Welcome to UG Connect’s Privacy Policy. This policy explains how we collect and use your data and how you can control your information. Looking for a quick summary on our privacy practices? Check out this page or this video. If you’re looking for specific product privacy information, for example, how we process your Chats and ugconnects, take a look at our Privacy by Product page. In addition to these documents, we also show in-app notices that provide you more information about our products and services. And if you’re a Spectacles user you can learn more on how we collect and use your data in the Spectacles Supplemental Privacy Policy.
Transparency is one of our core values at UG Connect. We believe there shouldn’t be any surprises about the data we collect and how we use it – that’s why we’re upfront with how we process it. For example, we process your information to provide you a more personalised experience, including to show you content and information that is most relevant to your experience, as well as more relevant advertisements. Understanding your interests and preferences help us provide a better product experience.
Furthermore, we believe a personalised experience should not come at the expense of your privacy. Just like in real life, there are some moments you want to share privately with your close friends, and others that you want to share publicly. That’s why from day one our philosophy has been to delete content by default and to give ugconnectchatters control by providing the tools that allow them to decide what happens with their content, like who to share it with or when to save it.
This policy covers our ugconnectchat app as well as our other products, services and features, such as Bitmoji, Spectacles and our advertising and commerce initiatives. When you read "Services" in this policy, we’re talking about all of them. Also, if you see us refer to our "Terms", we mean the Terms of Service that you agree to when you sign up for our services. Finally, if you see the term "ugconnectchatter" we are often using that as shorthand for any user of our services.
Let’s get started with the controls you have over your information:
Control over your information and settings is a core part of ugconnectchat experience. You can access, update and delete your information, decide who can contact you and download your data from within the ugconnectchat app. Below, we give you more details on the types of settings that are available, link out to our data download tool and provide instructions on how to delete data or your account.
We want you to be in control of your information, so we provide you with a range of tools, including:
Access and update your information. You can access and edit most of your basic account information right in our Services. Just navigate to your settings and you will see the options available to you.
Delete your information. If you want to delete your account, learn how here. You can also delete some information within our Services, like content you’ve saved to Memories, content you’ve shared with My AI, Spotlight submissions and more.
Control who can see your content. We’ve built a number of tools that let you choose who you share your content with. In some cases you may want to share content with your friends, and in other instances you may want to share it with the public. To learn more, go here.
Change your permissions. In most cases, you can change your permissions at any time. For example, by default you are findable to others through your phone number and/or email address that you provided. If you no longer want to be findable, you can always change your settings. Or if you provided access to your phone or third party platform contacts to make friending easier, you can change that later on in your app settings. Of course, if you do that, certain features and Services, like finding friends in your contact book, won’t work.
Opt out of promotional messages. You have the option to opt out or unsubscribe from promotional emails and messages sent by SMS or other messaging platforms. To do so, just follow the instructions in the message like an unsubscribe link or similar functionality.
Download your data. You can make a request in our Download My Data tool to export a copy of your ugconnectchat information.
Object to processing. Depending on where you live and the particular data we are processing, you may have the right to object to our processing of that information. This gets a bit technical, so we’ve explained it in more detail here.
Set advertising preferences. We try to show you ads that we think will be relevant to your interests, but if you’d like to have a less personalised experience, you can change your advertising settings in the ugconnectchat app. Learn more here.
Tracking. If you use an iPhone with iOS 14.5 or above, some specific requirements apply, which we’ve specified here.
This section provides you with details on what information we collect: what you provide to us, what we collect when you use ugconnectchat and information we receive from other companies or apps you’ve connected to your ugconnectchat account. Sometimes, we may also collect additional information, with your permission.
When you use our Services, such as ugconnectchat, we collect information you provide to us, generate information when you use our Services and in some cases receive data from others. Let’s break these down in more detail.
Many of our Services require you to set up an account. To do this, we ask you to provide us with account details (information about you, like your name, username, email address, birthday and phone number). When you set up your profile, you’ll also provide us with profile details (like your Bitmoji and profile picture). If you use our commerce products to buy something, like those latest sneakers, we may ask you for payment and related information (like your physical address, so we can ship the product to you, and payment information, so we can process the payment and transaction history).
