Privacy Policy
Our goal, mission and values
Ginza is an online community that connects people through a network of friends you can trust. We are the happiest social network!
Our commitment is to build a safe and welcoming space, far from the hatred of today's networks. A place to make friends, find people who like what you like, and be whoever you want to be.
This only works if everyone here plays their part, so we ask the same of you. Be kind. Treat other people with respect, including the ones you disagree with, and assume they meant well before you assume they did not. Hate, harassment, humiliation, and cruelty have no place on Ginza, and we act on them.
Introduction
Your privacy matters to us. This policy explains what information we collect when you use Ginza, why we collect it, how we use it, and the choices you have. Ginza is operated by Kraftwire Software Inc.
What we collect
We collect information you give us directly and information collected automatically when you use the service. Specifically:
· Identifiers: account ID and, where you provide it, date of birth.
· Contact info: email address and display name.
· User content: scraps, testimonials, photos, videos, direct messages, comments, forum and community posts, communities you own or moderate, profile bio and avatar, virtual pet data, and any media you upload.
· Social graph: friendships, friend requests, blocks, community memberships, the people you message, the topics you follow, and the people you add as a fan, a crush, or a Top 8 friend.
· Usage data: pages visited, features used, interaction timestamps, achievement and login-streak events, and the karma votes you cast.
· Profile visits: when you open somebody's profile we record the visit and show it to them, and we show you who has opened yours. You can look without being listed by turning on Stealth mode (profile views) in your settings.
· Diagnostics: crash logs, error reports, and performance metrics.
· Device and connection: IP address, browser type and version, operating system, device identifiers issued by the platform, and language.
We do NOT collect precise or coarse location from your device (the city or country shown on your profile is only what you typed there), contacts from your address book, health or fitness data, financial information, browsing history outside Ginza, search history outside Ginza, biometrics, or audio/SMS/call data. We do not use third-party advertising, do not track you across other companies' apps or websites, and do not sell your personal data.
We do not ask for sensitive information such as race, religion, sexual orientation or political views. A few optional profile fields let you share it if you choose to, and if you fill one in, it is stored and screened like any other profile text. Leaving them empty is perfectly normal, you can clear them whenever you like, and each one has its own visibility setting in your settings, so you decide who sees it.
Log data
Our servers may automatically log standard data sent by your browser · IP address, browser version, pages visited, and timestamps. We use these logs to keep the service running, diagnose problems, and improve reliability.
Personal information
When you create an account, we ask for your name and email, and for a password unless you sign up with Google or Apple. You may optionally add profile details such as age, location, interests, and an avatar. You may also sign up or log in using a social sign-in provider (Google or Apple). Anything you choose to share publicly on your profile, scrapbook, or in communities is visible to other users.
Google user data disclosure
Ginza's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Scopes requested:
· email: Your Google account email address
· profile: Your name
· openid: Authentication identity verification
We do not request access to your Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, or any other Google services. Google user data is not used for advertising, analytics, profiling, or training AI/ML models · only for authentication and account identification. We do not sell, share, rent, or transfer your Google user data to any third parties, except as required by law.
Independence and third-party affiliation
Ginza is an independent social network operated by Kraftwire Software Inc. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to Google LLC, Apple Inc., or Orkut.com in any way.
Social sign-in through Google or Apple is offered purely as an authentication convenience and does not imply any partnership, endorsement, or affiliation between Ginza and those companies.
User-generated content
Scraps, testimonials, photos, videos, messages, and community posts are stored in your account. Public content can be seen by other Ginza users.
Private messages and group chats are visible to the people in the conversation. We do not read them, and no automated system screens them · that is set out in full under "Moderation and enforcement data" below and under Moderation and enforcement in the Terms. Three things are worth knowing, and they are the only ones. If somebody in the conversation reports a message, our moderators can read what they need in order to deal with that report. If somebody reports your profile, the last ten messages between the two of you are attached to that report for the same reason. And if the person you are writing to has push notifications switched on, the opening of your message travels through Google's notification service to reach their phone, the same way it does in any app that sends notifications.
