HQ Discovery privacy policy

1. Who we are

• Developer: Waebox Media (WAEBOX MEDIA COMPANY)
• Address: 242/05 Dien Bien Phu, Chinh Gian, Thanh Khe, Da Nang, Vietnam
• Privacy contact: [email protected]
• Phone: +84 93 850 65 96

2. Scope

This policy applies to HQ Discovery version 1.0.0 and later on the App Store and Google Play. The waebox.com website has its own privacy policy. Read the website policy.

3. No account, no contact details

You can read HQ Discovery without signing up. The first time you save a story or follow someone, the app creates an anonymous profile so your library can be restored. That profile has no name, email address or phone number attached to it. If you never save or follow, no profile is created.

4. What we store

5. What our servers see but don’t keep

• Searches: the words you search for are sent to our servers to find results and are not stored.
• Your Following feed: the list of people you follow is sent to fetch their latest stories and is not stored as part of that request.
• Your IP address: used briefly to stop abuse, such as too many requests from one address. It is held in memory for a short time and never written to our database.

6. What we don’t do

• No advertising SDKs and no third-party analytics or crash-reporting SDKs.
• No tracking across other companies’ apps or websites, and no advertising identifier.
• No access to your camera, microphone, location, contacts or photo library.
• We don’t sell your data or share it with advertisers.

7. Links to publishers

Every story links to the original articles of the outlets that reported it. When you open one, it loads the publisher’s page in an in-app browser, and that publisher’s own privacy policy applies to what it collects.

8. Service providers

We use hosting and content-delivery providers to run our servers. They process data — such as IP addresses in routine request logs — only on our behalf and only to deliver the service, and they are required to protect it to the same standard as this policy. We don’t share your data with anyone else unless the law requires it.

9. How we protect it

• Everything between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
• Your access key and recovery code are stored on our servers only as one-way hashes. On your phone they are kept in the Keychain on iOS, and in storage encrypted with a Keystore key on Android.
• Our editorial tools require a staff account, and only authorized staff can use them.

No system is perfectly secure, but we collect as little as we can so there is little to protect.

10. How long we keep it

Until you delete it. Profiles that haven’t been used for 13 months are deleted automatically, together with everything saved in them.

11. Your choice, and withdrawing it

Saving and following are optional. You can change your mind at any time: Profile → Delete my data removes your profile from our servers and your phone, and stops backing up this phone until you tap Back up again.

12. Deleting your data

In the app: Profile → Delete my data. Without the app: email [email protected] with your recovery code (Profile → Recovery code). Both routes, and what is deleted, are described on the deletion page. Delete your data.

13. Children

HQ Discovery is not directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has used HQ Discovery, email [email protected] and we will delete the data.

14. Changes to this policy

If the app starts collecting anything new, we will update this policy, the App Store privacy details and the Google Play Data safety section in the same release, and change the effective date above.

15. Contact

Questions about privacy: [email protected], or use the support page. HQ Discovery support.