Of course, you’ll also provide us with information you send through or save within our Services, including content and information about that content, and content you share and generate with our AI Features (content, or “Inputs,” including text, images, video, audio, precise location and engagement, used to generate content and responses, or “Outputs”). We consider some of this information to be private content and communications (like ugconnects and Chats with friends, voice and video calls, and content that is saved in My Eyes Only). Or content you share with a particular audience like private & friend stories (My Story set to Friends, Private Stories). On the other end of the spectrum, some of the information you send through or save within our Services may be public content that is accessible to everyone (such as Public Story content, including My Story set to Everyone, Shared Stories and Community Stories, Spotlight or UG Connect Map submissions and Public Profile information). Keep in mind that ugconnectchatters who view your ugconnects, Chats and any other content, can always screenshot that content, save it or copy it outside the ugconnectchat app. So please don’t send messages or share content that you wouldn’t want someone to save or share.
Lastly, when you contact Support (content and communications shared with Support) or our Safety team, or communicate with us in any other way, including through our research efforts (like responses to surveys, consumer panels or other research questions), we’ll collect whatever information you provide or that we need to resolve your question.
When you use our Services, we collect information about which of those Services you’ve used and how you’ve used them. This helps us better understand the way our community uses our Services so that we can make improvements.
This includes usage information (information about how you interact with our – for example, which Lenses you view and apply, your premium subscriptions, Stories you watch, and how often you interact with other ugconnectchatters) and content information (information about content you create or provide, your engagement with the camera and creative tools, your interactions with My AI and metadata – for example, information about the content itself like the date and time it was posted and who viewed it). Content information includes information based on the content of the image, video or audio – so if you post a Spotlight of a basketball game, we may use that information to show you more content on Spotlight about basketball.
This also includes device information (such as your hardware or software, operating system, device memory, advertising identifiers, apps installed, browser type, information from device sensors that measure the motion of your device or compasses and microphones, including whether you have headphones connected and information about your wireless and mobile connections), location information (IP address), information collected by cookies and similar technologies, depending on your settings, (cookies, pixels (small graphic data that recognise user activity, such as if and how often a user has visited a website), web storage, unique advertising identifiers) and log information (such as details about how you’ve used our Services, access times, pages viewed, IP address and unique identifiers like cookies).
If you’ve explicitly granted device-level permissions, device information may also include information about your device phonebook (contacts and related information), images and other information from your device’s camera, photos and microphone (like the ability to take photos, videos, view stored photos and videos, and access the microphone to record audio while recording video) and location information (precise location through methods like GPS signals).
The last category of data we collect is information about you that we may receive from others, such as other users, our affiliates and third parties. This includes linked third-party service data (information we get when you link your ugconnectchat account to another service), data from advertisers (information from advertisers, app developers, publishers and other third parties to help target or measure the performance of ads), contact info from other ugconnectchatters or third parties (if another ugconnectchatter uploads their contact list which includes your information, we may combine that with other information we have about you to better understand who you may want to communicate with. Or, if you provide us with your contact information, we may use that to determine if we can communicate with you in other ways, like SMS, email or other messaging services) and data relating to potential violations of our Terms (we may receive information from third parties, including website publishers, social network providers, law enforcement and others, about potential violators of our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines).
Additionally, there may be instances when you interact with our Services that we will ask your permission to collect additional information. For example, before accessing your device’s camera roll or your device or third party contact book.
This section explains how we use the information we collect. Among other things, we use the information we collect to provide you with personalised products and Services that we work hard to build and improve. Below, we walk through each purpose for which we use information in detail. If you’d like to see a mapping of the data we collect with the purposes for which we collect it, we have a table
We use the information we collect in order to operate, deliver and maintain our Services. For example, by delivering a UG Connect you want to send to a friend or, if you share your location on UG Connect Map, to show you suggestions like places you might like in your neighbourhood, content others have posted to the Map or your friends if they’re sharing their location with you. We also use some of your information to help keep our products up to date, for example to make sure that our Services work with the latest operating systems and devices.
We use the information we collect in order to operate, deliver and maintain our Services. For example, by delivering a UG Connect you want to send to a friend or, if you share your location on UG Connect Map, to show you suggestions like places you might like in your neighbourhood, content others have posted to the Map or your friends if they’re sharing their location with you. We also use some of your information to help keep our products up to date, for example to make sure that our Services work with the latest operating systems and devices.
