Privacy Policy

Ratee ("we," "our," or "us") is committed to protecting your privacy. Ratee is a community platform for scanning and reviewing products, with a particular focus on cosmetics and beauty products, and is available on Google Play for Android devices and on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you use our mobile application and services. By using Ratee, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy.

We collect several types of information:

• Account Information: When you register, we collect your email address, username, and password. You are not required to use your real name — your username can be any handle of your choosing. If you choose to sign up or log in with Google Sign-In instead, we receive your Google account identifier, email address, name, and profile photo from Google. If you choose Sign in with Apple, we receive your Apple account identifier, your name, and an email address. If you use Apple's Hide My Email option, that address is a private relay address issued by Apple rather than your own, and we never receive your real address. We store the Apple account identifier so that your account remains yours even if that relay address later changes.
• Date of Birth: We ask for your date of birth when you register and use it to check that you meet our minimum age of 13. We store the date rather than a calculated age. It is private: it is never displayed on your profile or shown to other users.
• Profile Information: You may provide additional information such as a display name, profile picture, bio, gender, and preferences. Gender is optional, you can clear it at any time, and like your date of birth it is private and never shown to other users.
• Content You Submit: We collect reviews, ratings, product images, comments, and other content you post on our platform. Posting a product image or scanning a barcode may involve accessing your device's camera or photo library.
• Usage Data: We automatically collect information about how you interact with our app (only), including pages visited, features used, time spent, and your product scan history.
• Device Information: We collect device identifiers, operating system, mobile network information, device settings, and your IP address (which may be used to derive your approximate location for security and fraud-prevention purposes).

We use the collected information for the following purposes:

• To provide and maintain our services, including product reviews and ratings
• To create and manage your account
• To process and display your reviews, ratings, and content
• To send you notifications about activity on your account, reviews, and followers
• To improve our services, analyze usage patterns, and develop new features
• To detect, prevent, and address technical issues and security threats
• To enforce our Terms of Service and community guidelines
• To communicate with you about updates, changes, or important notices
• To provide customer support and respond to your inquiries
• Analytics and Measurement: We use analytics tools such as Firebase Analytics to understand how users interact with our app, measure app performance, and improve user experience. These analytics tools may use advertising identifiers (such as Google Advertising ID) for measurement purposes only. All analytics data is used solely for internal analytics and service improvement purposes.
• Business Insights and Product Development: We may also analyze, compile, and process usage data, ratings, review content, and other activity generated on the platform in an aggregated, de-identified, or statistical form in order to generate market insights, trend reports, and analytics products. We may use such aggregated insights for our own internal business purposes and may also make them available to business partners, brands, retailers, market-research organizations, and other third parties, including for commercial purposes, as further described in Section 4 ("Data Sharing and Disclosure").

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personally identifiable information to third parties for their own independent marketing purposes, except as described in this section. We may share your information in the following circumstances:

• Public Content: Your reviews, ratings, and profile information are visible to other users as part of our service.
• Service Providers: We may share data with third-party service providers who perform services on our behalf, such as:
  • Cloud hosting and database providers for data storage
  • Analytics providers, such as Firebase Analytics, for app analytics and measurement (which may use advertising identifiers for measurement purposes only)
  • Crash and error-reporting providers to help us maintain and improve service reliability
  • Email delivery services for notifications
  • Google Sign-In, if you choose to use it as an optional federated login method
  • Sign in with Apple, if you choose to use it as an optional federated login method
  • All service providers are contractually obligated to use your data solely for the purposes we specify.
• Legal Requirements: We may disclose information if required by law, court order, or government regulation.
• Business Transfers: In the event of a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction, and the new entity will be bound by the same privacy commitments described in this Policy.
• With Your Consent: We may share information for additional purposes with your explicit consent.
• Aggregated, Anonymized, and De-Identified Data: In addition to the purposes above, we reserve the right to compile, analyze, and process usage data, engagement metrics, ratings, review content, and other information generated through your use of the platform into aggregated, anonymized, or de-identified data sets and derived insights that do not, on their own or in combination with other information reasonably available to us or to a recipient, identify you as an individual, whether directly or indirectly. Any such data set will exclude your name, email address, phone number, password, exact device or advertising identifiers (such as advertising ID, push tokens, or install IDs), and any other field that could reasonably be used, alone or combined with other data, to re-identify you. We may use such aggregated or de-identified information for our own business purposes, including research, product development, market analysis, and business intelligence, and we may license, share, sell, or otherwise make such information or insights available to business partners, brands, retailers, market-research organizations, advertisers, and other third parties, including for commercial and monetization purposes. Because such information is irreversibly aggregated or de-identified and does not identify you personally, its use and disclosure as described in this paragraph is not considered a sale of your personal information under applicable law.

Before we begin using or sharing any aggregated or de-identified data for commercial or monetization purposes, we will notify you by email. By creating and continuing to use a Ratee account, you agree to this Privacy Policy, including this Section; if you do not agree with a future update to this Policy, you should stop using the app.

