Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 24, 2026 | Last updated: October 15, 2026

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy explains how Iris Social ("Iris," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, discloses, and safeguards information in connection with the Iris mobile application, the associated application and review process, and any related features we offer (collectively, the "Service"). It also describes the choices available to you regarding your information and how you can reach us with questions.

Iris is different from most social platforms in a way that matters for how you should read this policy. Iris describes itself as a closed network for real people: membership is not open to the general public, and access is granted only after a person completes an account setup, enrolls in two-factor authentication, and submits a written application that is read and decided on by a human reviewer. Because of that structure, this policy is written to cover two overlapping groups of people, and it applies in full to both:

Applicants — anyone who has created an Iris account and begun the signup and application process, whether or not that application has yet been decided, approved, or rejected.
Members — anyone whose application has been approved and who therefore has full access to the feed, posting, messaging, and other features of the Service.

We collect and process some information about you starting the moment you create an account, well before any human reviewer has looked at your application, and this policy explains what that involves. If your application is rejected, or if you abandon the process before finishing it, the information you already provided is still governed by this policy, including the retention and deletion provisions described in Section 5.

This policy does not cover the practices of third parties that Iris does not control, including any websites, services, or content that a member may link to or reference outside of the Service (subject to the note in Section 2 that Iris does not permit links or URLs inside text notes). It also does not apply to information collected by Iris in a capacity unrelated to the Service, such as in connection with employment applications.

Because Iris requires members to be at least 18 years old and is built and operated as a small, curated, adult community rather than a general-audience consumer app, several of the practices described below — including how applications are reviewed, how content is moderated, and how account deletion works — reflect that closed, invitation-adjacent model rather than a mass-market social network.

2. Information We Collect

We collect information in three broad ways: information you give us directly, information collected automatically through your use of the Service, and information generated by the ordinary functioning of the Service as you interact with it (such as who you follow or what you save). Each is described below.

Information you provide

When you create an Iris account and go through the application process, and as you use the Service afterward, we collect the following information that you provide directly:

Account credentials. The email address and password you use to create and sign in to your account. Your password is stored in hashed form using industry-standard hashing techniques and is never stored or logged in plain text, including internally by Iris staff.
Real identity information. Iris requires members to use their real name — we do not permit handles, pseudonyms, or aliases in the name field. You will also choose a unique username, which functions as your public identifier on the Service and is visible to other members.
Phone number. We collect a phone number during account setup for account security and contact purposes — for example, to help verify your identity or reach you about your account. Your phone number is never used as a sign-in method (Iris does not support SMS-based login or SMS-based two-factor authentication) and is never displayed to other members.
Role. During signup you select a self-described "role" from a preset list of roughly thirty options (for example, Photographer, Writer, Founder, or Athlete). This role is displayed on your public profile.
Two-factor authentication enrollment data. Iris requires every account to enroll in two-factor authentication using a time-based one-time password (TOTP) authenticator app, such as Google Authenticator, Authy, or 1Password. In connection with this enrollment we generate and store the cryptographic secret associated with your authenticator; we do not collect the authenticator app itself or data from other accounts stored in it.
Membership application answers. As part of applying to join Iris, you submit written answers, of up to 300 words each, to three fixed questions: "What do you value most about social media with real human expression?"; "What has humanity lost in the pursuit of convenience?"; and "What are some things that you consider to be timeless?" These answers are read by a human reviewer, not an algorithm, and are used solely to decide whether to approve your application, as described further in Section 3.
Profile photo. A photo you choose to represent yourself on your profile.
Posts and content. Photos (up to ten per post), a single video per post (capped at one minute in length), or a text "note" (up to 500 characters), along with any optional caption you add to a photo or video post and up to three keywords you choose to attach to a post. Text notes may not contain links or URLs, and we do not accept or store link content submitted in violation of that rule.
Comments. Any comments you leave on posts, including threaded replies (Iris supports one level of replies beneath a comment).
Direct messages. The content of one-to-one, real-time messages you send and receive through Iris's messaging feature.
Communications with us. Anything you send us directly, such as a support request or a question about your account or this policy.
Contact and feedback messages. If you write to us through the contact form on our website or send feedback from inside the app, we collect your name and email address (for in-app feedback, your username and account email) and the message you write.

