, and users who report abuse.

For example, a payment provider may tell us whether your subscription is active, canceled, refunded, disputed, or failed.

If you sign in with Google, Google sends us a signed identity token. We read and keep only three things from it: your email address, Google’s confirmation that the address is verified, and your Google account identifier (the value Google calls sub), which is what links your Google account to your CometFare account. We also read your Google profile picture URL to offer it as a starting avatar. We do not request access to your Gmail, contacts, calendar, files, or any other Google service, and we cannot see them. Signing in with Google is optional; you can use an email address and password instead.

If you connect Spotify (optional), we request two read-only permissions (user-read-currently-playing and user-read-playback-state), which let us see only what is playing right now. We cannot see your library, playlists, saved tracks, or listening history, and we cannot control playback. The current track is fetched while your profile is being viewed and shown as a “listening now” status; we do not build a listening history from it. Disconnecting Spotify in your settings stops the data flow immediately, deletes the stored Spotify access and refresh tokens, and clears the last known track from your profile.

13. How We Use Information

We use the information we collect to create and manage accounts, deliver messages, operate habitats and channels, process subscriptions, resolve abuse reports, improve service design, fix technical bugs, and prevent chargeback or refund fraud.

14. Legal Bases for Processing

Where laws such as the GDPR or UK GDPR apply, we may rely on the following legal bases:

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether our interest is overridden by your rights, and we have concluded it is not for the purposes listed above. You have the right to object to that processing at any time on grounds relating to your situation. Write to larisah@cometfare.com and we will stop unless we can show compelling grounds that override your rights, or we need the data to establish or defend legal claims.

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time, by disconnecting an integration in your settings, or by unsubscribing. Withdrawing consent does not affect processing that already happened.

15. Sharing Information

We do not sell personal information. We may share information under the following limited conditions:

Service Providers

• Cloudflare, for hosting, infrastructure, networking, security, database/auth-related services, analytics, and platform services;
• Paddle, for payments, subscriptions, invoices, refunds, fraud checks, chargebacks, taxes, and billing management;
• Resend, for email delivery and service communications;
• Agora, for real-time voice/video call and streaming infrastructure (processes audio/video streams and connection data during calls);
• Google, for optional Google sign-in;
• Spotify, for the optional, user-connected "listening now" integration.

Other Users

Information you choose to make public or visible may be seen by other users, such as profile details, public posts, public comments, habitat activity, roles, traits, or visible membership.

Habitat Owners and Moderators

Depending on the feature, habitat owners or authorized moderators may see information needed to manage their habitat, such as member lists, roles, reports, moderation logs, and content posted in that habitat.

Legal and Safety Disclosures

We may disclose information if we believe it is reasonably necessary to comply with law, respond to legal process, enforce our Terms, investigate fraud, protect users, defend legal claims, or respond to emergencies and credible threats of harm.

Business Transfers

If CometFare is involved in a merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, financing, or similar transaction, information may be transferred as part of that transaction.

16. Third-Party Providers

CometFare relies on Cloudflare, Paddle, Resend, and Agora to operate, secure, bill for, and provide real-time features of the Service, and on Google and Spotify for optional sign-in and integrations. Each provider processes data according to their own privacy policies, DPA agreements, and technical controls. If providers are changed, this Privacy Policy will be updated accordingly.

17. Public Content

Public content may be indexed, copied, screenshotted, shared, archived, cached, or stored by other users or third parties. Even if you delete public content from CometFare, copies may remain outside our control. Use caution before sharing personal details publicly.

18. Data Retention

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for. The periods below are the ones we work to. Where a period is longer than you might expect, the reason is given, usually tax law or the need to make a ban stick.

