Privacy Policy
Last updated: September 12, 2026
See also our Terms of Service.
About this policy
This describes what Truk’s systems actually do with your data today, so that it can be checked against the product rather than taken on faith. Where we collect less than you might expect — coarse areas instead of precise locations, one-way hashes instead of identities — that is a design decision, and we explain it.
1. Who this policy covers
This Privacy Policy explains what Truk collects and why, for everyone who uses the Service: people browsing and voting, whether or not they have an account (“Community Members”), Vendors, and Venues. It is written to describe our actual systems, not general promises, so where a practice differs between these groups, we say so.
Truk is operated by Byte Digital, a California sole proprietorship, which is the business responsible for the information described here. We do not maintain a public business address; you can reach us at any time at hello@usetruk.com, which is also how you exercise any of the rights in Section 6.
2. Information we collect
Account information
If you create an account: your name, email address, and a password (we store a cryptographic hash of it, never the password itself), or, if you sign in with Google, the basic profile information Google provides. Vendors and Venues also provide a business name, contact email and phone, and details about what they sell or host.
Guest participation
You can browse and vote without an account. We set a cookie that lets us recognize your browser as one consistent participant — mainly so the same person voting for the same thing repeatedly is counted as one person’s enthusiasm rather than several different people (see Section 3). This cookie does not carry your name or contact information.
Interest and activity signals
When you vote, follow a Vendor or Venue, RSVP to an event, view a page, or ask for a vendor near you, we record that as a signal tied to a coarse area and a salted, one-way hash of your identity — not your account ID or device ID in recoverable form. Section 3 covers exactly what “coarse area” means.
Vendor and Venue business information
Listing details a Vendor or Venue chooses to provide: photos, descriptions, categories, offerings and prices, space or capability requirements, and the service area a Vendor travels. Vendors may also add credentials — insurance policies, health permits — and upload supporting documents. Credential documents are encrypted at rest, are never shown on any public page, and every access to one is logged.
Payment information
Subscription payments are handled entirely by Stripe. We receive confirmation that a payment succeeded or failed and enough billing metadata to manage your subscription; we do not receive or store your full card number.
Communications data
Text messages are not available yet, so we are not sending any and no SMS provider holds your number. You can still save a phone number on your account, and if you do we store it and nothing else happens with it. When texts become available, opting in will record your number and that opt-in against a specific Vendor or Venue, along with delivery status for the messages sent.
If you enable push notifications, your browser or device gives us a push subscription endpoint, not your phone number or precise identity. Transactional and account emails are sent through Resend.
Optional preferences about food
On your profile you can, entirely optionally, tell us what you cannot eat, roughly what you expect to spend per person, when a vendor nearby would be useful, and how many people you usually go with. Every one of these can be skipped or left blank, and skipping them changes nothing about how the service works for you.
These are used to show Vendors and Venues what the people following them want — as totals only. A group is never reported until at least five different people are in it, no answer is ever attributed to an individual, and nothing here is shared outside the platform or used for advertising. You can change or delete your answers at any time from your profile, and deleting your account removes them with it.
We do not ask for demographic information. We do not collect your age, income, ethnicity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or the composition of your household, and we do not infer them. Dietary answers such as halal, kosher or gluten-free can indicate religious observance or a medical condition, so we treat them with the same restriction as everything else here: counted within a group, never read as an individual.
Technical and usage data
Standard web request data (browser type, pages visited, timestamps), and, for fraud and abuse detection specifically, a salted hash of your IP address rather than the address itself. If you use error reporting or product-analytics features (when configured), a monitoring provider (Sentry) and a product analytics tool (PostHog) may receive technical event data; neither is used to sell or share your information with advertisers.
3. Location, specifically
Location is the piece of information people are most often surprised by, so here is exactly what happens with it.
- We only ask when there is a reason to. Your browser’s own permission prompt controls this; declining it does not block anything else on Truk from working.
- You choose the precision. “Near me — roughly” and “Near me — exactly” are different requests, and the page always says which one is in effect.
- A coordinate is never stored. When you cast a vote or a request, your device’s coordinate is converted on our server into a coarse grid cell — roughly three-quarters of a mile across — and the original coordinate is discarded in the same operation. What we retain is which cell, not where in it.
- Small numbers are never published. Aggregated demand for an area is only shown once enough different people are behind it (currently five). Below that, the honest answer we give is that we cannot report on that area yet — not a zero, and not a number that would identify individuals.
- Confirmed appearances are exact, and public, deliberately. A Vendor’s upcoming booked appearances and self-announced stops are addresses they have chosen to publish so people can find them — that is a different thing from a Community Member’s vote location, which stays private by design.
4. How we use information
- Operate the voting, discovery, matching, and booking system.
- Compute demand aggregates and forecasts for Vendors and Venues, always subject to the cohort-size and precision rules in Section 3.
- Send transactional messages (booking updates, credential expiry reminders) and, where you have opted in, promotional or informational messages from a Vendor or Venue you follow.
- Detect and prevent fraud and abuse — for example, identifying vote patterns consistent with location spoofing or a single actor voting under multiple identities.
- Maintain the security of the Service and enforce our Terms.
- Comply with legal obligations.
We do not use your individual voting history to build an advertising profile, and we do not sell personal information as that term is defined under the CCPA.
6. Your choices and rights
- Access and correction. You can see and edit most of what we hold about you from your account settings.
- Deletion. Deleting your account replaces your name, email, phone number, username, and profile photo with anonymized placeholders and immediately ends every active session. We keep the underlying account record because votes and similar signals reference it and removing the row outright would corrupt aggregate data that no longer identifies you — but nothing in the retained record identifies you anymore. A Vendor or Venue must first remove any businesses they own before their account can be deleted.
- SMS opt-out. Not needed yet, because we send no text messages. When we do, replying STOP to any message ends them for that sender, at any time.
- Location. Revoke location permission in your browser at any time; nothing else on Truk requires it.
- California residents (CCPA): you have the right to know what personal information we hold about you, to request deletion of it, and to not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. Because we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, there is no “opt out of sale” link to provide.
To exercise a right this section does not already give you self-service access to, contact us using the details in Section 13.
7. How long we keep information
Interest signals expire automatically, and how long depends on what the signal is: a page view is retained for a couple of weeks, while a stronger signal like a follow, a check-in, or a completed purchase is retained for about a year. Once a signal expires it no longer counts toward any total. Credential documents are retained for as long as the credential is active plus a limited period afterward, for the Vendor’s own record and any dispute about a past booking. Account information is retained until you delete your account, at which point Section 6 describes exactly what happens.
8. Security
Traffic to Truk is encrypted in transit. Credential documents are encrypted at rest and every access to one is logged. Interest signals are tied to a salted, one-way hash of your identity rather than the identity itself, using a salt that is never checked into source code. We rate-limit sensitive actions to slow down abuse, and we apply standard web security headers (a content security policy, HSTS, and others) to the Service. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that information will never be accessed by someone unauthorized, but these are the concrete measures in place today.
9. Children’s privacy
Truk is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has provided us information, contact us using the details in Section 13 and we will delete it.
10. Where data is processed
Truk is built for the U.S. market and its infrastructure runs in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S., which may have different data protection laws than where you live.
11. Third-party links
Vendor and Venue listings may link to their own websites or social profiles. Those sites have their own privacy practices, and this policy does not cover them.
12. Changes to this policy
If we make a material change to this policy, we will make a reasonable effort to tell you before it takes effect, the same way described in the Terms of Service.
13. Contact
Questions about this policy, or a request relating to your information: hello@usetruk.com.