Personalisation can also help with suggesting friends or recommending a new friend to send a UG Connect to based on who you UG Connect with the most. We may show recommended places on the UG Connect Map, generate stickers or even generate ugconnects and other content using AI, infer your interests based on your content or activity, or customize the content we show you, including ads. For example, if you watch barista content on Spotlight, talk to My AI about your favourite espresso machine or save a lot of coffee-related ugconnects in your Memories, we may highlight coffee shops on the UG Connect Map when you visit a new city or show you content about coffee that you may find interesting or relevant. Or, if you interact with a lot of music venues we may use that to show you ads for upcoming shows in town. Personalisation also includes tailoring your experience based on who you interact with most and what your friends are doing, including showing you content your friends create, like or enjoy on Spotlight or Place recommendations that are popular with your friends.
Our goal is to continuously provide you with more relevant and interesting content.
For example, if you watch a lot of sports content, but skip content with hair and makeup tips, our recommendation algorithms will prioritise sports, but not those makeup tips. You can learn more about how we understand ugconnectchatter preferences and rank and moderate content here.
We believe it is critical to also balance the benefits of personalisation with our ugconnectchatters’ expectations of privacy. For example, we may automatically tag the ugconnects you save to Memories based on the content within it (e.g. the UG Connect contained a dog), and then use that tag to personalise your experience, make recommendations or show you ads (such as showing you Spotlight ugconnects containing dogs). We do not use the private content and communications you send to your friends to personalise your experience, make recommendations or show you ads.
Another way we provide a personalised Service is through the ads we show. We use your interests and preferences from the information we’ve collected to personalise, target and measure ads. We think ads are best when they’re relevant. That’s why we try to select the right ads and show them to you at the right time. For example, if you’ve interacted with ads for video games, we will infer that you like video games, and show you similar ads, but those won’t be the only ads you see. Similar to our content strategy, we try to ensure you receive a variety of ads. We also use your information to avoid showing you ads you probably won’t be interested in. For example, if a ticketing site tells us you’ve previously bought tickets for a movie – we can stop showing you ads for it. You can learn about the different types of advertising and your choices about which ads you receive here.
You can learn more about how we collect, use and share your information for advertising purposes here.
A note about information collected by cookies and other technologies: we may use these technologies to collect information when you interact with Services we offer through one of our partners. For example, we may use information collected on an advertiser’s website to show you more relevant ads. Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually remove or reject browser cookies through the settings on your browser or device. Keep in mind, though, that removing or rejecting cookies could affect the availability and functionality of our Services. To learn more about how we and our partners use cookies on our Services and your choices, please check out our Cookie Policy.
Our teams are constantly coming up with new ideas for features and ways to improve our Services. In order to do this, we also develop and improve the algorithms and machine learning models (an expression of an algorithm that combs through significant amounts of data to find patterns or make predictions) that make our features and Services work, including through generative AI features (artificial intelligence capable of generating text, images or other media, using generative models. Generative AI models learn the patterns and structure of their input training data and then generate new data that has similar characteristics). We use algorithms and machine learning models for personalisation, advertising, safety and security, fairness and inclusivity, augmented reality and to prevent abuse or other Terms of Service violations. For example, our algorithms and machine learning models take into account the conversations ugconnectchatters are having with My AI to improve the responses from My AI.
Your information can help us decide what kind of improvements we should make, but we are always focused on privacy – and we don’t want to use more of your personal information than is necessary to develop our features and models.
In order to understand what to build or how to improve our Services, we need to understand trends and demand for our features. For example, we monitor metadata and trends about Group Chat use to help decide whether we should change parts of the feature, like the maximum size of a Group. Studying data from ugconnectchatters can help us see trends in the ways that people use the Services. This helps inspire us to improve ugconnectchat on a larger scale. We perform analytics in order to identify, monitor and analyse trends and usage. Based on this information, we will, among other things, create information about our users to help us understand demand.
