Privacy Policy
Last updated 13 August 2026
HereKorea is a community app for foreign residents of Korea. Using it means handing over a residence card photograph and a phone number, which is more than most apps ask for. This page says exactly what happens to those and to everything else.
Who is responsible
HereKorea is run as an independent project. The operator is the data controller for everything described here and can be reached at hidensideofthemoon@gmail.com.
What is collected, and why
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Phone number | It is how you sign in, and it is what makes one account one person. |
| Password | Stored only as a scrypt hash. Nobody, including the operator, can read it back. |
| Nickname, photo, bio | What other members see. Optional except the nickname. |
| Residence card photograph | Checked once by a reviewer to confirm you live here and to set the country on your profile. Arrives with the registration number already covered on your phone. Never shown to other members. See the retention section — this one does not stay. |
| Name on the card | Recorded so a reviewer can hold the card next to the account. It is never displayed anywhere in the app. |
| Date of birth, nationality | Age eligibility, and the flag on your profile. |
| Posts, replies, photographs | The thing you came to do. |
| Messages and their photographs | Delivered to the people in the conversation and nobody else, with one exception: if somebody reports a message, a reviewer reads that message. Only the reported one — the rest of the conversation is not shown to them. |
| Follows, blocks, likes, reposts | How the app decides what to show you and what to keep away from you. |
| Neighbourhood name | If you tag a post with where you are, the phone works out the district name and sends that word. See below for what is not sent. |
| Approximate location | Only if you switch on Neighbours, and only after you have agreed to it on a screen that explains this first. Your reading is rounded to about a kilometre before it is saved, and the rounded value is all that is stored. It is used to work out how far away other members are, and it is deleted — not hidden — the moment you turn the feature off. See below. |
| Record of location use | That your location was used, and when. Korean law requires a location-based service to keep this record. It does not include who you were shown. |
| Gender and languages | Both optional, both blank unless you fill them in. They exist so Neighbours can be filtered; leaving either blank means you never appear in that filter. |
| Server logs | Requests, times and IP addresses, kept briefly so faults can be found and abuse can be rate limited. |
What is deliberately not collected
Your registration number. The number on your residence card is never read, never typed in, and never stored — not even as a hash. It is sensitive identifying information under Korean law, and the unique phone number already does the job it would have done.
Covering it is required rather than encouraged, and the covering happens on your phone. The app paints over what you mark and then photographs the result, so the hidden pixels are not in the file that is uploaded — they are not sent and then discarded, they are never sent. Sign-up will not let you submit a card with nothing covered.
Your precise position. Tagging a place sends the name of a district and nothing else, and the same is true of roommate listings.
Neighbours is the one feature that needs to know roughly where you are, and it is built so that "roughly" is enforced rather than promised. The build asks your phone for approximate location only — on iOS the app cannot request the precise kind at all — and whatever does arrive is rounded onto a grid of about one kilometre before it is written down. The unrounded reading is never stored anywhere.
Nobody, including us, is ever shown a distance to you. Other members see a range — "1–3km" — and never a number. This matters more than it sounds: three exact distances to the same person, taken from three places, are enough to work out where they live. Rounding on the way in and answering in ranges on the way out are what make that arithmetic come out at a kilometre square instead of an address.
What is inside your photographs. A picture from a camera roll carries the place and time it was taken in its metadata. Every image uploaded is re-encoded on arrival and that metadata is dropped before anything is stored.
How long things are kept
- Residence card photograph — deleted the moment a reviewer decides, approve or reject. If nobody has reviewed it within 30 days it is deleted anyway and you are asked for a new one.
- Photographs sent in messages — the full-size file is deleted after 14 days and only a small copy remains. After 30 days that goes too, and the message says the photo is no longer kept.
- Documents you ask us to read — not kept at all. The photographs and the answer live for the length of the one request that produces them. What is written down is that a reading happened and when, so that the monthly allowance can be counted — no part of the document, and nothing about what it said.