Information we collect automatically

As with most mobile applications, we and our infrastructure providers automatically collect certain technical information when you use the Service, including:

Device information, such as device type, operating system and version, and app version.
Push notification token. If you allow notifications, your device gives Apple a token that we store with your account so we can notify you, for example about an application decision or a notice that content of yours was removed. We store the token and whether it belongs to a development or production build. You can turn notifications off in Iris Settings or in iOS Settings, and we delete the token when you delete your account.
Posts you have viewed. We record which posts you have seen so that the feed does not show you the same posts repeatedly.
Crash and diagnostic data. If you have chosen to share diagnostics with app developers in your iOS settings, Apple may provide us with anonymized crash reports, which help us identify and fix bugs and stability issues.

We collect this category of information in the ordinary, limited way typical of a mobile application — we do not use it to build advertising profiles, and, as described in Section 4, we do not use it for advertising at all, because Iris does not carry advertising.

Information from your use of the service

Using Iris naturally generates additional information about your activity within the closed community:

Likes you place on posts.
Saves and bookmarks. Posts you save for later. Saves are private: no other member, including the author of the saved post, can see what you have saved or that you have saved it. We treat this as one of the more sensitive categories of activity data you generate on Iris, precisely because it reflects your personal interests without any expectation of visibility to anyone else.
Follows and followers. Iris currently makes follow and follower relationships visible to other members. If this changes in the future — for example, if we introduce an option to make this private — we will update this policy accordingly.
Reports you submit, including reports flagging a post as spam, harassment, inappropriate content, "Report as AI-generated," or "something else," and any blocks you place on other members.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information described in Section 2 for the following purposes, each grounded in how Iris actually operates as a closed, application-based community:

Operating the Service

We use your account, profile, and content information to provide the core functionality of Iris: creating and securing your account, displaying your profile and posts to other approved members, delivering direct messages to their intended recipient, enforcing posting limits (such as the cap of three posts per day per member and the ten-photo, one-video, or 500-character-note limits on individual posts), and generally making the feed, comments, likes, saves, and follows work as designed.

Reviewing membership applications

We use the information you submit during signup and application — your name, username, role, and your three written answers — so that a human reviewer can evaluate and decide on your application. Nothing about an applicant's account is usable — there is no feed access, no ability to post, and no ability to message other members — until that application is approved, and this restriction is enforced at the database level, not merely hidden in the app's interface. This means the use of your application answers is limited to the review decision itself; they are not used to train general-purpose recommendation systems or shared for marketing purposes.

Content moderation

Because Iris is built around genuine human expression, we use a moderation approach that combines member reports, AI-assisted assessment, and human judgment:

No automatic scanning. Posts are not scanned as they are published, and a post is not sent to any outside AI service unless a member reports it.
On-demand AI assessment. If a member reports a specific post as AI-generated, that triggers an on-demand analysis of the post — its image and its caption or note — using an Anthropic Claude AI model, and generates a report for review by a human moderator. This analysis only occurs when a member actively initiates it by reporting a specific post.
Member reports. Members can report posts for spam, harassment, inappropriate content, AI-generated content, or "something else." We use the content of these reports, together with the reported post and any relevant account history, to evaluate the report.
Human review before enforcement. Every member report, whether or not it comes with an on-demand AI assessment (Anthropic), is routed to a human reviewer. No automated system on Iris takes enforcement action — such as removing content or restricting an account — on its own; a person makes that decision.
Content notices and disputes. If a human moderator removes one of your posts, we record the reason, show you a private notice in the app, and send a push notification. You can dispute a removal once; a moderator reviews the dispute and may restore the post.
Blocking. We use information about blocks that members place on other members to keep them apart: hiding each other's posts and search results, and preventing messages, follows, mentions, comments and likes between them. Any existing follow between them is removed.

Security

We use your account credentials and two-factor authentication enrollment to protect your account from unauthorized access, including verifying your identity at sign-in through your TOTP authenticator app, and to investigate and respond to suspicious account activity. We may use your phone number to help verify your identity or contact you if we detect a security concern affecting your account.

Communicating with members

We use your email address and, where relevant, your phone number, to send you communications related to your account and application — for example, notifying you of an application decision, communicating about your account security, or responding to a support request you send us.

Improving the Service

We use aggregated or de-identified usage, analytics, and crash log data to understand how members use Iris, identify and fix bugs, and inform decisions about how to develop the Service going forward.

