Privacy Policy

Operator: Lee Jacob Yan Chak, an individual developer · Jurisdiction: Hong Kong SAR · Contact: support@krownapps.info

In force from 21 October 2026.

First written 27 July 2026, and last corrected against the app (version 2.5.0) and the running database on 9 October 2026. The text about the photo check was added on 20 October 2026. The text about results you open and asks for votes was added on 21 October 2026. Last updated 21 October 2026.

Krown is built and run by one person, not by a company. There is no corporate entity, no staff, and no legal department behind it.

What Krown collects

To create your account

• Phone number, if you sign in with it. Krown’s sign-in service (Supabase Auth) creates a one-time code and sends it to you by SMS through Twilio, then checks the code you type back. Other members of your group never see your number.
• Apple or Google account, if you sign in with one instead. With Apple, Krown asks only for your email address, and Apple’s private relay address works. With Google, Google shares your email address, name and profile picture link, and Krown’s sign-in service stores them with your account. Krown uses the email address to recognise you and does not show it, your name or that picture in the app.
• Age check — you enter your date of birth once at sign-up. It is checked on your device, and the date itself is not sent to Krown or stored. What is stored is an age bracket (13-15, 16-17 or 18+) and the date you passed the check. The bracket is shown on your own profile screen. Other members of your group do not see it.
• Username and avatar photo — visible to people in your groups. Your username also appears on any card you choose to share (below).

When you play

• Photos, and the group and day they belong to. You take them with Krown’s camera or pick them from the photos and videos you took that day. With a photo, Krown may also keep a muted clip of up to three seconds: the moment the camera caught with the shot, or the start of a video you picked.
• Votes you give. These are anonymous to other members of your group. They are not anonymous to Krown itself — the account behind a vote is stored so duplicate and abusive voting can be prevented. Krown will not tell your group who voted how.
• Group membership, invite links you create or use, and invites you send to a friend inside the app, with their answer.
• Reports and blocks you submit. A report you file records which photo it was about, the reason you chose, any note you wrote, and — once someone has looked at it — whether it was upheld or dismissed and when. The person you reported is never told who reported them.
• Notification settings you choose in the app.
• A push token, if you turn notifications on. Your device registers a token with Expo’s push service and Krown stores it so notifications can reach you. The notifications Krown sends you, with their title and text, are kept in a send log.
• Invite activity — the invite code you joined through, and a log of invite codes that were tried, with an identifier for the device that tried each one and whether it succeeded. That log is deleted after 30 days.
• Your group’s timezone, read from your device when you create a group, so the crown drops at the right local time (10 PM, unless the group picks 8, 9 or 11 PM).
• The date you accepted these terms and this policy.
• Nudges you send a friend to post, kept for two days.
• Asks for votes you send a friend, kept for two days.
• Results you open. Krown keeps one record for each night whose results you open, to see whether groups come back.
• Cards you choose to share. Krown can make a story card (your username and a code that lets people ask to join your group) or, when one of your own photos wins, a winner card (that photo, its category and your crown score). Krown makes the image on your phone, and you decide where to post it. For a day, anyone with the card’s link or code can look it up and ask to join; the group’s creator says yes or no. Krown keeps the card’s details, who asked and the answer, and deletes them 30 days after the card ends.

Permissions the app asks for

The app asks for camera access; for notifications if you choose to turn them on; for your photo library when you choose a profile photo, read an invite code out of a screenshot, or pick photos and videos you took today for your three; for permission to add a photo to your library only when you tap Save; and for contacts only if you choose to use “Find your friends” (described below). It does not ask for your microphone: clips are kept without sound.

Finding friends from contacts (optional)

Krown can show you which of your contacts already play, and let you text the rest an invite. This is off until you use it: the iOS contacts permission is requested only when you tap See Who’s Here, never at launch and never during sign-up, and you can choose full access, a limited selection, or nothing. You can revoke it at any time in iOS Settings.

How it works, precisely: your contacts’ names, numbers and emails never leave your phone. On your device, each phone number is converted into an irreversible scrambled code (a salted SHA-256 hash). Only those codes are sent to Krown’s server, which answers with the ones that belong to existing Krown accounts so the app can show you those friends. The codes are used to answer that question and are not kept as a copy of your address book; requests are rate-limited; and Krown cannot reconstruct a phone number from a code. Names stay on your phone for display only.

Inviting someone from that screen opens your own Messages app with a pre-written invite. You choose the recipient there and press send yourself — Krown never messages anyone on your behalf and never sends invitations automatically.

Who processes it

The services below were identified by reading the shipping code and inspecting the running system on 9 October 2026, not from memory or assumption. Amazon Web Services was added on 20 October 2026, from the code and the checks recorded when the photo check went live. The storage region for Supabase was read from the live project. Where something is a hosted setting rather than code, such as the sign-in SMS provider, the page says how it was checked.