We conduct research to better understand general consumer interests, trends and how our Services are used by you and others in our community. This information, along with analytics (as we described above), helps us understand more about our community and about how our Services fit into the lives of those in our community. We also engage in research and development to develop new techniques and technologies (e.g. new machine learning models or hardware, such as Spectacles). The results of our research are sometimes used in features on ugconnectchat, and we sometimes publish papers about things like overall behaviours and consumer trends (which will only have aggregated data across our user base, and not contain any private information about you specifically).
We use your information to enhance the safety and security of our Services, verify ugconnectchatter identity and prevent fraud or other unauthorised or illegal activity. For example, we provide two-factor authentication to help protect your account and can send you email or text messages if we notice any suspicious activity. We also scan URLs sent on ugconnectchat to see if that webpage is potentially harmful and can give you a warning about it.
Sometimes we’ll get in touch with you to promote new or existing features. This includes sending ugconnectchatters communications through ugconnectchat, email, SMS or other messaging platforms, where permitted. For example, we may use the ugconnectchat app, email, SMS or other messaging platforms to share information about our Services and promotional offers that we think may interest you.
Other times, we need to communicate with you to provide information, alerts or to send messages our users ask us to deliver at their request. This may include sending communications through ugconnectchat, email, SMS or other messaging platforms, where permitted, to deliver account status updates, security alerts and Chat or friending reminders; it may also include fulfilling our user’s request to send invites or ugconnectchat content to non-ugconnectchatters.
When you ask for help, we want to get you support as quickly as possible. In order to provide you, the ugconnectchatter community and our business partners with the help needed to resolve issues with our Services, we often need to use the information we have collected to respond.
We use the data we collect to enforce our Terms and the law. This includes enforcing, investigating and reporting conduct that violates our Terms, policies or the law, responding to requests from law enforcement, and complying with legal requirements. For example, when unlawful content is posted on our Services, we may need to enforce our Terms and other policies. In some cases, we may also use or share your information to cooperate with law enforcement requests, escalate safety issues to law enforcement, industry partners or others, or comply with our legal obligations. Check out our Transparency Report to learn more.
Additionally, there may be instances when you interact with our Services that we will ask for your permission to use your information in a new, different or otherwise specific way.
This section explains who we share information with, what that information may include and the reasons for sharing that information, including when we need to transfer it outside the country it was collected from.
ugconnectchat. To provide our Services to you and our community, we may share your information with your friends on ugconnectchat or other ugconnectchatters. For example, the content you post to Stories, or your status as a premium subscriber, can be viewed by your Friends if you allow them. See the Control Over Your Information section and your Settings for the controls you have over who sees what and when.
Family Centre Participants. When you have enabled Family Centre, we share information about the connected teen account to the parent or guardian to provide insight about how the account is used, for example, who your Friends are on ugconnectchat or which friends you may be sharing your location with. We do not share message content. Learn more.
Public. Most of the features on ugconnectchat are private and for Friends only, but we also offer public features that allow you to opt in to showcase your best ugconnects to the world, such as Spotlight, UG Connect Map or your Public Profile. When you do this, those ugconnects may also be discoverable outside of ugconnectchat, for example on the web. Some information, like your username and Bitmoji, are visible to the public. Learn more.
Third-Party Apps. Sometimes we provide features that allow you to connect with third-party apps. If you decide to connect your ugconnectchat account with a third-party app, we will share any additional information you direct us to.
Service Providers. We share your information with our service providers, who process that information on our behalf. For example, we rely on such Service Providers to facilitate payments, measure and optimise the performance of ads or protect the services. We do not share private communications with them. We maintain a list of categories of service providers here.
Business and Integrated Partners. We share your information with business and integrated partners in order to provide the Services. For example, you can use OpenTable within ugconnectchat to reserve a table. This does not include private communications. We maintain a list of these partners here.
Anti-Fraud Partners. We share your information, such as device and usage information, with industry partners working to prevent fraud.
Legal, Safety and Security Partners. We share your information as necessary for the following legal, safety and security reasons:
Comply with any valid legal process, governmental request or applicable law, rule or regulation.
Investigate, remedy or enforce potential Terms of Service and Community Guidelines violations.
Protect the rights, property or safety of us, our users or others.
Detect and resolve any fraud or security concerns.
Affiliates. UG Connect consists of different subsidiaries owned by us. We may share your information within those internal subsidiaries as needed to carry out our Services.
