PrivacyPolicy

Bitely is a short-form food video app. People watch reels of real dishes from real places nearby, then order delivery or takeaway, or follow the spot. Businesses list themselves and take orders; the bearers and riders they invite work the counter and do the deliveries.

This policy covers the Bitely mobile app on iOS and Android, the business dashboard at business.bitely.store, and this website. Bitely is based in Pakistan and operates under Pakistani law.

Anything about privacy — a question, a request, a complaint — goes to support@bitely.store, and a person answers it.

Only what a given feature needs to work. The table is long because the app does a lot, not because we are hoovering things up — most people will only ever touch the first half of it.

• Running your account — signing you in, verifying your email, keeping sessions valid, and letting you get back in when you are locked out.
• Building your feed — what you watch, like, save, follow, order and hide forms a taste profile that ranks your For You feed, the Explore grid, the Dishes tab and the order of nearby restaurants. It is used for nothing else, and section 9 lists every signal.
• Showing what is nearby — putting restaurants on the map, sorting by distance, and giving directions.
• Completing orders — passing your order to the restaurant, letting them and your rider reach you, and keeping everyone updated as the status moves.
• Keeping the community safe — checking posts are about food, reviewing what gets reported, and enforcing the rules in the Terms.
• Protecting restaurants and riders — the delivery record in section 9 exists so that people who repeatedly leave riders standing at the door cannot keep doing it indefinitely.
• Telling you things — order updates, replies, follows, and whatever else you have asked to hear about.
• Stopping abuse — rate limits and per-account usage counters that block spam and keep paid services from being drained by whoever finds the endpoint.
• Fixing and improving the app — diagnosing errors and understanding which features people actually use.

Business owners see aggregate numbers about their listing — views, orders, directions requested, follower counts, how those move over time. They do not get a list of who viewed them, and we do not build them one.

Pakistan does not yet have a general data protection law in force — a bill has been circulating in draft for years. We decided not to wait for one. This policy is a commitment we hold ourselves to regardless, and it is written to the standard we would have to meet if that law arrives tomorrow.

Where we handle your information, we are relying on one of four things:

• You asked us to. Placing an order, sending a message — we cannot do the thing without the data the thing requires.
• You gave permission. Location, camera, microphone, photos and notifications are each a separate permission you grant and can withdraw at any time from your phone's settings. Camera, microphone, photos and notifications are optional. Location is not: the app's core features cannot function without it — see Location.
• We have a genuine interest and it does not override yours. Keeping the service secure, stopping spam and fraud, protecting restaurants from repeat non-receivers, and understanding which features work.
• The law requires it. Responding to a lawful order, or keeping records we are obliged to keep.

• We do not sell your personal information — to anyone, for any purpose, at any price.
• We do not run third-party advertising or tracking SDKs. The app ships with no analytics kit, no ad network and no data-broker SDK. Your activity is not shared with advertisers because there is no pipe for it to go down.
• We do not track you across other apps and websites.
• We do not read your chats to build a profile. Messages exist to be delivered to the person you sent them to. They are not an input to your feed, and they are not training data.
• We do not collect payment credentials — no card numbers, no PINs, no banking logins, from anyone.
• We do not take a cut of your order. Cash goes straight from you to the restaurant or the rider; we never touch it.
• We do not sell or share your contact details with the businesses on Bitely beyond the specific order you made with them, and they are forbidden from using them for marketing.

Bitely needs your location to work. Almost everything the app does is an answer to "what is around me" — the feed, the offers, the dishes, the restaurants you can order from and the delivery estimates you are quoted. Without your position we cannot tell which of those are near you, so the app asks for location access when you first sign in and shows a screen explaining why until you allow it.

Location is still only read while you are actually using the app — finding food near you, placing your business on the map, or a rider navigating to a drop-off. Bitely does not track your location in the background, and there is no code in the app that would let it.

• Decline location access and the app cannot show you nearby food, so it will keep asking rather than show you results from somewhere you are not. If you have declined permanently, the screen sends you to your phone's settings, which is the only place that choice can be changed.
• You can still create an account, sign in, and read these documents without granting it.
• When you tag a place on a post, that place's coordinates are stored with the post and shown publicly. That is the point of tagging, but it is worth knowing before you tag your own kitchen.
• A delivery address you save is stored with its map position so the restaurant and rider can find you.
• During a delivery, a rider's "Delivered" button only unlocks when they are near the drop-off. That check happens on their device against the delivery address — we are not recording a trail of where they went.
• You can revoke location permission at any time in your phone's settings.

Two features send content to OpenAI to be processed. Only the item being processed goes — never your account details, your contacts, your messages or your order history.

• The food-only check — when you publish a post, a few frames from it are checked to confirm it is actually about food. Posts that are not get declined instead of published.
• Menu scanning — if a business photographs its printed menu, that photo is read so the items and categories fill themselves in rather than being typed by hand.

Both only run when you take that action. If you would rather a photo of yours was not processed this way, do not use that feature — nothing else in the app depends on it.

If we add another AI feature, this section gets updated before it ships, not after.

A few things on Bitely are decided by software rather than by a person. We think you should be told which, because two of them can stop you doing something you wanted to do.

None of these are permanent, and none of them are secret. If one of them affects you and you think it is wrong, write to support@bitely.store — you are entitled to have a person look at it, and we would rather fix a bad automatic call than defend it.