• Supabase — database, file storage for photos, clips and avatars, and authentication (phone, Apple and Google sign-in). It is the app's only backend. Your data is held in Supabase's Sydney, Australia region.
• Amazon Web Services — the photo check, since 17 October 2026. Each new photo is sent to Amazon Rekognition in Sydney, Australia before your group can see it, as described below.
• Expo — two separate things. Push delivery: when a notification is sent to you, your push token together with the notification's title and text is passed to Expo's push service to be delivered. App updates: released builds contact Expo's update service when the app starts.
• Twilio — sign-in codes. Supabase Auth sends your one-time code by SMS through Twilio’s messaging service, so your phone number and the text of that message pass through Twilio.
• Apple — three separate things. Distribution: Krown is on the App Store, with test builds on TestFlight, under an individual Apple Developer membership held by the operator. Push delivery: notifications are handed from Expo to Apple’s Push Notification service, which delivers them to your device. Sign in with Apple: if you use it, Apple confirms who you are to Krown’s sign-in service and shares your email address or a private relay address.
• Google — only if you sign in with Google. Google confirms who you are to Krown’s sign-in service and shares your email address, name and profile picture link.
• Vercel — hosts this website, krownapps.info.

Every service that processes data for Krown does so only to provide its service to Krown, under terms that require it to protect that data at least as well as this policy does.

PostHog is deliberately not in that list. An earlier version of this page named it. It belongs to an older web version of Krown and processes no data for app users. Krown has no analytics, advertising or tracking service of any kind in the app.

Sentry and Upstash are no longer in that list. Earlier versions of this page named them. Nothing in the app, the server or this website uses either of them now (checked 9 October 2026).

This website. krownapps.info sets no cookies and runs no analytics. Card pages (addresses starting krownapps.info/c/ or /r/) keep a random ID in your browser’s storage and send it with each card lookup. Krown’s server stores only a scrambled form of that ID, to limit how many cards one device can check, and deletes that log after 30 days.

Who sends your sign-in code. The app asks Supabase Auth for a code; the provider behind it is a Supabase setting rather than something in Krown’s code. Twilio’s own message log, checked in October 2026, shows the codes going out through Twilio’s messaging service. Supabase creates and checks the code; Twilio delivers the text.

Checking photos. To keep Krown safe, every photo you post is checked automatically before your group can see it. Krown sends the photo to Amazon Rekognition, a service of Amazon Web Services, in Sydney, Australia. It answers with labels such as “nudity” or “violence” and how sure it is. Only the photo is sent: not the clip that may come with it, and not your profile photo. Krown has opted out of Amazon using these photos to develop or improve its services, and the opt-out was in place before the first photo was sent. A photo the check flags stays hidden, and a person at Krown may review it. What the check said about a photo is deleted 30 days after the check, unless the photo is still waiting for a person to look at it.

No advertising network and no data broker is used. Nothing may be added to that list without checking the code first.

How long it is kept

Photo files and their clips are deleted 30 days after they are posted. A job runs every hour and removes them from storage.

This was checked against the running system on 9 October 2026, and its history is recorded here because the job has failed before. Being scheduled is not the same as working: until 28 July the job failed every time it ran, so nothing was deleted. From 25 September it failed again, and the photos that came due in that time were deleted late, on 5 October, when the job was rebuilt. The rebuilt job could not run until a key it needs was added on 9 October; no photo came due in that time, and the first run after the fix succeeded. That is the standard this page holds itself to: a retention promise counts only when the job is observed to succeed, not when it merely exists.

That job removes the files. The record that a post existed, and the nightly result it counted towards, are not removed by it. Everything attached to your account, files included, is removed when you delete your account — see deleting your account.

Some records have their own limits. Invite-code attempts and card lookups are deleted after 30 days; answered or expired invites, and ended cards with the requests made through them, 30 days after they close; nudges after two days.

Asks for votes are also deleted after two days. What the photo check said about a photo is deleted 30 days after the check, unless the photo is still waiting for a person to look at it. Everything else attached to your account is kept until you delete the account. Past nightly results stay after that, without your name.

Deleting your data

You can delete your account from inside the app. See deleting your account.

Children

Krown is for people aged 13 and over. If the age check fails, sign-up stops and no account is created. That refusal is remembered on the device for a year; because it is stored on the device, it does not survive reinstalling the app. Krown is not designed for children.

Your choices

• Turn notifications off in Settings.
• Block anyone in your group, and unblock them again from your blocked list in Settings.
• End a crown link you shared, in Settings › Shared Crown Links.
• Leave a group at any time.
• Delete your account at any time.

Your rights

You can ask to see the personal data Krown holds about you, to correct it, or to delete it. Email support@krownapps.info. Krown replies within 40 days, in line with Hong Kong’s Personal Data (Privacy) Ordinance.

Withdrawing consent

You can withdraw your consent at any time, in any of these ways:

• Delete your account, in You › Settings › Delete Account.
• Turn off Krown’s access to notifications, contacts, the camera or your photos, in iOS Settings.
• Email support@krownapps.info.

Every photo you post is checked, so choosing not to have your photos checked means not posting photos.

Contact

Email support@krownapps.info. This reaches one person, not a support team.