For the purposes of a Merger or Acquisition. If we were to sell or negotiate to sell our business to a buyer or possible buyer, we may transfer your information to a successor or affiliate as part of that transaction.
Our Services may contain content and integrations offered by our integrated partners. Examples include integrations in Lenses, Camera editing tools, to provide Scan results and third-party developer integrations. Through these integrations, you may be providing information to the integrated partner as well as to UG Connect. We are not responsible for how those partners collect or use your information. As always, we encourage you to review the privacy policies of every third-party service that you visit or use, including those third parties you interact with through our Services. You can learn more about our integrations in ugconnectchat here.
On iOS, we use Apple’s TrueDepth camera to improve the quality of Lenses. Note, however, that this information is used in real time – we don’t store this information on our servers or share it with third parties.
Our Services connect you with your friends around the world. To make that possible, we may collect your personal information from, transfer it to and store and process it in the United States or other countries outside where you live. Whenever we share information outside where you live, we ensure safeguards are in place to protect the data as required by law where you live. If you want to learn more about this, see the Region Specific Information section for more details.
In this section, we provide you with information on how long we keep your information, why we keep your information and also highlight how we may need to keep your information to comply with laws, courts and other obligations.
As a general rule, we keep information as long as you tell us to, and otherwise as long as we need it to provide our Services, or as required by law. For example, if you store something in Memories, we will keep it as long as you need it, but when you Chat with a friend, our systems are designed to delete Chats you send within 24 hours after your friend reads it (unless you’ve changed your default settings or decide to save it). Whether we retain your data depends on the specific feature, your settings and how you’re using the Services. Here are some more factors we consider when we decide how long to keep your information:
If we need the information to operate or provide our Services. For example, we store your basic account details – like your name, phone number and email address – to maintain your account.
To do the things you expect from our Services and as we’ve described within this Privacy Policy. For example, we maintain your list of friends until you ask us to delete them since friends are key to expressing yourself. Similarly, we keep your shared list of contacts until you ask us to remove them in our app settings (note: updating your device permissions may not remove the contacts you’ve previously shared with ugconnectchat). Learn more. Conversely, ugconnects and Chats sent in ugconnectchat will be deleted by default from our servers within 24 hours after we detect they’ve been opened by all recipients or have expired, unless you’ve changed your default settings or decide to save something, in which case we will honour your choices.
The information itself. For example, we store location information for different lengths of time based on how precise it is and which Services you use. If location information is associated with a UG Connect – like those saved to Memories or posted to UG Connect Map or Spotlight – we'll retain that location as long as we store the UG Connect. Expert tip: you can see the location data we retain about you by downloading your data.
How long we need to retain the information to comply with certain legal obligations.
If we need it for other legitimate purposes, such as to prevent harm, investigate possible violations of our Terms of Service or other policies, investigate reports of abuse or protect ourselves or others.
Have a look at our Privacy by Product page and support page for details on the specific retention periods for products.
Although our systems are designed to delete some of your information automatically, we cannot promise that deletion will take place by a specific time.
In some cases we need to comply with legal requirements to store your data which stops us from deleting your information. For example, if we receive a notice from a court asking us to keep a copy of your content. Other reasons we may keep a copy of your data are if we get reports of abuse or other Terms or policy violations, or if your account, content created by you or content created with other ugconnectchatters is flagged by others or our systems for abuse or other Terms or policy violations. Finally, we may also keep certain information in backup for a limited period of time or as required by law.
For the latest information about how long we store different types of content, check out our Support Site.
Depending on where you live you may have additional rights. This section provides more details on region specific information.
We do our best to keep our policies as simple as possible, but depending on where you live, you have some additional rights or there may be specific information that you should be aware of. Please have a look at the list below to see if any apply to you!
Note: The US State Privacy Notice applies only if you are a resident of certain US states that have implemented state-level privacy laws.
We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time, and will give you a heads-up if we make any changes we think you should know about.
We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. But when we do, we’ll let you know one way or another. Sometimes, we’ll let you know by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy that’s available on our website and mobile application. Other times, we may provide you with additional notice (such as adding a statement to our websites’ home pages or providing you with an in-app notification).
Have any questions about the information here or wish to contact our Data Protection Officer (DPO)? You can contact us here.