Privacy policy

What you give us

Most of what we hold is what you choose to enter:

• Your account: your name, email address and password (stored only as a secure hash). If you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address and a Google account identifier instead of a password.
• Your profile, if you fill it in: phone and WhatsApp numbers, a photo, a short bio, a company name, a city and a website.
• Listings you post: the property’s details, price, location and photos. Photos are re-encoded when they are uploaded, which removes the data embedded in them, including any GPS position.
• Messages you send to other people through Ikarona.
• Lists you make and share, with the votes and notes you add to them.
• Saved searches and email alerts. You can ask for an alert without an account, in which case we keep only your email address and what the alert is for.
• Reports you send us about a listing (for example, that it is no longer available), and ratings you leave about a lister.

What we collect as you use Ikarona

• How often each listing is viewed, saved and contacted. These counts are kept per listing, not per person, and listers see them as totals.
• When a buyer reports a listing without an account, we keep a one-way scrambled form of their IP address — enough to tell one person from two — and never the address itself.
• Technical logs from our servers, such as IP addresses, device and browser types and error details, which we use to keep the service running and secure.
• If you allow notifications in the app, a token that lets us send them to your device.

What stays on your device

The app keeps some things only on your phone: the places you save for drive times, the listings you have looked at recently, your language and display choices, and the listing you are writing (which is also saved to your account as a hidden draft once you choose its type).

When you ask for drive times, the app sends the positions of your saved places to our server to work them out. They are used for that calculation only, and are not stored.

On the website, your browser keeps your sign-in, your language and your display choices.

How we use it

• To run the service: show listings, put buyers and renters in touch with listers, deliver messages, and keep your lists and alerts.
• To send you the emails you ask for or need: account verification and password resets, alerts, replies, and reminders to listers to confirm that a listing is still available.
• To keep Ikarona trustworthy: review listings before they go live, act on reports, and prevent spam and abuse.
• To fix problems and improve the service.

We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t use it for advertising.

What other people see

• A listing shows the lister’s name and the details they entered. Where the lister chooses, the map shows only the area, not the building.
• Phone and WhatsApp numbers are not part of the listing page; they are fetched only when someone taps Call or WhatsApp.
• Anyone with the link to a list you share can see it. Members see each other’s names, votes and notes.

Who else handles your data

We use a small number of companies to run Ikarona. Each handles data only to provide its service to us:

• Microsoft Azure hosts our servers, database, photo storage and service logs, in data centres in the Netherlands and Germany.
• Resend delivers our emails.
• Sentry receives error reports from the website and our servers, so that we can fix them.
• PostHog (hosted in the EU) measures how the website is used — only if you agree in the cookie banner. With the same agreement, Sentry may record replays of website sessions in which all text, inputs and images are masked.
• Google provides sign-in with Google and the maps in the app. The website’s maps come from OpenFreeMap and MapTiler, and its address search from MapTiler and OpenStreetMap’s Nominatim.
• Expo, Google and Apple deliver the app’s notifications.

Drive times are worked out on our own routing server.

How long we keep it

We keep your account and what belongs to it until you delete your account. Listings come down 60 days after their lister last confirmed them, and expired listings stay in your account until you remove them or delete the account.

Server logs and error reports are kept for a limited time, usually no more than 90 days.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from the Profile tab in the app. This permanently removes your profile, your listings and their photos, your saved homes, the lists you own, and your votes, notes and memberships in other people’s lists. Homes you added to a list someone else owns stay in it. Messages you sent may remain visible to the people you sent them to.

You can also write to support@ikarona.com to have your account deleted, or to stop an email alert you set up without an account — every alert email also has an unsubscribe link.

Your rights

You can ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, have it corrected or deleted, and object to how we use it. Write to support@ikarona.com and we will answer within 30 days. We handle personal data in line with Lebanese law, including Law No. 81 of 2018 on electronic transactions and personal data.

Children

Ikarona is not meant for anyone under 18, and we don’t knowingly collect their information.

Security

Connections to Ikarona are encrypted, passwords are stored only as secure hashes, and access to our systems is limited to the people who run the service. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect what you entrust to us.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top, and for significant changes we will tell you in the app or by email before they take effect.

Contact

Questions, requests or complaints about your data: support@ikarona.com.