Privacy policy

rate is an app where you rate anything out of five stars and see how your taste lines up with your people. This page says what rate collects, what is public, who handles it for us, and how to delete it. It is short because we don't collect much.

Who we are

rate is made by woorlds. Questions about this policy or your data: [email protected].

What you give us

• Your phone number, or your Apple ID. You sign in with Sign in with Apple, or with your phone number and a 6-digit code we text you. We ask every account for a phone number to keep on file — it's how you get back in. We use it only to sign you in: it isn't shown to anyone and we don't message you otherwise. Sign in with Apple shares an email address with us — never your name — and you can choose a private relay address Apple makes for you. We keep it with your sign-in and don't use it for anything else. Accounts made before October 2026 with a handle and a password can keep signing in that way.
• A handle — your name on rate, which you pick once you're in. We don't ask for your real name.
• A signing key is made for your account and kept by us, encrypted, to sign what you post on rate. There's no recovery code to keep.
• A profile photo and a bio, if you add them. The photo is cropped and re-encoded on your phone before upload, which removes the original file's hidden details (including any location in it).

Finding friends from your contacts

If you choose find friends and allow access to your contacts, the app reads only the phone numbers on them — no names, emails or anything else — and scrambles each one on your phone (a one-way SHA-256 hash) before sending it. Our server compares the scrambled numbers with the sign-in numbers of people on rate and shows you the ones who are here, so you can follow them. We don't keep the numbers you send — not in our database and not in our logs; we only count how many were sent, to stop abuse. Someone who has your number in their contacts can find your account the same way. You can say no, or switch contacts off for rate in iPhone Settings at any time.

What you post

Ratings, the lines you write with them, replies, hearts, lists, bookmarks, who you follow, and the answers you give the oracle's questions. These are public by default: anyone on rate can see them on your page, in the feed and on the things you rated. Your handle, photo, bio and the titles of your oracle reads are public too. From 6 October 2026, your current oracle read also shows on your profile to people who can see your ratings; reads written before that stay private. Share cards and invite links show the same public things and nothing more.

Reports you file go only to our team, who read them to remove what breaks the terms. Private: reports you file, people you block, the text of your earlier oracle reads and of any read written before 6 October 2026, and whether you called a read accurate (only you see those). With a private account, your read and what you post show only to the people you approve.

Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store your device's push token so Apple can deliver them. We use it for one daily round-up of what your people rated, for replies to your ratings, and for new followers. The token is deleted when you sign out, when Apple tells us the device is gone, or when you delete your account.

Location

rate uses your location only while you use the app — never in the background. It asks once: when you open the near me deck, ask the oracle for something near you, or after your first few ratings, with the reason first. Once you allow it, the app reads where you are when you open it and when you come back to it, so near me and the oracle know where you are without making you wait; the search also shows places near you. Your approximate position goes with your questions to the oracle (see below). In the iPhone app you can also switch location off inside rate at any time (settings → location); while it's off, nothing about where you are is used or sent. Our record of how the app is used notes whether location is allowed and how old the phone's last position is — never the position itself. Your phone rounds the position to about 100 metres before sending it. Our server uses it to pick the right area (about 2 km across) and doesn't write it to your account or the database. Places around you come from Google Places: we send Google the rounded position of the area you're in, never your account. A plan near you keeps a rounded position with your account in memory for up to a day so the same plan can be shown again. Positions are stripped from our error reports.

The oracle and AI

The oracle's reads, plans and questions are written by an AI model. To write them, our server sends your handle, your ratings and the lines you wrote, plus answers you gave to its earlier questions, to OpenRouter, which passes them to OpenAI. A plan for you and other people also includes their ratings and lines as they are visible to you. We don't send your location, your device details or anything about your contacts. The read is generated when you open the oracle and one is due.

