Orbits
Orbits introduces small groups of adults to one another around a real activity. This policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, where it is kept, how long we keep it, and the choices you have.
Orbits is made and operated by Aleph Labs LLC, a limited liability company registered in the United Arab Emirates, which is the controller of the personal data described in this policy. Our registered address is:
Aleph Labs LLC
Shams Business Center, Sharjah Media City Free Zone
Al Messaned, Sharjah
United Arab Emirates
You can reach us about anything in this policy at support@orbitssocial.com, or in the app under Settings then Contact us.
Aleph Labs LLC is established in the United Arab Emirates and follows its personal data protection law. Where the law of another country applies to a member we serve, we follow that too. Orbits is offered today in Dubai, Riyadh, and Beirut, and we do not offer or direct the service to people in the European Union.
We give every member, wherever you live, the rights in section 18, and we answer requests within 20 working days. A working day means Monday to Friday.
Orbits is for adults. You confirm your date of birth when you create an account and the app will not let you continue if you are under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.
We only collect what the service needs.
| What | Why we collect it | Our legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address or phone number, and your password if you use one. Passwords are stored only as a secure hash. You can also sign in with Apple or Google, which gives us your email address and nothing else. If you sign in with Apple, we also keep an encrypted token from Apple. | Your account, signing in, and service notices. The Apple token is used only to end your Sign in with Apple link when your account is deleted. | Performance of our contract with you. |
| Your profile: first name (never a last name), date of birth, gender, nationality, city, field of work, interests, and, if you add them, a profile photo and a short line about you. | Running the service, forming groups, the 18 and over check, orbits limited by age or gender, and showing you to other members as described in section 4. Your age and gender also help choose which announcements we show you. | Performance of our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in keeping Orbits to adults only. |
| Your answers when you join an Official Orbit: the area you can get to, the spoken language you would like, and the most you would like to spend, as one of three bands. | Placing you in a group and booking a venue. Other members never see them, and they are not kept on your profile. | Performance of our contract with you. |
| Messages you send in group chats and one to one chats, and your answers in the in app games. | Delivering chat and the games, and reading a reported message when we investigate it. See section 6. | Performance of our contract with you. Reading a reported message: our legitimate interest in keeping members safe. |
| Ratings you give after an orbit, your connect choices, the positive qualities you give people, and an optional private “spark”. | Feedback on venues, connecting people who both want to connect, learning who you get on with so we can place you with similar new people, and an internal standing score seen only by our team. A spark is shown to no one unless both people mark it for each other, and it never affects who you are grouped with. | Performance of our contract with you. The standing score and keeping apart people who should not meet again: our legitimate interest in safety and quality. The spark: your consent. |
| Reports you file, reports filed about you, blocks, and what our team decided. A report about a one to one chat includes a copy of the last 20 messages in that chat. | Safety and moderation. | Our legitimate interest in protecting members. |
| What you do on Orbits: joining, leaving (with the reason you pick), requesting, checking in, hosting, canceling, invites, friendships, notify me requests, and activities or cities you ask us for. | Running the orbit, showing you your own history, support, investigating a report, and deciding which activities and cities to run next. | Performance of our contract with you, and our legitimate interest in safety, support, and planning the service. |
| Your badges, and a record of each badge level you reached. | Showing your progress and, unless you switch it off, showing the badge on your profile. A badge never shows a number or who rated you. | Performance of our contract with you. |
| Your membership and payments, received from your app store through our subscription service, RevenueCat: your plan, when it renews or ends, payment problems, refunds, each payment with its price, the country of your store account, the one time extras you bought, gifts of membership time, and which version of the membership screen a purchase was made from. | Giving you what you paid for, telling you about a payment problem, answering payment questions, keeping accounts, and learning which membership screen works better. We never see your card details. | Performance of our contract with you. Keeping accounts and comparing screens: our legitimate interest in running the business. |
| Your notification and email choices, a dated record of each email choice, and whether your phone allows notifications. A device push token, only after you allow notifications. | Sending you only what you chose to receive. | Performance of our contract with you. Optional email: your consent. |
| Internal notes and flags our team writes about you, for example that two members should not be grouped together again. | Grouping and support. Never shown to you or to any other member. | Our legitimate interest in running the service well. |
| The time you last opened the app, the platform you signed up on, which version of these terms you accepted and when, and when we asked you to rate Orbits. | Understanding how the service is used, sending a reminder after a long time away, and asking for a store rating rarely. | Our legitimate interest in running and improving the service. |
| Technical records: your internet address, the time of a request, and the device or app version. On the sign in screens, a check run by Cloudflare that tells a person from an automated program. | Keeping accounts secure, spotting abuse, and fixing faults. | Our legitimate interest in the security of the service. |
| A crash report, only if the app crashes: technical details of the crash and of your phone, with a random identifier that is not tied to your account. An update check when the app starts. | Finding and fixing faults, and delivering fixes. | Our legitimate interest in keeping the app working. |
| Only if our team deletes an account that was suspended or banned: a scrambled code of that account's phone number, email address and Apple or Google sign in id. It cannot be turned back into those details. | Stopping the same details from opening a new account. Nothing like this is kept for any other account. | Our legitimate interest in protecting members. |
What you have to give us. To have an account you need to give us an email address or a phone number, a first name, your date of birth, your gender, your nationality, your city, your field of work and at least five interests. A profile photo is needed only to join an orbit. The short line about you is optional.
Anonymous counts. We count some things as totals with no account attached, such as how many phones run each version of the app, and how many times an orbit's page or the membership screen is opened. A draft of an orbit you have not published, and a few small notes the app uses to work faster, stay on your phone and never reach us.