With other members

Iris is a closed community, and information within it is shared according to the visibility that the feature itself is designed to have:

Your profile information — your real name, username, role, and profile photo — is visible to other approved members.
Your posts, captions, keywords, and comments are visible to other approved members, consistent with how the feed and comment threads function.
Your follows and followers are currently visible to other members, as described in Section 2.
Your direct messages are shared only with the specific member you are messaging — they are not visible to other members of the Service.
Your saves and bookmarks are never shared with or made visible to other members, including the author of a saved post. This is a deliberate design choice, and we treat it as a privacy commitment, not merely a feature default.
If you set your account to private, your posts are visible only to members whose follow request you have approved. Iris moderators can still see a post that has been reported or flagged for review.
Applicants who have not yet been approved are not visible to other members at all — because an unapproved account cannot access the feed or appear to other members, application answers, in-progress signup information, and pending status are not shared with the broader membership.

With service providers and processors

We rely on a small number of third-party service providers to operate Iris, and we share information with them only as needed for them to perform services on our behalf, under obligations that limit their use of that information to providing those services:

Supabase, our backend-as-a-service infrastructure provider, hosts our Postgres database, handles account authentication (including account emails such as confirmation and password reset, which are delivered through Resend), stores uploaded files (such as photos, videos, and profile photos), and powers real-time messaging. Supabase functions as our data processor and has access to the underlying data needed to provide this infrastructure.
Anthropic, whose Claude AI models we use on an on-demand basis to analyze a post when a member reports it as AI-generated. Only that reported post — its image and its caption or note — is sent for this analysis, and it is used to generate a report for human review, not for any other purpose.
Apple, whose Apple Push Notification service delivers notifications to your device. Apple receives your device token and the text of each notification.
Resend, which delivers emails that Iris sends: account emails to you, such as confirmation and password reset, and messages to our team, such as feedback you send from the app, post reports, and membership applications.
Zoho Mail, which hosts our contact inbox (contact@join-iris.com), so messages you send us are stored there.
Web3Forms, which receives messages submitted through the contact form on join-iris.com and forwards them to our inbox.
Cloudflare, which hosts and secures join-iris.com and processes visitors' IP addresses and request logs for that purpose.

We do not sell your personal information to advertisers or any other third party. Iris does not display advertising of any kind within the Service, and never will.

Legal disclosure

We may access, preserve, or disclose information about you if we believe in good faith that doing so is required or permitted by law, such as to comply with a valid subpoena, court order, or other legal process; to enforce our terms and policies; to protect the rights, property, or safety of Iris, our members, or the public; or to detect, investigate, or address fraud, security, or technical issues. Where legally permitted, we will attempt to notify affected members before disclosing their information in response to a legal request.

Business transfers

If Iris were to be involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, member information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We would require that any successor continue to honor the commitments of this policy with respect to information collected before the transaction, and we would notify members of any material change in ownership or in how their information is handled.

5. Data Retention

We retain the information described in Section 2 for as long as your account remains active, and for as long as reasonably necessary afterward to operate the Service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. In practice, this means your profile information, posts, comments, direct messages, likes, saves, follows, and application answers are retained for the life of your account, and moderation records (such as reports and the outcomes of human review) may be retained separately for a reasonable period to maintain the integrity of our moderation process.

If your membership application is rejected, or if you begin but do not complete the signup or application process, we retain the limited information you provided (such as your email address and application answers) for a reasonable period in order to administer the application process and prevent abuse of it, after which it is deleted or de-identified in the ordinary course.

Account deletion

Members can permanently delete their account at any time from the Settings menu within the app. Deleting your account deletes your profile, your posts, and the content associated with your account. This action is irreversible: once you confirm account deletion, we cannot restore your profile, posts, or associated content, and you would need to reapply for membership and go through the full signup and application process again if you wished to rejoin Iris in the future. Some limited records — for example, information we are required to retain to comply with a legal obligation, or moderation records needed to enforce our policies against abuse — may be retained for a limited period even after account deletion, consistent with the purposes described above, and, where retained, will be deleted once no longer needed for those purposes.

6. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on where you live, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information, broadly similar to the rights described in frameworks such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). We describe these rights below in the spirit of those frameworks; this description does not represent a claim that Iris holds any formal certification or has undergone a regulatory compliance audit under GDPR, CCPA, or any other law, and the specific rights available to you, and how to exercise them, may vary depending on your jurisdiction.

