Privacy Policy

1.What we collect

Account details: your legal name, date of birth, email address, phone number and, where you give it, your postal address. Account photo: the photograph you add to your account, if you choose to add one. Jobs: what you post or accept, when, for how much, and how each one ended. Location: your device's position while a job is being posted, started, photographed or finished. Photographs: the completion and report photographs you take in the app, with the time, place and device they were taken on. Messages and calls: what you write and the photographs you send to the other person on a job, when each message was sent, delivered and read, and a record of each voice call — who called whom, when, how long it lasted and how it connected. The sound of a call is never recorded. Notification addresses: the token your phone gives Help so that messages and calls reach you, and the language they are written in. Ratings and reports about you and by you. Device and usage information needed to run and secure the app and the site, such as the app version, the device type and the network address.

Paying: your card, bank account, Apple Pay or Cash App Pay details are collected and held by our payment processor, Stripe. Averentium never receives or stores a card number or a bank account number.

Worker setup: identity documents, your Social Security number or other taxpayer identification number, and your payout bank details are collected by Stripe directly, inside screens Stripe provides within Help. Averentium receives only the result — whether verification passed, whether tax information is complete, whether payouts are enabled — together with an account identifier, and never the numbers themselves.

2.Why we collect it

To run the marketplace: to show nearby jobs, to confirm a worker is at the address, to keep the record of completed work, to move money and to pay workers. To keep people safe: to verify identity, to investigate reports, to enforce a ban against a person and not just an account, and to prevent fraud. To meet legal obligations: tax reporting, record keeping, the sanctions and anti-money-laundering rules that apply to payments, and lawful requests from authorities. To communicate with you about your account, your jobs and changes to Help.

3.Location

Location is read when you are posting, starting, photographing or finishing a job, and at no other time. A worker's precise position is visible to the poster only between the moment a job is started and the moment it is finished. Positions recorded with a job's photographs stay with the record of that job.

4.Photographs, messages and calls

Completion and report photographs are kept with the time, position and device they were captured on, because they are the record that a job was done as described. They are retained for the life of the account and after it, as section 8 explains, and may be reviewed if a job is reported or a payment is disputed.

An account photo is optional. Help keeps it on its servers, with its location and camera details removed, so that it appears on every phone you sign in on. It is shown to you, and to Help's administrators, who may use it to confirm whose account it is. It is kept while your account has it, and is deleted when you remove or replace it and when your account is deleted.

Each job has one private conversation between its poster and its worker, which opens when the job is accepted. Messages, their earlier versions when edited, and the photographs sent in them are encrypted before they are stored, and photographs sent in a conversation have their location and camera details removed. Unsending a message, or deleting it from your own view, removes it from the screen but not from Help's record, so that neither person can erase the other's record of a job. Voice calls travel between the two phones, directly or through Help's own relay server, encrypted from one phone to the other; Help keeps only the call record described in section 1.

A conversation is kept for three years after its job is completed, cancelled or refunded, or after a dispute about it is resolved, and is then deleted automatically — unless it is needed for an open dispute, chargeback, fraud or safety investigation, legal request, appeal or report, in which case it is kept until that is closed. Help staff read a conversation only to handle a report, a dispute, a safety or fraud concern or a legal request, and every such reading is recorded with its reason in a log that cannot be altered. Messages asking to be paid outside Help may be flagged automatically for review.

5.Where it is kept

Account records and signed documents are held in Apple's CloudKit. Jobs, ratings and reports, a record of each document you agree to, and website, payment, ledger, tax, message and call records are held in Help's own database, a managed Postgres database hosted by Railway. Every photograph — your account photo, the photographs added to a job, completion and report photographs, and those sent in messages — is encrypted by Help before it is stored, and is kept, encrypted, with Help's storage providers, Apple's CloudKit and Railway; only Help's servers can decrypt it. Identity, taxpayer identification and bank details are held by Stripe under Stripe's own safeguards. All of it is encrypted in transit and at rest. Averentium is based in the United States and processes information there.

6.Who receives it

The other party to a job: your name, your rating, the contact and address details needed to do the job, a worker's position while a job is under way, and the messages, photographs and calls you exchange in the job's conversation. Apple and Google: their notification services deliver Help's notifications to your phone, and a notification shows a preview of a message unless you turn previews off in Help's notification settings. Stripe: what is needed to charge a poster, verify a worker, pay a worker, prevent fraud, meet Stripe's own legal duties and report payments to tax authorities; Stripe's use of your information is described in its privacy policy at https://stripe.com/privacy. Tax authorities: the Internal Revenue Service and, where required, state authorities receive the information on any tax form the law requires us to file about payments to a worker. Apple: CloudKit stores account data, and Help's encrypted photographs, under Apple's terms. Service providers that host Help, deliver its email or help us operate it — Railway hosts Help's servers and database and keeps Help's encrypted photographs, and Resend delivers Help's email — under contracts that limit their use of the information to that work. Authorities: we disclose information to law enforcement, courts and regulators where the law requires it or where it is needed to protect someone's safety. A successor, if Averentium's business is sold or merged, on the same terms. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for targeted advertising.

7.Tax records

Payments to workers are reported to tax authorities when the law requires it. For every worker and every tax year in which the worker was paid, Averentium keeps a permanent record of the amounts paid, adjusted, reported and withheld, the status of any tax form, and the tax information status of the account. These records are kept for as long as the law requires and are never deleted automatically, because a filed tax form can be questioned or corrected years later. A worker sees the same figures in the app under Earnings and Taxes and under Documents.

8.How long we keep it

Your account and its jobs are kept while the account is open. When an account is closed, its contact details are removed from view within a reasonable time, but signed legal documents, the photographic record of completed jobs, the payment ledger, tax records and any record needed to enforce a ban are retained, because they are the evidence of work done, money moved and obligations met. Conversations are kept and deleted as section 4 describes, whether or not an account is closed. An account photo is deleted with the account, as section 4 describes. Backups are rotated on a fixed schedule.

9.Security

Access to records is limited to the people and systems that need it, every administrative action is logged, no secret is stored in the app, and every request that moves money is verified on the server rather than trusted from a phone. No system is perfectly secure; if a breach affects you we will tell you as the law requires.

10.Your choices and rights

You can read and export everything on your account from the profile screen, correct your details there, choose which notifications you receive, and ask us to close your account. Where the law where you live gives you further rights — to access, correct, delete or restrict the use of your information, or to know what is collected — you may exercise them by writing to the support address published on averentium.com, and we will respond within the time the law allows. We verify a request before acting on it and do not treat you differently for making one. The tax, payment and safety records described above may be exempt from deletion under the laws that require us to keep them.

11.Children

Help is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18, and an account found to belong to a minor is closed.

12.Changes

We may change this policy. A change is published with a new version and effective date, and you will be asked to read and agree to it before you continue to use Help.

13.Contact

AVERENTIUM LLC. Write to us at the support address published on averentium.com.