Privacy Policy

Last updated: 2 October 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how Kovio GmbH ("we", "us", "our") collects, uses and protects your personal data when you use the Ilk app and the website ilkapp.com. We follow the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (nDSG) and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Data controller:
Kovio GmbH
Ussbergstrasse 4d, 8864 Reichenburg, Switzerland
Commercial Register / Reg No.: CH-130.4.037.280-3 (UID: CHE-242.027.017)
Privacy contact: support@ilkapp.com

1. Summary

• Ilk is for people aged 18 or older.
• Other people see the map cell that you are in (an area of about 36 km²), never your exact position.
• Messages that you send to AI companions go to AI providers so that the companion can reply. Your chats with people never go to an AI provider.
• When you report someone, a person at Ilk reads your conversation with that person to decide on the report (see section 2).
• Ilk has no advertising, no analytics and no tracking. We do not sell your data.
• You can delete your account in the app at any time. Messages that you exchanged stay readable for your chat partners (see section 8).

2. Data that the Ilk app collects

• Account: your email address and your password (stored only as a secure hash). When you sign up, we store the time at which you confirmed that you are 18 or older and accepted the Terms of Service and this Privacy Policy.
• Profile: your username, your avatar design, your gender, your interests (with their position in the interest tree and their weights for matching) and your app language. Your short bio is written by an AI from the names of your interests (see section 3). Ilk has no profile photos and does not ask for your date of birth.
• Location: if you allow location access, the app sends your position to our server about every 10 seconds while the app is open. The app does not use your location in the background. The server uses the position to find your map cell (H3 resolution 6, an area of about 36 km²) and to confirm that a visit is real. Then it discards the position: the server does not store or log it. Other people see only your cell. For your latest cell, the server keeps only a rough point: the centre of the cell, rounded to 0.05 degrees (about 5 km). Your phone also finds the name of your region and country for the centre of your cell with the map service of your phone (Apple on iPhone, Google on Android). The app sends these names and your cell to our server to create AI companions for your area. We also keep a location history at the level of cells: the cells that you visited in the last 30 days (at most five), visit records for 14 days, your map-cell contributions for 14 days and a log of your cell changes until you delete your account.
• Messages and content: your chats with people and with AI companions, message requests, the messages that you publish as the owner of a map cell, and the private names that you give to cells. We store them so that we can deliver and show them.
• Notifications: the push token of your device. A notification about a new message contains up to the first 100 characters of the message. It goes through Expo and then through Apple (iPhone) or Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (Android) to your device.
• Consent for AI companions: the time at which you agreed that your messages to AI companions go to the AI providers, or that you withdrew this consent.
• Safety: the people that you block and your reports (who reported whom, when, the reason that you chose and the explanation that you added). If you report a message that a cell owner published, we keep a copy of that message with the report for 90 days. Feedback that you give about an AI companion (a category and an optional comment) is also stored.
• Review of reports: when a person reports someone, a person at Ilk reads the messages between the two people and their profiles. The person at Ilk also reads the explanation of the report and, for a cell owner message, the kept copy. We read them only to decide on the report, and only while a report about the two people exists. We decide within 24 hours on work days, and on a report of a threat of violence or self-harm on the same day.
• Moderation decisions: we record the decision: the date, the reason, the outcome and the broken term. If we suspend an account, we store the time of the suspension. When we remove content or suspend or delete an account, we send a statement of reasons by email to the reported person. It never names the person who reported. We send the result of every decision by email to the person who reported. If a report shows a credible threat to the life or safety of a person, we give the report to the police. We also give them the data that identify the account.
• Technical data: our server provider records technical request data (for example IP address and time) in short-lived logs to operate and protect the service.
• Crash reports: when the app crashes or meets an error, it sends a crash report to Sentry. The report contains the error, the place in the app code, the app version, the device model, the operating system and the addresses of the last server requests without their parameters. It contains no messages, no position, no map cell and no email address, and it is not linked to your account. Sentry receives the IP address of your device when the app sends a report. We set Sentry not to store it.

The app contains no advertising or analytics tools. Ilk has no in-app purchases at this time.

3. AI companions

Ilk shows AI companions on the map. They are always marked with an "AI" badge and they are not real people. Before your first conversation with an AI companion, the app asks for your consent. If you agree, the following happens when you write to an AI companion:

• Your messages in that conversation, the recent history of that conversation and a short summary of older parts of it go to our AI provider Groq so that the companion can reply. If Groq is not available, the request goes to EURouter instead.
• The summary is itself written by the AI. It can contain topics, interests and personal details that you mention in the conversation. We store it until you delete your account.
• If your message asks about current events, a short search query based on your message (or the message itself) goes to the search provider Tavily. We store the search result until you delete your account.
• Your username and your profile are not sent with your messages. Your chats with people are never sent to an AI provider.

Two other features use Groq independently of this consent, and they send only names of interests: Groq writes your bio from up to 12 of your interest names, and Groq creates new AI companions for your area from up to five of your interest names and the language of your region. No username, email address or position is sent.

You can withdraw the conversation consent at any time in the app under Profile → Settings & Privacy → Legal → AI companions. The app then asks again before your next conversation with an AI companion. The withdrawal does not affect messages that were already processed.

AI companions use facts from public sources: Wikidata and Wikipedia (people from history linked to an area) and API-Football (football results). These requests contain no personal data. Wikidata receives the approximate centre of a map cell, not your position.

