Privacy policy
The short version: we collect the minimum needed to prove you are an Australian university student, and nothing else.
1. What we collect
- Your university email. Stored securely, used only to verify you, to sign you in and to send you a link if you forget your password, and never shown to another user.
- Account data. A randomly generated user ID, your university name (derived from the email domain), and your preferences.
- Usage data. Which pages you open and what you tap, so we can improve the app. It is recorded under your random user ID, never your email, and everything you or anyone else writes - chats, posts, what you type - is blanked out of it before it leaves your browser.
2. What we never collect
- Your real name. If you and someone you are chatting with both agree to reveal, the name you choose to give is held by that chat and erased with it, unless the chat is reported or kept for moderation, when it is part of what a moderator reads (see section 4).
- Photos or profile pictures
- Location data
- Contact lists or social media accounts
- Any permanent record of your conversations (see section 4 for the few that moderators keep for a while)
3. How we use it
- To verify you are a current university student
- To match you with other verified students
- To enforce the house rules and keep people safe
- To keep the service running and make it better
4. How long we keep it
Chat messages are deleted 24 hours after your chat ends. Nobody can read them in that time; it is there so that someone can still report a bad conversation.
Some chats are kept for longer, so a moderator can look at them:
- A reported chat is copied for moderators when it is reported, kept while they look into it, and deleted 30 days after the report is dealt with.
- A chat that ended after trouble - someone was removed from it, our filter blocked a message, or it flagged abuse or someone talking about hurting themselves - is copied when it ends, even if nobody reports it. If nobody reports it, the copy is deleted after 7 days. Swapping phone numbers or emails is your call and does not count as trouble on its own.
- A chat reported for involving a child is kept until a moderator has dealt with it and deletes it, because it may be needed by the police.
- Messages our filter blocks are never shown to anyone in the chat, but they are kept with the chat as evidence and follow the rules above.
- A note that our filter caught something you sent - which kind of thing, when and in which chat, not the message itself - is kept for 90 days so a moderator can spot a pattern, then deleted.
Account data is kept while your account is active.
5. When you delete your account
You can delete your account yourself, from your profile. It happens straight away: you are logged out everywhere and taken out of any chat, room or search.
Deleted at once:
- Your email address, password, university, gender and year of study.
- Your sign-in records and the device details that came with them, your mood and handle style, the people you blocked, and your reactions, likes, upvotes and event RSVPs.
- Your rants, forum replies, weekly answers, feature requests and any event suggestion that hasn't been approved.
- A forum thread you started is deleted, unless other students have replied to it: then it stays for their replies, with your title and words replaced.
Kept, because other students rely on it:
- Forums and group rooms you started, which hold other students' posts and chats, and campus events approved from your suggestion, which are no longer linked to you.
Kept for safety, for a limited time:
- Anything you posted that a moderator is still looking at is kept until they decide, and deleted 30 days after that.
- Copies of chats, filter notes and reports - about you, or made by you about someone else - follow the rules in section 4 whether or not you delete your account.
- A scrambled fingerprint of your email address (not the address itself), so the same address can't be used to sign up again straight away. It is kept for 30 days, or for as long as a ban on the account lasts or a report about it is open, and 30 days after the report is dealt with. Then it is deleted too.
What is left after that is an account number with nothing attached that identifies you, so the records above still make sense to a moderator.
6. Who we share it with
We do not sell, trade or share your personal information. We may publish anonymised, aggregated statistics. We will comply with valid legal requests when required by law.
Two services run parts of Jini for us, and handle data only to do that: Cloudflare hosts the app and its data, and sends our email; and PostHog, in the EU, receives the usage data in section 1.
What you write for other students to see - a group room's title, description and tags, a forum's name and description, forum threads and replies, rants, and campus event suggestions - is checked for abuse by an AI model, TypeSafe's Jev, which we reach through Cloudflare Workers AI. Cloudflare lists the model as keeping none of what it is sent. Only the text itself is sent: not your account, your email, your university or your handle. Private chats are not sent to it.
7. Security
Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and encrypted at rest. Session tokens live in an encrypted, HttpOnly cookie that browser code cannot read. Passwords are stored using industry-standard hashing.
8. Your rights
- Ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, by emailing the address in section 9
- Delete your account yourself, from your profile (see section 5 for what is kept)
- Ask us to correct it, or to stop collecting usage data about you, the same way
9. Contact
Privacy questions go to privacy@jini.com.au.
This policy may change. We will tell users about any material change by email or in the app.