Privacy notice
Effective 8 October 2026
Who we are
Finds Digital Platform (CR No. 253561), Doha, Qatar, operates QatarFinds (at qatarfinds.com, also reachable at qatar-marketplace.vercel.app, and in our app) and is responsible for the personal data described here (the “controller”) under Qatar’s Personal Data Privacy Protection Law (Law No. 13 of 2016).
For anything about your data, email support@qatarfinds.com.
What we collect
- Account: your phone number (or your email address, if you sign in with one), your first and last name, and your username. Your username and when you joined are public; your names are seen only by you and our team.
- Listings: the text, price, location and other details you enter, and your photos and videos, including drafts you haven’t posted yet, which we save to your account as you go (for example, when you add a photo or tap Save draft). Published listings are public. We remove hidden details, such as location, from photos and videos.
- Contact numbers: if you turn on Call or WhatsApp for a listing, signed-in users who tap it see your number. We limit how many numbers one account can see.
- Messages: your chats with other users, and any photos you send in them. If you edit or delete a message, the other person sees the change, but we keep the original for safety. Photos deleted for everyone are removed from our storage after 30 days, unless a report needs them.
- Deals, reviews and saved items: deals you confirm, reviews you write (published reviews are public), and the listings and searches you save.
- Safety: reports you make or that are made about you, blocks, appeals, notices, and our moderation records.
- Contact requests: when you tap Call seller or WhatsApp on a listing, we show you the number and keep a record that you asked.
- Activity: sign-ins, with basic browser and device details from your sign-in sessions, the listings you view and the searches you make (including the words you type), with your IP address and approximate country.
If our team posts a listing for you
If you give our team permission to post a listing for you, we keep the phone number, listing details and photos you give us, and a record of your permission, even before you have an account. We get this data from you. Until you sign in, the listing shows as from a “Private seller”, and signed-in users who tap Call seller or WhatsApp on it see the contact number it gives. When you sign in with that phone number, or verify it in Edit profile, the listing moves to your account. If that number already has an account, the listing goes straight into it.
Why we use it
- To run QatarFinds: your account, listings, chats, saved items, and contacting sellers.
- To keep it safe: checking listings, preventing fraud, spam and misuse, and handling reports and appeals. To spot misuse, we may link accounts that use the same network, and if an account’s activity passes limits we set, an automated review (using an AI model) may flag it for our team to look at.
- To personalize what you see (see below).
- To answer you, and to meet our legal duties.
We use your data because it’s needed to provide the service you asked for, because keeping the platform safe is a legitimate purpose, where you gave us permission (for example, for a listing our team posts for you), and where the law requires it. We don’t sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
Personalization
Personalization is on by default. While it’s on, we also use the listings you view and the searches you make as personalization signals, and your views help order the listings you see first. Turning it off stops new signals and clears the ones we hold, and “Reset personalization data” clears them while it stays on (open your account and go to Edit profile). The activity records described above are still kept for safety.
Who processes it for us
We use these service providers, and give each only what it needs for its service:
- Vercel: hosts the website. Our server code runs in Frankfurt, Germany, and pages reach you through Vercel’s worldwide network.
- Supabase: our database, sign-in and file storage, in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Render: prepares photos and videos, in Frankfurt, Germany.
- Google (Gemini API; United States and other countries): checks and translates listings, including their photos and the pictures in their videos, suggests a category from a draft’s first photo, interprets searches, suggests listing wording when you use Enhance, and, when switched on, helps review unusual account activity.
- Twilio (United States): sends sign-in codes by text message.
- Proton (Switzerland): our email.
So your data is stored and processed outside Qatar: mainly in the European Union, and also in the United States and other countries where Google and Twilio process it. Other users see what you make public, as described above. We share data with the authorities only when the law requires it.
How long we keep it
While your account is open, we keep your account, listings, messages, and activity and safety records; we haven’t set fixed deletion periods for these yet, and we will list them here when we do. Listings, messages and photos stay until you or we delete them. Closing a listing or deleting a message takes it out of view, but we keep a record of it for safety. The original files you upload are deleted within a few hours, once we’ve made the versions we show, and photos deleted from a chat for everyone go after 30 days, as described above.
When an account is deleted (see Your rights), we keep a few safety records, such as reports, bans and appeals, with a locked note of the account’s phone number, email and dates, for 1 year, then a daily job deletes them; records tied to a report that is still open wait until it is closed. If the account was banned, we keep a coded fingerprint of its phone number (never the number itself) for 3 years, so it can’t be used to sign up again. Our database backups are kept for 7 days.
Your rights
Under Qatari law, you can ask to see the personal data we hold about you, to get a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, or to object to how we use it (you can switch personalization off yourself at any time). Where we rely on your permission, such as for a listing our team posts for you, you can withdraw it. Email support@qatarfinds.com and we will reply within 30 days. We may ask you to confirm the account is yours.
You can change your names and username yourself in Edit profile. To delete your account, open Account, choose Delete account and confirm with a code we send to your phone. We delete it 14 days later, on the date we show you; until then your profile and listings are hidden and you are signed out everywhere, and signing in lets you keep the account. After deletion, people you chatted with keep their copy of the conversation without your name, photos you sent in chat are removed, and if you sign up again you start a new account. If you can’t receive the code, email support@qatarfinds.com: we reply from that address and ask you to confirm, and for a lost phone number we may ask for details only the owner would know.
If you are unhappy with how we handled your request, you can complain to the National Data Privacy Office at the National Cyber Security Agency, which oversees personal data protection in Qatar.
Keeping data safe
Data travels encrypted, access to our systems is limited to the people who need it, and our team signs in to the admin with passkeys. No system is perfectly secure, so tell us at support@qatarfinds.com if you notice a problem.
Children
Anyone may use QatarFinds. People under 18 may use it only with a parent’s or guardian’s permission, and should involve them before meeting anyone or making a deal.
Under Qatar’s Personal Data Privacy Protection Law, a parent or guardian can ask us to delete a child’s data. Email us at support@qatarfinds.com.
Changes to this notice
We will update this notice when what we do with data changes, and change the date at the top. For important changes, we will tell you on QatarFinds first.
This notice is published in Arabic and English. If the two versions differ, the Arabic version prevails.