How we use information
We use your information to operate Ginza, authenticate you, deliver messages and notifications, suggest friends and communities, prevent abuse, and respond to support requests. We do not sell your personal data and we do not run third-party advertising on Ginza. Nor may anyone else advertise here without our prior written agreement · see Advertising and promotion in the Terms.
Fake account, bot, and abuse prevention
Ginza only works if the people on it are real. To keep fake accounts, impersonators, bots, and spam off the service, we analyse the account, device, connection, and usage data described above · for example your IP address, browser and app version, platform, the timestamps of your actions, account creation and login patterns, how fast actions such as friend requests or scraps are sent, and the reports other users file.
We use these signals only to detect and act on fake, duplicate, or automated accounts, impersonation, spam, attempts to get past our minimum age of 13, and attempts to evade a suspension or ban. We do not use them for advertising or ad profiling, and we do not sell or share them with advertisers or data brokers.
Where an account is restricted or removed on this basis, we keep a record of the signals and of the decision as enforcement evidence, as described under "Moderation and enforcement data" below. For users in the EU, EEA, and UK, the legal basis for this processing is our legitimate interest in keeping the platform safe and lawful. For users in Brazil, we rely on legitimate interest (legítimo interesse) and on compliance with our legal obligations.
Security
We take reasonable measures to protect your information against loss, theft, and unauthorized access. No system is perfectly secure, so please use a strong, unique password and keep your account details confidential.
How long we keep data
We keep your data for as long as your account is active. If you delete your account we remove your personal data within a reasonable period, apart from the following:
· Records we are required to keep for legal or accounting reasons.
· Moderation and enforcement records · see "Moderation and enforcement data" below.
· Copyright and trademark claim records · see "Copyright and trademark claims" below.
· Encrypted backups, which are purged within 30 days of the deletion.
· Scraps, testimonials, community posts and chat messages you sent to other people. Those stay where you put them, on their pages and in their conversations, shown as coming from a deleted account. What was sent to you is deleted with your account.
· Communities you own, which pass to one of their moderators, or to the official Ginza account if there is no moderator, so that the community and its members survive.
Aggregated, anonymised analytics that cannot identify you may be kept indefinitely.
Children
Ginza is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. Giving a false date of birth to get past this minimum age breaks our Terms of Service. If we learn that an account belongs to a child under 13 · from a report, from our own checks, from the signals described above, or from what the profile itself shows · we remove the account and its data. This applies whether the child opened the account themselves or an adult opened and supervised it for them: we do not offer a parent-managed account for under-13s, and consent from a parent does not let us keep one. We may act at any time, including long after the account was created. We also remove profile pictures that are photographs of a child on their own. If you believe a child has created an account, please contact us so we can remove it.
Third-party services
We use a small number of trusted providers to run Ginza: a managed cloud backend for our database, authentication, and storage; an email provider to send transactional and notification emails; a notification service, Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, which carries push notifications to your phone and therefore receives the text shown in them; two analytics providers, Google and Microsoft, described under "Analytics and session recording" below; and a content classification provider, currently OpenAI, which screens the text described under "Moderation and enforcement data" below. These providers only handle the data needed to deliver their service. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with advertisers or data brokers.
Analytics and session recording
We use two analytics providers to understand how Ginza is used and where it breaks:
· Google Analytics 4, loaded through Google Tag Manager, which records page views, device and browser type, and interactions such as clicks.
· Microsoft Clarity, which records session replays and heatmaps: the pages you open, how far you scroll, and where you tap or click.
Microsoft Clarity runs in strict masking mode. All text is masked inside your browser before anything is sent, so Microsoft does not receive the words in your posts, messages, comments, or profile, nor anything you type into a field. What a replay shows us is the layout of the page and where you moved and clicked, with the text blanked out.
Neither provider is used for advertising, and we do not sell or share this data with advertisers or data brokers. Analytics load only on ginza.com.br · never in development or preview builds · and only after your first interaction with the page, or four seconds after it opens. Our iOS and Android apps load the Ginza website, so the same applies there. You can block both providers using your browser's settings or a content blocker.
Your rights
You can view, update, or delete most of your information directly from your profile and account settings. You can also request a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete your account by emailing support@ginza.com.br · we speak English and Portuguese on the team.