• Account information: while your account exists. After deletion, removed or anonymized within 30 days, apart from the minimum needed to enforce a ban or meet a legal obligation.
• Profile information: while your account exists, or until you edit or delete it. Edited values are not kept in history.
• Messages and posts: while they remain in the chat, habitat, support area, or comment thread. Once deleted by you, habitat staff, or us, purged from live systems within 30 days.
• Private messages: as above. Deleting your account removes your messages from your side of the conversation; copies already delivered to another user’s inbox remain theirs.
• Habitat data: while the habitat exists, then 30 days. Moderation records from the habitat follow the moderation period below.
• Moderation records: 3 years from the action. Kept past account deletion so that bans hold, repeat violations are visible, and appeals can be reviewed against what actually happened.
• Call and stream metadata: 12 months for session records (participants, space, start and end times, duration); 90 days for the daily counters that enforce quotas. Audio and video are never recorded, so there is nothing to retain.
• Security and technical logs: 12 months, including IP addresses, request metadata, rate-limit events, and error and crash reports. Signals tied to a confirmed abuse or fraud pattern may be kept up to 3 years.
• Support requests, reports, and appeals: 3 years, so that safety history and dispute records survive long enough to be useful.
• Payment and subscription records: 7 years. This one is not our choice: tax, accounting, and chargeback rules require it, and Paddle holds the primary record as Merchant of Record.
• Backups: rolling 35 days, then overwritten. Deleted data can persist in a backup until it rotates out; it is not restored to live systems except in a disaster recovery, and a deletion is re-applied if it is.

Where a legal hold, an open investigation, an active dispute, or a regulator’s request applies, we keep the affected records until it ends, even if the period above has run out.

19. Account Deletion

You may request account deletion by using available in-app tools or contacting larisah@cometfare.com.

We act on a deletion request within 30 days, and will tell you when it is done. Account and profile information is deleted or anonymized; your messages are removed from your side of every conversation; backups holding the data rotate out within 35 days.

Some things survive deletion, and you should know which: payment records (7 years, tax law), moderation records and ban identifiers (3 years, so a ban cannot be shed by deleting the account), and anything under an active legal hold or dispute. Content you posted publicly or sent to other users may remain visible to them (see Public Content).

20. Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights over your personal information:

• Access: get a copy of what we hold about you;
• Correction: have inaccurate information fixed;
• Deletion: have your information erased, subject to the retention rules above;
• Portability: receive your information in a machine-readable format, or have it sent to another service;
• Objection: object to processing based on legitimate interests;
• Restriction: have processing paused while a dispute about accuracy or lawfulness is resolved;
• Withdraw consent: for anything we do on the basis of consent, at any time;
• Human review: of an automated decision that significantly affects you (see Automated Processing).

To exercise any of these, write to larisah@cometfare.com from your account email address, saying which right you are exercising. We respond within 30 days, and will tell you if we need a further 60 days because the request is complex. Exercising these rights is free; we may charge a reasonable fee only for a request that is manifestly unfounded or repetitive.

We may need to verify your identity before completing a request, usually by confirming control of the account email. We may refuse or limit a request where the law allows, and if we do we will tell you why.

Complaining to a Regulator

If you are in the EEA or the UK, you have the right to lodge a complaint with a data protection supervisory authority, normally the one where you live, where you work, or where you believe the problem happened. You can do that without contacting us first, though we would rather hear from you and try to fix it. UK residents can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office; a list of EEA authorities is published by the European Data Protection Board.

If You Are in California

Under the CCPA and CPRA you have the rights to know, delete, correct, and to opt out of sale or sharing, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them. In the twelve months before the date on this page we collected the categories described in Information We Collect (identifiers, commercial information, internet activity, approximate geolocation, audio/visual information you upload, and inferences drawn from your use of the Service) for the purposes in Legal Bases for Processing, and disclosed them for business purposes to the service providers named in Sharing Information.

We have not sold personal information, and we have not shared it for cross-context behavioural advertising, in the preceding twelve months, including information about users we know to be under 16. There is therefore nothing to opt out of, and no “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link is required. We will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights: your account, features, and price stay the same. An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf with written proof of authority.

21. Communications

We may send you account emails, security alerts, billing notices, subscription updates, support replies, or policy updates. These are transactional and necessary. Marketing emails will include an unsubscribe link.