- Your approximate location — deleted as soon as you turn Neighbours off, and deleted on its own after 30 days without being refreshed. A position nobody has updated in a month is not where you are, so it is of no use to keep. Coming back after that asks for your agreement again rather than assuming it still stands.
- The record that your location was used — six months, because Korean law asks that it be kept. It survives turning the feature off: a record anybody can clear on request is not a record. It goes when the account does.
- Password reset codes — ten minutes, single use.
- Sign-in sessions — revoked when you sign out, change your password or reset it.
- Everything else — for as long as the account exists.
Who else sees it, and where it goes
Your data is not sold, and it is not shared for advertising. It is handled by the companies below, and because every one of them runs outside Korea, holding an account here means your information is stored and processed abroad. The Personal Information Protection Act asks that this be set out plainly rather than buried, so here it is in full.
| Who | What reaches them | Why, and where |
|---|---|---|
| Railway | Everything held about your account — see the section above. | Hosting: the server, the database and the disk the photographs sit on. Held for as long as your account exists. United States. |
| Expo | A device token, and the text of a notification as it is sent. | Delivering push notifications to your phone. Nothing is kept beyond delivery. United States. Turning push off in Settings stops this entirely. |
| RevenueCat | Your account id and the state of your subscription. No name, no phone. | Checking with the stores that a subscription is real and still running. Only for people who subscribe. United States. |
| Apple, Google | Whatever their own terms cover — payment, distribution, crash reports. | Selling the subscription and distributing the app. They are the ones who charge you; we never see your card. United States and elsewhere. |
| Google Gemini | Photographs you send to Read my mail, and nothing else. | When you photograph a document and ask what it says, the photographs go to Google's model to be read and come straight back. They are held in memory for the length of that one request and are never written to our disk; neither the photographs nor the answer is stored anywhere afterwards, by us or on your phone. Whatever is on the page — your address, an account number, an amount — goes with it, which is why the screen says so before you take the picture and why nothing is kept once you have your answer. The same model is also used by the operator's own console to draft event listings from public web pages, which involves no member's data at all. United States and elsewhere. |
Every company in that table is under a written agreement with us — their own terms of service for the processing they do on our behalf — that requires them to protect your information to the same or an equal standard as this policy sets out and as the App Store Review Guidelines require, to use it only for the purpose named in the row, and not to sell it or repurpose it. None of them is permitted to use what reaches them for their own advertising, and none of the content sent to Google Gemini is used to train a model. Where any of them falls short of that, the remedy is ours to pursue and the obligation is theirs.
If you would rather your data did not leave Korea, the app cannot be used without it — the service runs on these providers. Refusing means not holding an account, and you can close yours at any time from Settings, which deletes what is held. Push notifications and the subscription are each refusable on their own, without closing anything.
Read my mail is refusable on its own too, and it is the only feature that has to be agreed to before it will run. The first time you open it the app says what is sent, who it goes to and what is left afterwards, and nothing leaves your phone until you agree. To take that back later: Settings → Read my mail → Withdraw consent. There is nothing to delete when you do, because nothing was stored; what changes is that the app will ask again before it sends anything else. Everything else in the app keeps working either way.
Beyond that, information is disclosed only where the law requires it of us.
Your rights
Under the Personal Information Protection Act you may ask what is held about you, have it corrected, have it deleted, and withdraw your consent. Most of it you can do yourself:
- Your nickname, photo and bio can be changed in the app at any time.
- Withdrawing consent to Read my mail — Settings, then Read my mail, then Withdraw consent. That is the one place in the app where anything you own is sent to a third party, and it is the one thing you are asked to agree to before it runs.
- Deleting your account — Settings, then Delete account. It is immediate and it is complete: profile, posts, replies, messages, photographs, follows and your residence card if one is still on file. Messages you sent are removed from other people's copies of the conversation as well.
For anything the app cannot do itself, write to the address at the top of this page.
Children
HereKorea is not for anybody under 14. An account cannot be created with a date of birth that puts you under that age.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it and the app says so before the change takes effect.