Moderation and enforcement data
When our admins or automated systems take action under our Terms of Service or this Privacy Policy, we record what happened so we can keep the platform safe and answer appeals. This includes:
· Account actions: warnings, freezes, suspensions, and permanent bans, including the reason and timestamp.
· Content actions: removal or hiding of scraps, testimonials, photos, videos, reported messages, comments, and community posts that breach our rules.
· Community actions: freezing, removing, or transferring ownership of communities whose content, members, or owners breach our rules.
· Reports: information you submit when reporting another user, post, or community, and the outcome of our review.
· Authenticity actions: removal of accounts found to be fake, duplicate, automated, or impersonating someone, and reversal of the activity they generated.
This moderation and audit data is retained for as long as needed to operate Ginza safely and to comply with legal obligations, even if the underlying content or account has been removed. It is accessible only to authorized staff at Kraftwire Software Inc., apart from the text we send to the classification provider described immediately below.
· Automated text screening: the text of names, community names and descriptions, posts, group chat titles, gift messages, requests to join a community, and other content you write may be processed by automated classification services, including third party providers acting as processors (currently OpenAI, whose moderation and language models we use for this), solely to detect content that breaches our rules. The classification result and the screened text excerpt are stored with the moderation record.
· Automated image checks: a new profile picture is compared against a short list of protected images, such as the Ginza logo, so that nobody can wear our branding by uploading it. Nothing else about a photo or a video is checked automatically, and no image is sent to a classification service.
· Not screened: the contents of your direct messages and group chats. We do not send them to any classification service and we do not scan them ourselves. A group chat's title is the one exception, and it is screened like any other name. Message contents reach a moderator only through a report · of a message, or of a profile · and then only as far as is needed to deal with it, in which case the reported excerpt and the messages around it are stored with the moderation record like any other.
Copyright and trademark claims
If you report copyright or trademark infringement, we collect and process the information you provide so we can investigate and respond. This includes:
· Your contact details and a description of the work you believe has been infringed.
· The location (URL or content identifier) of the allegedly infringing material on Ginza.
· A statement of your good-faith belief that the use is not authorized.
· Any correspondence between you, the alleged infringer, and Kraftwire Software Inc. regarding the claim.
We retain copyright and trademark claim records for as long as needed to resolve disputes, enforce our policies, and comply with legal obligations, even after the reported content or account has been removed. This data is accessible only to authorized staff at Kraftwire Software Inc.
Communications
Essential account communications · such as password resets, email address change confirmations, account security alerts, and the notice we send when these terms or this policy change in a significant way · are required for the operation of your account and cannot be opted out of while your account is active. Everything else can be switched off · see the next two paragraphs.
Notification emails tell you that something happened on Ginza: a new scrap, a friend request, a message you missed. You can switch each kind off on its own in your account settings, under Notifications.
Product updates and newsletter emails are sent to all account holders by default. You may opt out of these at any time using the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any one of them. Opting out does not affect essential account communications.
European users (GDPR)
If you are in the EU/EEA or UK, you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, port, and object to the processing of your personal data. Depending on the activity, we rely on the performance of our agreement with you, on our legitimate interests, on your consent where we ask for it, and on compliance with our legal obligations.
Brazilian users (LGPD)
If you are in Brazil, the LGPD gives you the right to confirm processing, access, correct, anonymize, port, and delete your data, and to revoke consent at any time. Kraftwire Software Inc. acts as the data controller (controlador) for the personal data you provide to Ginza. You can reach the person responsible for data protection (our encarregado) at support@ginza.com.br.
Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will update the date above and, if changes are significant, notify you by email or with an in-app message.
Contact
For privacy questions or requests, write to support@ginza.com.br · we speak English and Portuguese on the team.
Social sign-in (Google, Apple)
When you sign in with Google or Apple:
· We receive your email address and basic profile information (name) from the provider.
· We do not access your contacts, calendar, drive, or any other account data.
· Social sign-in data is used exclusively to create and authenticate your account.
· We do not store OAuth tokens long-term; authentication sessions are managed via secure, short-lived session tokens.