22. Security

We use reasonable security measures to protect personal information, including:

• Password hashing: PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 with a random per-account salt and a server-side secret. Plain-text passwords are never written down anywhere.
• Encryption in transit: HTTPS/TLS for every request and secure WebSockets for live chat;
• Optional two-factor authentication on your account;
• Access controls: administrative tools are restricted to a small number of authorized operators, and privileged actions are logged;
• Rate limiting and abuse detection on authentication, messaging, uploads, and API endpoints;
• Provider-level protection: encryption at rest and network security supplied by Cloudflare.

However, no system is perfectly secure; you are responsible for keeping your login credentials safe and for the security of the device you sign in from.

If There Is a Breach

If a breach of personal information occurs and it is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, as the GDPR requires. Where the risk to you is high, we will notify you directly and without undue delay, by email to your account address, telling you what happened, what information was involved, what we are doing about it, and what you should do.

If you believe you have found a security vulnerability, report it to larisah@cometfare.com. We will not pursue action against good-faith research that does not access other users’ data, degrade the Service, or extort.

23. International Transfers

CometFare may store or process information in countries other than your own. Cloudflare operates a global network, and our Workers run at the edge location closest to whoever is making the request, so your data may be processed outside the country you are in, including in the United States.

Where information leaves the EEA or the UK, we rely on the Standard Contractual Clauses (and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum) in our agreements with Cloudflare, Paddle, Resend, and Agora, together with any adequacy decision that covers the destination. Our providers publish their own transfer documentation, and you can ask us for a summary of the safeguards that apply by writing to larisah@cometfare.com.

24. Children and Minors

CometFare is intended for users who are at least 13 years old. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13.

If we learn that a user is under 13, we will suspend the account and delete the personal information we hold about them, keeping only the minimum needed to record that the deletion happened and to stop the account being recreated. This is not discretionary.

In the EEA and the UK the age at which a person can consent on their own is set nationally and is between 13 and 16. Below that age, use requires a parent or guardian’s consent, given from the account email address.

Parents or guardians who believe a child has given us information can write to larisah@cometfare.com to have the account and its data removed. We will act on it without requiring a legal process.

25. Sensitive Information

You should not submit sensitive personal information (such as government IDs, financial data, precise location, biometric data, or highly private details) to CometFare unless it is absolutely necessary.

26. Automated Processing and Moderation Tools

CometFare uses automated and semi-automated tools to help detect spam, abuse, fraud, malware, and policy violations. They work on signals such as message rate and repetition, the age and history of an account, the reputation of links and uploaded files, sign-in and IP patterns that suggest ban evasion or credential stuffing, payment-risk indicators from Paddle, and the volume and outcome of reports from other users.

What they can do on their own is limited and reversible: rate-limit you, hold a message or upload for review, hide content pending a look, require re-verification, or temporarily restrict a feature.

What they cannot do on their own is permanently terminate an account, remove paid access, or impose a lasting ban. Those decisions are made by a person. Where a temporary automated restriction has significant effect on you, you may ask for it to be reviewed by a human.

The consequences of these decisions range from a short delay in sending a message up to loss of access to the Service. To contest one, use the appeal page, or write to larisah@cometfare.com. You have the right to a human review, to state your case, and to contest the outcome.

27. Do Not Track and Browser Signals

CometFare may not respond to all browser "Do Not Track" signals unless required by law. We will provide appropriate consent choices where required by regional regulations.

28. Data Accuracy

You are responsible for keeping your account information accurate and up to date. You can update your profile through account settings or by contacting us.

29. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time.

For material changes (a new purpose for existing data, a new category of data, a new recipient, or a change that reduces your rights), we will give notice in the Service or by email to your account address at least 30 days before they take effect, and the notice will say what changed. Where a change requires your consent, we will ask for it rather than assume it. Corrections and clarifications take effect when published.

Continued use after a change takes effect means you accept it. Every version carries an effective date at the top of this page.

30. Contact

For privacy questions, requests, or concerns, contact:

larisah@cometfare.com

See also the Terms of Service and the Refund Policy.