When you ask the oracle something, your question, your handle, your ratings and lines and what it already told you go to Anthropic's Claude, which writes the answer — together with the ratings and lines of the people you follow, as you can see them, so it can answer about your people (every question carries them; it can also look up anyone else's ratings that you can see). Once you allow location, your approximate position goes with your questions to the oracle, rounded to about 100 metres, and is used to find places near you. Your conversations with the oracle are stored with your account, and the team reads them to improve the app. They are deleted with your account.

Usage information

• What you do in the app — the screens you open, the cards you're shown, what you rate and skip, the buttons you tap, how long a visit lasts and how it began (a link, a notification), and visits to rate's launch page. Each event carries a random identifier made on your phone for rate alone (not an advertising identifier) and, when you're signed in, your account; before you sign in it's tied to that identifier only. We use it to see what works in rate and what doesn't. The words you type aren't part of it, and none of it is used for ads.
• Session replay — once you say ok on the sheet that explains the oracle, rate also records a replay of the screen while you use the app, with everything you type masked, so we can see where the app confuses people. Nothing is recorded before that ok.
• Numbers derived from what you posted — for example whether people rate again the week after they start — shown to us only as totals, to see whether rate works.
• The deck's order uses your own ratings and bookmarks to decide what to show you next, and how often everyone passes on a card — a total per card, nothing about who — so things almost nobody recognises sink.

Who handles data for us

• DigitalOcean — runs our server.
• Supabase — our database, sign-in and file storage.
• Twilio — texts you the sign-in code. Twilio receives your phone number for that, and nothing else.
• Sentry — error reports from our server, without IP addresses or request headers.
• Apple — delivers notifications, and Sign in with Apple if you use it.
• PostHog (stored in the EU) — keeps a copy of the usage events above and the session replays, so we can study them. Everything sent to PostHog goes through our server, which doesn't pass on your IP address.
• Google (Places) — the photos of places, and the restaurants, bars and cafés near you where our own places data doesn't reach yet. Google gets the area you're in, a place's name and where it is, and what you type in the search when places near you are shown — never your account.
• OpenRouter and OpenAI — write the oracle's reads, plans and questions, as described above.
• Anthropic — Claude answers what you ask the oracle, as described above.

Names, descriptions and pictures of the things you rate come from public sources such as Wikimedia (Wikidata, Wikipedia, Commons), Cover Art Archive and Open Library. When you search or view a card, your phone may contact Wikimedia directly to fetch a picture or a search result, the way it would for any website; we send them nothing about your account.

Places — restaurants, bars, cafés, bakeries, museums and galleries, parks, cinemas and music venues — come from open data (below) and, where that doesn't reach yet, from Google Places. Their photos are Google's, shown with the photographer's name. We keep a place's photo and anything else Google tells us about it for up to 30 days, then fetch it again (only Google's id for a place is kept longer); a place you rate keeps only its name, address, position and kind with your rating.

Places data: Places from Overture Maps Foundation, overturemaps.org — data from Meta, Microsoft and others under CDLA Permissive 2.0; data from Foursquare under Apache 2.0 (see NOTICE).

What we don't do

No ads. No tracking across apps or websites. No selling or renting of data. No keeping your address book. No data brokers.

Keeping and deleting

• Your content stays until you delete it. Deleting a rating removes it and its line.
• Delete account (your page → settings) removes your account, everything you posted, your photo, your oracle reads, answers and conversations, your push token, the usage events recorded with your account and your login, immediately; if you signed in with Apple, we also ask Apple to end rate's access to your Apple ID. We remove PostHog's copy of your events and replays within 30 days. Things you were the first to rate (a film's entry, say) are shared with everyone who rated them, so the entry stays; your rating of it does not.
• Error reports follow Sentry's retention (currently 90 days).
• You can see everything you posted on your own page. If you'd like a copy of your data, email us and we'll send it.

Age

rate is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them. If you think a child has an account, email us and we'll delete it.

Changes

When this policy changes, we'll update this page and the date at the top, and say so in the app if the change matters.