Privacy Policy
We built MissingPets to reunite families with lost pets — not to build a data business. This page explains, in plain language, exactly what we collect, why, and what we do with it.
What We Collect
If you're a pet owner
When you create an account, we collect your name, email address, phone number, and a password. Your password is never stored as plain text — it's hashed with bcrypt before it ever touches our database, meaning even we can't see it. When you add a pet, we store the photos you upload and the details you give us: name, species, breed, color, and an optional microchip ID.
If you're a finder
You can report a sighting or a found pet without creating an account and without giving us any personal information. If you choose to share your location, we only ever ask for it through an explicit action on your part — we never collect precise location silently in the background. If you decline, or don't have location services available, we fall back to an approximate location based on your IP address. You may optionally attach a photo and notes to your report. For basic abuse prevention — stopping spam and fake reports — we record the IP address associated with sighting and found-pet reports.
Why We Collect It
Every piece of data we ask for exists to serve one purpose: getting a lost pet home faster. Your contact details let a finder reach you (or let us connect you both) when there's a possible match. Pet photos and details power the identification and matching process. Finder location — precise or approximate — helps narrow down where a lost pet was actually seen, so searches and alerts can be targeted to the right neighborhood instead of a whole city. We don't collect anything beyond what's needed to run the service.
How It's Stored & Secured
Our database and file storage run on Supabase, and the application itself is hosted on Vercel — both established infrastructure providers used by companies far larger than us. Photos live in cloud object storage, not on any personal device or server we manage directly. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt before storage; we never have access to your plain-text password, and neither does anyone else.
We're a small, early-stage team, and we've chosen infrastructure — Supabase and Vercel — built by companies whose entire business depends on getting security right, rather than trying to run our own servers from scratch.
Who We Share It With
No one. We do not sell, rent, or share your data with advertisers or data brokers — full stop. The only parties with any access to your data are the infrastructure providers necessary to run the service itself (Supabase for database and storage, Vercel for hosting), and they only process data on our behalf to keep the platform running. We currently have no third-party ad-tracking or analytics integrated into the app.
Cookies
This marketing site — the pages you're browsing right now — sets no cookies of its own. We don't use it to track you across the web or build an advertising profile, and there is no third-party ad-tracking or analytics integrated into it. The MissingPets application itself (at app.missingpets.pet) is covered by this same policy once you create an account there.
Your Rights & Deleting Your Data
You can request access to the data we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account and associated data entirely. As a growing company, we haven't yet published a formally certified GDPR or CCPA compliance program with fixed retention schedules — we're honest about that rather than claiming certifications we don't hold. What we commit to is this: we will honor deletion and access requests promptly, and we intend to formalize a published retention policy as the company matures.
To request access to or deletion of your data, email us at hello@missingpets.pet — see our contact page for more ways to reach us.
Changes to This Policy
As MissingPets grows and adds new features, this policy will evolve with it. If we make material changes to how we collect or use data, we'll update the "last updated" date at the top of this page. We encourage checking back periodically. For the full terms governing use of the platform, see our Terms of Service.
Questions?
If anything here is unclear, or you want to know exactly what data we hold about you, just ask. We're a small team and you'll hear from a real person.
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