the bored. privacy
the bored is a small app for telling your friends you're bored, right now. We built it to collect as little as possible. This page says exactly what we keep, why, and how to get rid of it.
Your account
You pick a handle and an emoji. To get back into your account you can set a password, link Sign in with Apple or Sign in with Google, or any mix of them. If you sign up with a password we ask for an email address. It's used only to send you a password reset code, it's never shown to anyone, and you can change it in Settings. We don't ask for your name, phone number, contacts, or location, and we don't collect them.
What we store
- Your handle and emoji, and a profile photo if you choose to add one.
- Sign-in details, if you set them: a password (stored only as a one-way hash, never the password itself), a recovery email address, and a link to your Apple ID or Google account. For Google we keep only the account's ID number, so we know it's you next time. We don't receive your Google password, and we don't store your Gmail address, name, picture, contacts or anything else from your Google account.
- A short notification history (what you were notified about, including a preview of a message), kept for up to 30 days. A preview is removed sooner when the chat it came from is erased or the sender's account is deleted.
- Your posts (text and/or a photo). A post is shown on the board for 1 hour. Then it leaves the live board, but people you've accepted as followers can still see it under "earlier today" for the rest of the day, at most 24 hours after you posted it. After that it's in your History and on your profile, where people you've accepted as followers can see it while their own board is open. You can hide any post from your profile, or delete it, at any time. Photos from the room and from chats are never shown on your profile.
- Room messages you send (including photos), and post photos. These are kept as your History (so you can look back at a bored window) until you delete your account.
- 1:1 chats (messages and photos). A chat stays open while you're talking and ends after 1 hour with no new messages. When it ends, it's deleted from our servers, unless you or the other person saved it. A saved chat is kept in both people's History until it's unsaved or one of you deletes your account.
- Who you follow, who follows you, and who you've blocked.
- A push notification device token, only if you turn on notifications. It's used to deliver notifications and nothing else.
- Reports you file, and a copy of the reported content, so we can review them.
- When you had the app open, and when you had the room on screen: the start and end time of each visit, kept for 90 days. We use it to see how the app is being used. It's never shown to anyone else.
- What you looked at: whose profile you opened, which chats you opened, and when you opened the chat list, your own profile, find people or your history, with the time. Kept for 90 days. We use it to see how the app is being used. It's never shown to anyone else, including the person whose profile you looked at.
What we don't do
No tracking, no analytics SDKs, no advertising, no selling or sharing your data with anyone for marketing. Ever.
Who can see what
Your posts are visible to people you've accepted as followers. Your room messages are visible to people you follow each other with (mutuals). A room message can also be seen, shown dimmed, by people who are mutuals with one of your mutuals, but only if that friend was on the board when you sent it (so they can follow the conversation). Chats are visible only to the two people in them. Your History is visible only to you. Your handle, emoji and profile photo can be found by anyone searching for handles.
Where it lives
The app's server runs on Render (United States). The database is PostgreSQL hosted by PlanetScale. Photos are stored in Cloudflare R2. Password reset codes are sent to your recovery email through Mailgun. Notifications are delivered through Apple's push service. These providers handle data on our behalf and don't use it for anything else.
Deleting your data
You can delete a post at any time: it's removed from the board, from "earlier today" and from your History at once, and deleting the post you have on the board ends your 1 hour. A post you don't delete leaves the live board by itself when its 1 hour is up, is shown under "earlier today" for the rest of the day (at most 24 hours after you posted it), and its photo stays in your History. Delete your whole account in the app under You → delete account: your profile, posts, photos, messages, follows and device tokens are deleted immediately. You can also email [email protected] and we'll do it for you. Reports filed about content may be kept for a short time while we review them.
Safety and moderation
You can report or block anyone from the app. We review reports within 24 hours and remove content and accounts that break our terms.
Age
the bored is for people aged 13 and over.
Changes and contact
If we change this policy we'll update this page and the date above. Questions: [email protected].