Should we begin processing your personal (identifiable) data for new purposes not described above — including any future commercial use of insights derived from personal data — we will update this Privacy Policy in accordance with Section 9 ("Changes to This Privacy Policy") and, where required by applicable law, including Algerian Law No. 18-07 on the protection of natural persons in the processing of personal data, obtain your prior consent before doing so.

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction. However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

You have the following rights regarding your personal information:

• Access: You can access and review your personal information through your account settings.
• Correction: You can update or correct your information at any time.
• Deletion: You can request deletion of your account and associated data by contacting us or using the delete account feature.
• Data Portability: You can request a copy of your data in a portable format.
• Opt-Out: You can opt out of certain communications and optional data processing activities, such as analytics and crash reporting, through your account settings. This does not apply to the aggregated, de-identified data described in Section 4, which is not tied to your individual account.

Ratee is not intended for users under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe we have collected information from a child under 13, please contact us immediately.

We retain your personal information for as long as necessary to provide our services and fulfill the purposes outlined in this policy. Raw behavioural analytics events are automatically deleted after 90 days.

When you delete your account, we delete your personal information. Deletion means the records are removed, not kept and marked inactive. Four things deliberately remain, and none of them identifies you:

• Information we are required by law to retain, for as long as the law requires it.
• Aggregate statistics, such as how many people used a feature on a given day. These contain no identifier and no link to any account, so removing your contribution would rewrite our historical totals rather than protect your privacy.
• Products you added to the catalogue. A product entry is a shared community record that everyone reviews and votes on, not personal content. It remains, and it stops being attributed to you.
• Behavioural events recorded before you created an account, on a device you shared with another Ratee user. These carry no link to any account. On a device we have only ever seen your account on, they are deleted along with everything else. On a shared device we cannot tell yours apart from the other person's, and deleting them would erase someone else's data at your request, so instead they are deleted automatically 90 days after they were recorded.

The full deletion policy, including how to delete your account without the app, is at https://ratee.app/delete-account

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last Updated" date. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes.

Ratee is committed to providing a safe and respectful environment for all users and strictly adheres to Google Play's Child Safety Standards.

• Protection of Minors: Ratee does not allow content that exploits, endangers, or sexualizes children in any form. Any content involving minors must be appropriate, respectful, and compliant with applicable laws.
• Content Moderation: We actively moderate user-generated content using automated systems and manual review to detect and remove harmful, abusive, or inappropriate content, including content that may pose a risk to children.
• Reporting Mechanisms: Users can report content or accounts that violate our community guidelines or child safety standards. All reports are reviewed promptly, and appropriate action is taken.
• Zero Tolerance Policy: We have a zero-tolerance policy for child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming, harassment, or any behavior intended to exploit or harm minors. Such content will be removed immediately, and offending accounts will be permanently banned.
• Legal Cooperation: We cooperate with law enforcement and relevant authorities when required by law, including reporting CSAM or other illegal activities involving minors.
• Age Restrictions: Ratee is not intended for children under the age of 13. We take reasonable steps to prevent underage access and remove accounts found to be in violation of this requirement.
• Continuous Improvement: We regularly review and improve our safety measures, moderation tools, and policies to ensure best practices for child safety.

For any concerns or reports related to child safety, please contact us immediately at: contacts@ratee.app

Ratee complies with Algerian Law No. 18-07 of 10 June 2018 on the protection of natural persons in the processing of personal data.

• Lawful and transparent processing: We process your personal data lawfully, fairly and transparently, and collect it only for specified, explicit and legitimate purposes (Art. 5).
• Consent: We process your personal data only after obtaining your consent (Art. 7), which you give by accepting this Privacy Policy when you create your account. If we introduce new purposes for processing your personal data in the future — including any commercial use of insights derived from personal data as described in Section 4 — we will notify you, including by email, before doing so; your continued use of the app after such notice constitutes your acceptance.
• Anonymization standard: When we describe data in this Policy as "anonymized" or "de-identified," we mean data processed so that it can no longer identify you, whether directly or indirectly, including by cross-referencing with other information reasonably available to us or to a recipient. Removing only direct identifiers such as your name is not sufficient for data to be treated as anonymized under this Policy.
• Sensitive data: We do not process sensitive data revealing racial or ethnic origin, political, religious or trade-union opinions, or data concerning health, except in the cases explicitly permitted by law (Art. 11).
• Your rights: You have the right to be informed, to access and obtain a copy of your data, to rectify inaccuracies, and to object to processing on legitimate grounds (Art. 32–36). You can exercise these rights from within the app or by contacting us.
• Security and cross-border transfers: We take appropriate measures to secure your data, and we obtain the authorization of the National Authority for the Protection of Personal Data (ANPDP) before any transfer of personal data abroad (Art. 41–46).
• Supervisory authority: Processing is subject to the oversight of the National Authority for the Protection of Personal Data (ANPDP), the independent regulator established under Article 22 of the law.

For any request related to your rights under Law 18-07, contact us at: contacts@ratee.app

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at:

Email: contacts@ratee.app

We will respond to your inquiry within a reasonable timeframe.