What we do not collect. We collect no device location, no advertising identifier, and no cross app tracking data. Orbits carries no advertising software. We do not ask what you can eat or about allergies, and we do not ask you for any special category of personal data, such as your health, your religion or your ethnic origin, so please do not put that kind of information in your profile or your messages.
Cover photos. A cover photo a host uploads for a member created orbit is shown publicly, to members and guests. We can remove or hide any cover, and anyone who sees one can report it.
The Orbits app never reads your device location and asks for no location permission. Your city, and the area you pick when you join an orbit, are choices you make from a list.
The button that shares your live location opens the Google Maps app on your phone, under Google's own terms, and the Send my plans button opens your phone's own share sheet. Orbits does not receive what you share. Orbits has no SOS feature and no emergency contact feature.
Chat on Orbits is not end to end encrypted. Messages are encrypted in transit and at rest, but our moderators can read message content when they are investigating a report. We do that only for safety and moderation.
Adding a profile photo opens your phone's own photo picker. Orbits only ever receives the picture you choose. We keep your current profile photo and nothing else, and every new profile photo is sent to our team for review.
When a photo is replaced, removed or deleted with your account, we delete the file from our storage, normally within minutes. A phone or browser that already showed it may keep its own saved copy, which we cannot reach.
We do not run facial recognition or any automatic analysis of your photo.
We keep a record of your membership changes and of each payment or refund. If you delete your account, these are not deleted but made anonymous: nothing in them links to you, and only the month, the product, the price, the country and the city remain, as accounting records and statistics.
Our team can open a dated list of what you have done on Orbits, built from the records in section 3: signing up, membership changes, joining, leaving, hosting, invites, purchases, the ratings you gave, friendships, and reports made about you with what we decided.
Kept out of it: who reported anyone, whether someone blocked you, the content of any message, your location, and your internet address.
Only named staff with the right role can open it, only the most senior administrator can download it, and every download is recorded.
These processes affect which orbits you are placed in and who with. A warning, a suspension, or a ban is always decided by a person on our team. If you think an automatic decision about you is wrong, write to support@orbitssocial.com and a person on our team will look at it.
A small team uses an internal dashboard. Every person has a named account and a role that limits what they can open. For moderation, support, payments and matching, staff with the right role can see your profile, your photo, your ratings, your join answers, your membership and payment details, and your notification and email choices, which they can never change. Bulk exports are restricted to the most senior administrator, and every download is logged. Nothing is sold and nothing is shared for advertising.
Service email always arrives. It covers sign in and password messages, and it may cover membership or policy changes and security or moderation notices. Purchase receipts come from Apple or Google.
Optional email is off unless you switch it on. There are two separate choices: News, features and offers, and Other products from Aleph Labs, the company that makes Orbits. You can switch either on or off at any time in Settings then Email Preferences, and every optional email carries an unsubscribe link. Our staff can see your choices but can never change them.
Alerts inside the app are controlled in Settings then Notifications. These always arrive, whatever your switches say: a notice that an orbit you are in was canceled, a notice that its venue changed, notices about your own membership or account, and an Important Update from the Orbits team, which is sent only when something real needs your attention and is never an offer or a promotion.
These follow your switches: reminders about your orbits, an alert that an Official Orbits signup is open in your city (only if you asked for it), a reminder after a long time away, and a suggestion to rate Orbits on the store.
Announcements can be aimed. We may choose who sees an announcement card or gets a notification from our team using your city, your gender, your age, your membership level, the orbits you are in, or an activity you asked about.
Orbits runs on Supabase, and your data is held in its European Union region, in Frankfurt, Germany, encrypted in transit and at rest. Our database provider keeps its own daily backups, each for up to 7 days. Before we make a change to the database we sometimes take a copy of it first, held on a computer the company controls and deleted within 30 days.
Some of the companies in section 14 process limited data outside the European Economic Area, under the transfer safeguards each provider publishes. Our own team works from the United Arab Emirates and reads member data from there for support and moderation.
We share data only with the companies that help us run the service, and only for that purpose.
We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety.
We never sell your data. We run no third party advertising, we use no advertising identifiers, and we never share member data with anyone for advertising purposes.
A specific case can be kept longer under a legal hold, while a legal claim or a request from an authority about it is live.
You can delete your account yourself, straight away, in Settings then Delete account. It cannot be undone. You can also email support@orbitssocial.com from the address on your account, and we will delete it within 20 working days. An account that is suspended or banned can only be deleted by email. The same address is where you ask us to delete part of your data.
Deleting removes your sign in, your profile, your photos, your messages, your ratings, your friendships, your badges, your membership details, your activity records, and the notes about you. We also ask RevenueCat to delete its record of you and, if you signed in with Apple, we ask Apple to end that sign in link.
What is kept, and why:
Deleting your Orbits account does not cancel a subscription you bought from Apple or Google. Cancel it in your phone's subscription settings.
We protect your data with encryption in transit and at rest, database rules that stop one member's data being read by another, named staff accounts with limited roles, and a log of staff actions. No service can promise it will never be breached. If there is a breach that puts your data at high risk, we will tell you and the relevant data protection authority without undue delay.
Wherever you live, you can:
Most of these you can do yourself in the app. For anything else, write to support@orbitssocial.com. It is free. We answer within 20 working days; for a complex request we may need up to 40 further working days, and we will tell you. We may need to check that the request really comes from you.
If we meaningfully change this policy, we will let you know in the app or by email, and we give you at least 14 days before it takes effect.
If Orbits or Aleph Labs LLC is sold, merged or reorganized, your data moves to the new owner with the service and stays protected by this policy. We will tell you before that happens.
Aleph Labs LLC
Shams Business Center, Sharjah Media City Free Zone
Al Messaned, Sharjah
United Arab Emirates
Email support@orbitssocial.com for privacy questions and data requests.