Summary
- Payments happen inside PayPal. We never receive card numbers, bank details or PayPal passwords.
- Other people's personal information in your photos is blurred before anything is stored.
- Photos are private by default; only clean shots of the item can appear publicly.
- There are no accounts or passwords. Access to a listing or deal is by its private link.
- No advertising, no third-party analytics, no data sales.
What we collect
| Data | From | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Listing details (title, description, price, meeting area) | Seller | To show the listing |
| Seller name and PayPal email | Seller | To pay the seller via PayPal Payouts |
| Optional updates email | Seller | To send deal notifications |
| Buyer's PayPal email | PayPal, on approval | To send the buyer deal updates |
| Photos (redacted) | Seller and buyer | Verification, handoff checks and dispute evidence |
| Deal timeline (PayPal IDs, statuses, times) | Avowly and PayPal | To run the deal and build the handoff record |
| Notification subscriptions | Your browser, if you opt in | To deliver push notifications |
| Support messages and email | You | To answer you |
| Scam-check verdicts (not what you pasted) | The check you run | So the result can be shared. Your text and screenshots are sent for analysis and never stored. |
| A one-way scrambled tag of your IP address | Your request | Rate limiting. The raw IP isn't stored. |
Photos
Every uploaded photo is analyzed and areas showing other people's personal information are pixelated before saving: phone numbers, contact names, call logs, messages, emails, faces and personal watermarks. Photos are re-encoded, which removes embedded metadata such as GPS location. The unredacted original is never stored. If redaction can't run, the photo isn't saved.
The item's own serial or IMEI stays readable, because verification depends on it. On public pages only the last four digits are ever shown, and photos that contain identifiers are never public.
How we use it
Only to run deals: verifying listings, holding and releasing payments, notifying the parties, defending disputes with the handoff record, preventing abuse, and answering support requests.
Who we share with
| Service | What they receive | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| PayPal | Order amounts, seller PayPal email, and the handoff record if a dispute is opened | Payments, payouts, disputes |
| OpenAI | Photos, to read them and to find personal information to blur; text and screenshots you submit to the scam check | Verification and redaction. API data isn't used for model training by default. |
| Channel3 | The product make and model, and one public item photo | Market price checks |
| Neon and Vercel | Stored data and requests | Database and hosting |
| Your browser's push service | Notification text | Push notifications, if you opt in |
| Resend | Your email and the message | Email notifications, if enabled |
The other party in a deal sees the deal's photos, verification results and timeline. Nobody else does.
Access & links
Listings and deals are protected by long random links (“keys”) instead of accounts. Anyone with your seller or deal link can act on it, so treat it like a password and share only the public listing link. Proof pages show no keys, emails or full serials.
Keeping & deleting
Deal records are kept so they can serve as evidence if a dispute is opened later. To have a listing, its photos or your support messages deleted, contact support with the link, and we'll remove them unless a payment dispute on that deal is still open.
Contact
Questions or requests: use the support form and choose “Privacy or a photo”.
Avowly is a prototype built for the PayPal AI Hackathon and runs on the PayPal sandbox.