Legal
Privacy Policy
Last updated | May 3, 2026
Last updated: May 3, 2026
This Privacy Policy describes how Fous Technologies, Inc., a Delaware corporation doing business as Fous (“Fous,” “we,” “us,” or “our”), collects, uses, discloses, and retains information when you use fous.com, the Fous application, and any related products or services that link to this Policy (the “Service”).
Fous is an experimental research preview that estimates likely real-world coordinates from photographs within a limited geographic area. Because the Service can generate precise location information from images, we operate it with heightened logging, abuse detection, and safety review. This Policy explains those practices.
This Policy is not a contract. Our Terms of Service govern your use of the Service.
1. Notice at collection
The table below summarizes the categories of information we collect, why we collect them, whether we sell or share them for cross-context behavioural advertising, and our ordinary retention periods.
| Category | Examples | Purpose | Sale or sharing | Ordinary retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account information | Name, email address, account identifier, sign-in provider identifier, account settings. | Create and administer accounts, authenticate users, communicate with you, enforce the Terms, and provide support. | No. | While your account is active, then ordinarily up to 90 days after account deletion, unless a longer period is required for security, legal, or abuse-prevention reasons. |
| Authentication and security data | Session tokens, CSRF tokens, one-time sign-in codes, hashed token identifiers, login timestamps, IP address, user-agent, and related security events. | Keep you signed in, protect accounts, prevent fraud and abuse, investigate suspicious activity, and maintain audit records. | No. | Session and verification artifacts are retained only as long as needed for authentication and security. Security logs are ordinarily retained up to 24 months, or longer if relevant to an investigation, legal obligation, or dispute. |
| Submissions | Photographs you upload, image file metadata available to us, upload timestamp, request parameters, and associated account or network identifiers. | Process your request, generate a result, debug failures, detect and investigate misuse, enforce safety rules, and maintain an abuse audit trail. | No. | Unflagged submissions are ordinarily retained up to 24 months. Submissions associated with suspected misuse, safety incidents, legal requests, account enforcement, or disputes may be retained up to 7 years after the matter is closed, or longer if required by law. |
| Outputs and derived location data | Coordinates, confidence scores, candidate locations, map or address information, and other location-related outputs generated by the Service. | Return results to you, improve reliability and safety controls, investigate abuse, respond to complaints, and comply with legal obligations. | No. | Retained with the related submission according to the periods described above. |
| Operational data | Request path, timestamps, status codes, latency, error traces, abuse-filter decisions, rate-limit events, device and browser information, IP address, and user-agent. | Operate, secure, troubleshoot, monitor, and improve the Service; detect scraping, automated abuse, and attempts to bypass controls. | No. | Ordinarily up to 24 months, unless needed for security, legal, or abuse-prevention reasons. |
| Communications | Emails, support requests, abuse reports, legal requests, and related correspondence. | Respond to you, handle complaints, investigate misuse, and maintain business and legal records. | No. | Ordinarily up to 7 years, depending on the nature of the communication. |
2. Sensitive information
The Service may process information that some laws treat as sensitive, including precise geolocation information derived from a photo and visual information contained in the photo. A photo may also incidentally reveal people, license plates, homes, workplaces, health facilities, religious sites, shelters, political activity, or other sensitive context.
We use this information only to provide the Service, maintain safety and abuse controls, investigate violations, comply with law, and protect rights and safety. We do not use sensitive information to infer characteristics about you for advertising, and we do not sell or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.
Do not upload images that you are prohibited from submitting under our Terms of Service, including images intended to identify, locate, track, harass, dox, or harm an individual, household, or vulnerable community.
3. Sources of information
We collect information from the following sources:
- You. For example, when you create an account, upload a photograph, contact us, or make a privacy request.
- Your device and browser. For example, when your device sends IP address, user-agent, cookie, and request information.
- Authentication providers. If you sign in with Google or another supported provider, we receive the account information necessary to authenticate you.
- Service providers. We may receive operational, delivery, security, and support information from vendors that process data for us.
- Safety, legal, and abuse reports. We may receive reports from users, affected people, researchers, law enforcement, legal representatives, or other third parties.
4. How we use information
We use information to:
- provide, operate, maintain, and secure the Service;
- authenticate users and protect accounts;
- process uploaded photographs and return location-related outputs;
- enforce rate limits, usage restrictions, and technical controls;
- detect, prevent, and investigate misuse, harassment, doxxing, stalking, scraping, attempts to bypass safety controls, and other prohibited activity;
- review submissions, outputs, and metadata where needed for safety, security, debugging, abuse reports, legal compliance, or enforcement;
- communicate with you about your account, security, legal notices, support requests, abuse reports, and material Service changes;
- comply with law and respond to lawful requests;
- establish, exercise, or defend legal claims; and
- evaluate and improve reliability, safety systems, and user experience.
We do not use submitted images for training. If we decide to use submitted images for training in the future, we will update this Policy and obtain consent where required by law before doing so.
5. Cookies and similar technologies
We use cookies and similar technologies that are necessary to operate the Service, keep you signed in, protect against cross-site request forgery, complete sign-up and single-sign-on flows, remember security state, and enforce abuse controls.
We do not use third-party advertising cookies or behavioural tracking cookies. Because we do not sell personal information or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, there is currently no advertising opt-out cookie to set. If that changes, we will update this Policy and provide any legally required opt-out mechanism.
6. Disclosure of information
We may disclose information to the following categories of recipients:
- Service providers and processors. Vendors that provide cloud hosting, database hosting, object storage, authentication, transactional email, security, logging, monitoring, analytics used for operations rather than advertising, customer support, and similar services. They may use information only to provide services to us and must protect it under appropriate contractual obligations.