Access. You can request a copy of the personal information we hold about you. Much of this information — your profile, posts, comments, likes, saves, and follows — is already visible to you directly within the app.
Correction. You can update most of your profile information, such as your name, username, role, and profile photo, directly within the app's Settings. For information you cannot edit directly, you may contact us using the details in Section 11 to request a correction.
Deletion. You can permanently delete your account and its associated content at any time using the account deletion feature in Settings, as described in Section 5. You may also contact us to request deletion of specific information where deleting it would not require deleting your account entirely, and we will consider such requests consistent with our legal obligations and legitimate operational needs (for example, retaining moderation records needed to enforce our policies).
Objection and restriction. Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to object to, or request that we restrict, certain uses of your personal information. Contact us using the details in Section 11 to make such a request, and we will respond consistent with applicable law.
Non-discrimination. We will not deny you access to the Service, charge you a different amount, or otherwise discriminate against you for exercising any privacy right described in this section, recognizing that Iris does not currently charge for membership in any event.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information in Section 11. We may need to verify your identity before acting on certain requests, given the sensitivity of account and messaging information on a closed platform like Iris.

7. Data Security

Iris was designed as a closed, curated community, and we take the security of member information seriously as part of that design. Measures we use include:

Mandatory two-factor authentication. Every account is required to enroll in TOTP-based two-factor authentication through an authenticator app at signup. We do not offer or rely on SMS-based two-factor authentication, which is generally considered less resistant to interception and account-takeover techniques than an authenticator-app-based approach.
Hashed passwords. Your password is never stored in plain text; it is stored in hashed form using standard password-hashing techniques.
Database-level access controls. Our database uses row-level security policies, meaning access control is enforced at the database layer itself, not only by the app's interface. In practical terms, this means each member's session is restricted to reading and writing only the specific rows and columns of data that member is authorized to access — for example, another member's private saves, or an unapproved applicant's in-progress account, are not merely hidden by the app's screens but are structurally inaccessible to sessions that should not see them.
Protected credentials for third-party services. Secrets and API keys used to authenticate with our infrastructure and moderation vendors (such as Supabase, Anthropic, and Resend) are never exposed to the client application that runs on your device.
Encryption in transit and at rest. We use encryption to protect data as it travels between your device and our servers, and our infrastructure provider stores data using industry-standard storage protections.

No system of transmission or storage can be guaranteed to be 100% secure. While we work to protect your information using the measures described above, we cannot guarantee its absolute security, and you should take care to protect your own account credentials and authenticator app.

8. Children's Privacy

Iris is not directed at, and is not intended for use by, anyone under the age of 18. Iris is a closed, curated adult community — not a general-audience service — and the minimum age to apply for or hold an account is 18 years old.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we become aware, through our human application review process, member reports, or otherwise, that an account belongs to someone under the age of 18, we will take steps to disable the account and delete the associated profile, posts, application answers, and other content promptly, consistent with the account deletion process described in Section 5. If you believe a person under 18 has created or attempted to create an Iris account, please contact us using the details in Section 11.

9. International Data Transfers

Iris's infrastructure, including the database, authentication systems, and file storage provided through Supabase, the AI moderation system provided by Anthropic, and the notification, email, contact-form and website-hosting services provided by Apple, Resend, Zoho, Web3Forms and Cloudflare, may store or process information in a country or region other than the one in which you live. If you access the Service from outside the country or region in which our infrastructure or service providers operate, your information may be transferred to, stored in, and processed in that other location.

Where such transfers occur, we intend to take reasonable steps designed to help ensure that your information continues to receive an appropriate level of protection consistent with this policy and applicable law, such as relying on our infrastructure and service providers' own contractual and technical safeguards. Iris Social will update this section with the specific data transfer mechanisms it relies on if and when they become applicable.

10. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes to the Service, our practices, or applicable law. If we make material changes, we will provide notice to members through the app, by email, or by another reasonable means before the changes take effect, and we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this policy. We encourage you to review this policy periodically. Your continued use of the Service after a revised policy takes effect constitutes your acknowledgment of the updated policy, to the extent permitted by applicable law.

11. Contact Us

If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or how Iris Social handles your information, please contact us at:

Email: contact@join-iris.com

Because Iris is a closed community built on trust between real people, we take privacy questions from applicants and members seriously and will respond to legitimate requests in a reasonable time frame.

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