4. Purpose and legal basis

• Provide the service: accounts, profiles, interest matching, the map with map cells, messages, notifications and account deletion (performance of a contract — GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)).
• Conversations with AI companions: your consent (GDPR Art. 6(1)(a)). You can withdraw it at any time.
• Safety and abuse prevention: reports, the review of reports and the decisions on them, blocks, confirmation of real visits and short-lived server logs (legitimate interest — GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)). We keep weekly monitoring summaries without account, cell or time details for 90 days.
• App stability: crash reports, to find and fix errors in the app (legitimate interest — GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
• Legal obligations: where the law requires us to keep or disclose data (GDPR Art. 6(1)(c)). Examples are the decision emails of a report under the EU Digital Services Act and a report of a threat to the police.

We do not use your data for advertising and we do not sell it.

5. Service providers

These providers process data for us. We share only the data that each provider needs for its task.

• Supabase (servers in Frankfurt, Germany) — database, sign-in, account emails (for example sign-up confirmation and password reset), server functions and server logs. All app data in section 2 is stored here.
• Groq (USA) — AI text generation for AI companion replies and conversation summaries, bios and new AI companions (see section 3).
• EURouter — fallback AI provider for AI companion replies when Groq is not available (see section 3).
• Tavily (USA) — web search for AI companion replies about current events (see section 3).
• Expo (USA) — delivery of push notifications and of app updates.
• Sentry (Functional Software, Inc., USA; data stored in Frankfurt, Germany) — crash reports from the app (see section 2).
• Apple and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging — delivery of push notifications to iPhone and Android devices.
• Google Maps (Android) and Apple Maps (iPhone) — the map in the app and the region name for your position (see section 2). These services receive the map area that you look at and your device's IP address.
• Brevo — email delivery of the decision emails of a report (see section 2) and of our internal weekly operating reports. The weekly reports contain only grouped counts and no personal data.
• Cloudflare — hosting of this website and of our internal page for the review of reports.
• Google Fonts — fonts on this website. Your browser loads them from Google servers, which receive your IP address.
• Wikimedia, API-Sports and football-data.org — some interest icons load directly from their servers, which receive your device's IP address.
• Apple App Store and Google Play — distribution of the app, under their own privacy policies.

6. Cross-border data transfers

Your app data is stored in the European Union (Supabase in Frankfurt, Germany). Some providers in section 5 process data in the USA or in other countries. For these transfers we rely on the safeguards that the nDSG and the GDPR allow, such as an adequacy decision (for example the EU-US and Swiss-US Data Privacy Framework) or the standard contractual clauses of the European Commission.

7. Cookies and tracking

This website sets no cookies for visitors. We use no analytics, tracking or marketing cookies on the website or in the app.

8. Data retention and account deletion

We keep your account data until you delete your account. Some data has a shorter retention period:

• Visited cells: 30 days. Visit records and map-cell contributions: 14 days.
• Copies of reported cell messages: 90 days.
• Reports and their explanations: until the person who reported or the reported person deletes the account, or until we delete one of the two accounts.
• Weekly monitoring summaries without personal details: 90 days.
• Records of sent notifications: 30 days.
• Crash reports: 30 days.

You can delete your account in the app under Profile → Settings & Privacy → Legal → Delete account. If you do not have the app, see Delete your Ilk account. When you delete your account, we delete at once:

• your email address, your password and your sign-in sessions;
• your username, avatar, bio, gender, interests and consents;
• the rough point of your latest cell, your map cell and all location history;
• your map-cell ownership, contributions, cell names and cell messages;
• your push tokens, notification settings, blocks and reports;
• the AI conversation summaries and search results of your conversations;
• your feedback about AI companions.

The record of a decision on a report stays after a deletion: the date, the reason, the outcome and the broken term. It has no link to an account and no content.

Exception — retained messages: the messages in your conversations (the messages that you sent and the messages that you received) are not deleted. Your chat partners can still read the conversation. Your name, avatar and profile are removed, and the conversation shows you as "Deleted Account". We keep these messages with no fixed end date, because they are also part of your chat partners' conversations. If you want us to delete specific messages, write to support@ilkapp.com.

Deleted data can remain in our database backups until these backups are replaced (normally after 7 days). We use backups only to restore the service after a failure.

9. Data security

We use technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised access, change, disclosure or destruction. Access rules in the database prevent other users from reading your position, your email address or your private data. Connections to our servers are encrypted.

10. Your rights (nDSG and GDPR)

You have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Right to information: know what data we collect and how we use it.
• Right to rectification: correct inaccurate or incomplete data.
• Right to deletion: ask us to delete your personal data. The fastest way is the in-app account deletion.
• Right to data portability: receive a copy of your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
• Right to restriction of processing: limit how we process your data.
• Right to objection: object to our processing of your data.
• Right to withdraw consent: withdraw your consent at any time, for example the consent for AI companions in the app settings.

To use these rights, write to support@ilkapp.com. We answer within 30 days. You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority (the FDPIC in Switzerland, or the data protection authority of your EU country).

11. Minimum age

Ilk is only for people aged 18 or older. Every person confirms this at sign-up. We do not knowingly collect data from people under 18. If we learn that an account belongs to a person under 18, we delete it.

12. Changes to this policy

We update this Privacy Policy when our practices or legal obligations change. We inform users of significant changes in the app or by email. The "Last updated" date at the top shows the current version.

13. Contact

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or your data, contact us:
Kovio GmbH
Ussbergstrasse 4d, 8864 Reichenburg, Switzerland
Email: support@ilkapp.com

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