- Authentication providers. If you choose to sign in with a third-party provider, information is exchanged as necessary to authenticate you.
- Professional advisors. Lawyers, auditors, insurers, accountants, and other advisors where reasonably necessary for business, legal, compliance, or risk-management purposes.
- Law enforcement, courts, regulators, and safety authorities.We may disclose information when required by law, subpoena, court order, or other valid legal process, or when we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect the rights, property, or safety of Fous, users, affected people, or the public.
- Parties involved in misuse or safety reports. Where appropriate, we may disclose limited information to investigate, prevent, or respond to abuse, security incidents, or legal claims.
- Business transaction recipients. If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, bankruptcy, sale of assets, or similar transaction, information may be disclosed or transferred as part of that transaction, subject to appropriate protections.
We do not sell your personal information. We do not share your personal information with advertisers or data brokers. We do not disclose submitted images or generated results to third parties for their independent commercial use.
7. Safety review and automated systems
We use automated and manual review processes to detect abuse, enforce rate limits, identify prohibited activity, and protect the Service. These processes may consider uploaded images, generated outputs, request metadata, account history, IP address, user-agent, and other operational signals.
The Service itself generates automated location-related outputs. Fous does not use those outputs to make legal, employment, credit, housing, insurance, immigration, law-enforcement, or similarly significant decisions about you. You must not use the Service for those purposes unless we have expressly agreed in writing and all applicable legal requirements are satisfied.
8. Retention
We keep information only for as long as reasonably necessary for the purposes described in this Policy, including providing the Service, maintaining security and audit trails, investigating misuse, complying with law, and defending legal claims.
The ordinary retention periods are listed in Section 1. We may retain information longer where required by law, where relevant to suspected misuse or safety incidents, where necessary to preserve evidence, where an account has been suspended or terminated for abuse, where we need to comply with a legal request, or where reasonably necessary to establish, exercise, or defend legal claims.
We may retain aggregated, de-identified, or otherwise non-identifying information for longer periods for security, analytics, research, and Service-improvement purposes.
9. Security
We use administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards designed to protect information against unauthorized access, loss, misuse, and alteration. These safeguards may include HTTPS, access controls, rate limiting, CSRF protection, hashed storage of session identifiers, restricted access to audit data, logging and monitoring, and separation of public-facing systems from audit storage.
No internet service can guarantee absolute security. You are responsible for protecting your account credentials and for ensuring that every photograph you submit may lawfully and safely be processed by the Service.
10. Your choices and rights
You may update certain account information in the Service and may sign out at any time. You may request account deletion or exercise privacy rights by emailing hello@fous.com.
Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, confirm, correct, delete, restrict, or object to processing of your personal information; obtain a portable copy of certain information; opt out of certain sales, targeted advertising, or profiling; limit certain uses of sensitive personal information; withdraw consent where processing is based on consent; and appeal a decision we make about a rights request.
We will not discriminate against you for exercising privacy rights. To protect security and privacy, we may need to verify your identity before completing a request. We may deny or limit a request where permitted by law, including when information must be retained for security, legal, abuse-prevention, or evidence-preservation reasons.
If you authorize an agent to submit a privacy request for you, we may ask for proof of authorization and may require you to verify your identity directly with us where permitted by law.
11. California privacy notice
This section applies to California residents where the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended, applies to us.
In the past 12 months, we have collected the categories of personal information described in Section 1, including identifiers, internet or electronic network activity information, visual information, inferences or derived outputs created by the Service, and sensitive personal information such as precise geolocation where generated by the Service or contained in a submission.
We collect, use, and disclose those categories for the business and commercial purposes described in Sections 4 and 6. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising. We do not knowingly sell or share personal information of anyone under 18.
California residents may request to know, access, correct, delete, and obtain a copy of personal information, and may limit certain uses of sensitive personal information where applicable. Because we do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioural advertising, there is currently no sale or sharing to opt out of. We will treat recognized browser-based opt-out preference signals as opt-out requests if we begin engaging in activity that requires such recognition.
12. EEA, UK, and Swiss users
Where European, UK, or Swiss data protection law applies, Fous Technologies, Inc. is the controller of personal data processed under this Policy.
Our legal bases for processing include:
- Contract. To create and administer your account, process submissions, and provide the Service you request.
- Legitimate interests. To secure the Service, prevent abuse, investigate misuse, maintain audit records, improve reliability, communicate about the Service, and protect Fous, users, affected people, and the public.
- Legal obligations. To comply with applicable law, legal process, regulatory obligations, and lawful requests.
- Consent. Where we ask for consent for a specific processing activity, such as processing sensitive information where consent is required by law.
You may have rights to access, rectify, erase, restrict, object to processing, data portability, and lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. If processing is based on consent, you may withdraw consent at any time, without affecting processing that occurred before withdrawal.
We are based in the United States, and your information may be processed in the United States and other countries where we or our service providers operate. Where required, we use appropriate transfer safeguards, such as Standard Contractual Clauses or other lawful transfer mechanisms.
13. Children
The Service is not intended for anyone under 16, and anyone under 16 may not create an account or use the Service. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it unless we are legally required to retain it.
You must not submit images of minors in any context that could be used to identify, locate, track, or harm them.
14. Copyright, privacy, and abuse reports
If you believe the Service has been used to process an image unlawfully, infringe copyright, violate privacy rights, identify a private location, or endanger a person, contact us at hello@fous.com. Please include enough information for us to understand and investigate the report.
15. Changes to this Policy
We may update this Policy from time to time. The current version will be posted on this page with the “Last updated” date above. If we make material changes, we will provide notice as required by law.
16. Contact
Questions, requests, complaints, and privacy rights requests may be sent to Fous Technologies, Inc. at hello@fous.com.