Hasty

Privacy policy

Last updated 6 October 2026

This explains what Hasty collects, why, and what you can do about it. We collect as little as we can and never sell your data. Hasty is run by Artifx SRL (Romania), which is responsible for your data: write to [email protected] about anything here.

What we collect

Account: your name or pen name, date of birth (to check you’re 18+; others only see an age range), your gender if you give it, and — if you add them — your email and a scrambled copy of your password.

Profile: the city you write from (never your exact location), languages, interests, what you’re open to, topics you’d rather avoid, and your bio.

Your letters and what’s attached to them: photos, doodles, stamps, postcards.

How you use the app: letters sent and received, your collection, rewards, settings, private notes you keep about penpals, reply reminders, and the stars and notes you send us.

If you’re a supporter: your plan, and your letter touches — your signature, ink, wax seal, and whether your letters carry a postmark with your town.

If you use one of our web forms without an account (reporting an intimate image, deleting an account), what you type into it, such as your name and email.

If you join the early-access list on heyhasty.com: your email address, when you joined, which form you used and the country your connection came from. We use it only to tell you when Hasty launches and about early access, never for anything else, and we never share or sell it. Every email we send has a way to unsubscribe, or write to us and we remove you; otherwise the list is deleted a year after launch.

The heyhasty.com website uses no cookies, trackers or analytics.

Who you’d like to write to (such as the genders you’re open to), and your Google Play age range when Google provides one.

Technical: when the app hits an error, a report with your phone model, Android version, the app version, the screen it happened on and the error itself (no letters); at sign-up, the country your connection comes from, only to check Hasty is available there; the same with anything you send through “Report a problem”; and your IP address, kept briefly in memory to stop abuse such as password guessing.

Sign-in: each phone you sign in on gets its own key, which we store only in a scrambled form. Photos lose their location and camera details when they reach us.

If a birthday under 18 is given at sign-up, a scrambled copy of that phone’s app ID, kept for 30 days, so it can’t simply be tried again with another birthday.

Why we use it

To run Hasty: delivering letters, working out how long they take, matching you with penpals, and keeping your collection.

To keep people safe: checking letters for scams and harmful content, and reviewing flags and reports.

To improve the app, using totals and trends rather than looking at individual letters.

Who sees it

People you write to see your letters and your profile (name, age range, city, languages, interests, bio). Lost letters are sent without your name until someone answers.

Our team only reads letters when they are flagged, held by our safety checks, or when the law requires it.

Notifications are made on your phone; no notification service sees your letters.

House penpals (see the terms) are run by Hasty itself: what you write to them stays with us.

We use service providers to host the app and send email. They only handle data to do that job for us.

We never sell your data or use it for advertising.

Where the law requires it, we report suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and keep the related information for a year.

How long we keep it

As long as you have an account. When you delete it, your profile, sign-in details, collection, drafts and notifications are deleted straight away. Your photos, city and gender go too, and error reports are no longer linked to you. Letters you already sent stay with the people who received them, signed “A former penpal”. Error reports are deleted after 90 days. Flags, reports and concerns are kept for up to a year; strikes stay on an account while they count towards a gag. An account on hold because it seems to belong to someone under 18 is deleted after 30 days unless it was a mistake. When the law requires us to keep something (a report about child exploitation), we keep it for as long as it requires — usually a year — even if the account is deleted.

Your choices

You can see and change your profile at any time, pause your account, turn off notifications, and delete your account in Profile → Account or at /delete-account.

You can ask us for a copy of your data or to correct it by writing to [email protected]. Depending on where you live, you may also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.

Security

Connections to Hasty are encrypted, passwords are stored as one-way hashes, and access to letters is limited to the people involved and our safety team.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we’ll tell you in the app first.

Contact: [email protected]