Privacy Policy

Your phone number. It is how you sign in, and we confirm it by sending you a code in a text message. There is no account without it.

Your username. It is your address inside the app, and anyone can see it.

Your display name, bio, profile photo, link and location, if you enter them. These are all optional, and all of them are visible to other people.

Information about your phone: the operating system and its version, and the app version. We use it to deliver notifications to you and to know whether your copy of the app needs updating.

Posts, stories, comments, likes and saves. Who a post reaches depends on your account setting: if your account is private, only your followers see your posts.

Messages and group conversations. We store them so we can deliver them and show them to you on any phone you sign in on. They are not end-to-end encrypted, which means that technically we can reach them.

Voice and video calls: we store when the call happened, how long it lasted, and who was in it.

If you report a post or an account, we store the report and the reason you gave. The person you reported is never told about it.

The prayer times screen needs to know roughly where you are, because prayer times and the direction of the Qibla are different in every city. The app asks for location permission only while you are using it, never in the background.

To get the times for your day, your latitude and longitude are sent to the Aladhan prayer-times service (api.aladhan.com), which returns the timetable. We do not attach your name, username or phone number to that request.

The Qibla direction is worked out on your phone from your position and the coordinates of the Kaaba. It is not sent anywhere, and it works with no connection.

If you refuse location permission, the prayer times and Qibla screen is the only thing that stops working. The rest of the app carries on.

Two features collect sensitive information, and each of them is switched off until you turn it on yourself — and an administrator has to approve your account for it first. Until that happens, we collect nothing through them. Approval can also be withdrawn, and the app keeps working without either of these.

Contact sync: we upload the phone numbers in your address book so we can tell you which of those people already have an account. Those are other people’s details, which is why switching the feature off deletes all of them from us.

Location sharing: this shares where you are while the app is open. You can switch it off at any time, and the stored readings are deleted with it. This is separate from the location used for prayer times above.

We do not sell or rent your information, and we do not use it for advertising. There are no ads in the app and nothing in it to buy.

We use outside services to make the app work, and each one only sees the part it needs. Sign-in (which sees your phone number, username and password — we never see your password). File storage (which holds your photos, files and attachments). The calling service (which carries the audio and video). Apple’s and Google’s notification services (which carry the text of a notification to your phone). The prayer-times service described above. And the update service that delivers app updates.

Your account, your posts and your files are stored on Amazon Web Services infrastructure in Frankfurt, Germany. If you are using the app from Iraq, that means your information is held outside your country.

We may disclose information if we are formally required to under the law, or where it is necessary to prevent serious harm to someone.

What you post stays until you delete it or delete your account.

If you delete your account: your sign-in is removed immediately and you cannot get back in, and your account and posts disappear from the app for other people. But you should know this plainly — records of your account and your content stay with us after deletion, so that we can deal with reports, disputes and any legal request. That record is internal, it does not appear anywhere in the app, and you cannot restore it.

If you want everything erased with no exception, write to privacy@zulfiqar-app.com and tell us plainly what you want.

You can change your display name, username, bio, photo and phone number in Settings at any time.

You can make your account private, so that only followers see your posts, your stories and who you follow, and new followers have to be approved.

You can switch off either of the two features above, and switching one off deletes what it collected.

You can block accounts, and you can report a post or an account without the other person being told.

You can delete your account from Settings without asking anyone. It is under Personal information, and you have to type your own username to confirm.

You can ask for a copy of your information, or object to something in this policy, by writing to privacy@zulfiqar-app.com.

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit, and your password is held by our sign-in provider, not by us.

Messages are not end-to-end encrypted. We say so twice on purpose: if you need a conversation that nobody but the two of you can ever reach, this app is not the right place for it.

No service can promise it will never be breached. If one happens and it affects you, we will tell you.

Zulfiqar is not for children under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we delete it.

If we change this policy in a material way, we will tell you inside the app before the change takes effect.

For any question about your privacy: privacy@zulfiqar-app.com