How the ranking works

The order of reels in your feed, the Explore grid, the dishes on the Dishes tab and the order of nearby restaurants are decided by software, from things you do inside Bitely. Nothing from outside the app is used — no browsing history, no other apps, no data bought from anyone. This is the complete list of what goes in:

Older signals count for less than newer ones, and everything is combined into a single taste profile per account that is rebuilt continuously on our servers. The profile is about food and nothing else: it is used only to order what you see inside Bitely, it is never shown to other people or to restaurants, it is not used for advertising (we run none), and it is deleted with your account.

You are in charge of it. Pull down on the feed for a fresh ordering; tap the menu on any reel for "Not interested", "See fewer posts from this creator" or "Less of this food"; unfollow anyone; change your interests in Settings; or switch off location access, in which case the app ranks by your home area or, failing that, by what is popular across Pakistan. If something keeps showing up that you do not want, write to support@bitely.store.

Other people on Bitely

Your username, profile photo, bio, posts, comments and reviews are visible to other users. Your email, phone number and delivery addresses are never shown on your public profile.

Every review shows a "Verified order" mark and the dishes you rated, but never the order itself — not its number, its total, nor anything else you bought. Which order a review belongs to is sent back only to you, so the app can reopen the right review when you want to change it.

When someone shares a link to a post, we build a preview page for it. Only posts set to Everyone get one — a followers-only or private post shows nothing, and neither does a post whose author was deleted or banned.

Restaurants, riders and bearers — only when you transact

Place a delivery order and the restaurant and the assigned rider get your name, contact phone and delivery address, because they cannot cook it or find you otherwise. For takeaway the restaurant gets your name and phone but no address. That is the whole of it, and they are contractually forbidden from using any of it for marketing or passing it on.

Order at a counter and there is no app account involved at all: whatever name or number the bearer types onto the ticket is what we hold, and it is visible to that restaurant and its staff. In the other direction, a bearer's own name and photo are visible to the business that invited them and appear on the receipts of the orders they take — that is what the role is for, and there is no way to work the counter without it.

The restaurant is a separate business, not part of Bitely, and once your order details reach them they hold that information as their own. Most restaurants publish their own terms covering the order itself — timings, charges, what they do about a wrong or missing item — and you will find them on the restaurant's profile in the app under Terms & conditions. This policy covers what we do with your data; what a restaurant does with it after that is theirs to answer for, and you can ask them directly.

Service providers

A small set of companies run pieces of the infrastructure for us. They process data on our instructions, for the purpose listed and nothing else.

Legal reasons

We may disclose information where the law requires it, where it is necessary to investigate fraud or abuse, or where someone's safety is at stake. We do not hand over user data on a casual request: we check that the request is lawful and properly made, we give only what is actually asked for, and where we are permitted to tell you about it, we will.

• Our servers run on Google Cloud in Mumbai, India — the closest region to Pakistan, chosen because it keeps the app fast.
• The database is hosted by Neon on Amazon Web Services.
• Videos, photos and voice notes are stored on Cloudflare R2, which distributes them across a global network so they load quickly wherever you are.
• The AI features in section 8 send the item being processed to OpenAI in the United States.
• Emails go out through Resend, and push notifications through Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging.

Every one of these is a contracted provider processing data on our behalf, not a party we have sold anything to. Traffic to all of them is encrypted in transit. If you are not comfortable with your information leaving Pakistan, the honest answer is that you should not use Bitely — we cannot offer a version that does not.

Some of it lives on your device first

So a shop can keep serving when the internet drops, parts of the app work offline. Work done with no connection — a counter order, an order moved to the next stage, a menu or price change — is written to storage on your own device and sent to our servers automatically once a connection returns. The app also keeps a copy of recent screens there so they still open offline. Which functions do this, and which need a connection, is listed in the Terms.

That local copy is not shared with anyone, is readable only by the app, and is cleared when you sign out — so one account's unsent work can never be sent under another's. It is not a backup: if you delete the app before it syncs, that work is gone. And because it sits on the device, anyone with the unlocked phone can see it, which is the same as for anything else in the app.

You will not find a cookie banner on this site, and that is not an oversight. We do not set any cookie that would need consent, because there is no advertising or analytics here to set one for.

The only cookies Bitely uses are two strictly necessary sign-in cookies on the web portals:

• bitely_refresh — keeps you signed in to the business dashboard.
• bitely_admin_refresh — the same thing for the admin panel, kept separate so the two portals cannot log each other out.

Both are httpOnly, so no script on the page can read them; SameSite=Strict, so another site cannot make your browser send them; sent only over HTTPS in production; and scoped to the API path. They expire after 30 days, and logging out clears them immediately. The mobile app uses no cookies at all — it keeps its token in the phone's secure keystore.

This informational website sets no cookies whatsoever.

• Your account and content — while your account is open. Deleting the account removes them, as described in section 15.
• Verification codes — 10 minutes, then they are useless.
• Sign-in sessions — access tokens last a day, the refresh token 30 days. Logging out or revoking a device ends the session immediately.
• Delivery chats — deleted outright the moment the order reaches its final status. They are meant to be temporary and they genuinely are.
• Content you delete yourself — a post, comment or review is removed from Bitely when you delete it.
• Usage counters — the per-day counts behind rate limits are swept out on a rolling schedule; they are numbers, not history.
• Viewing history — a score per post you watched, kept 90 days and then swept out.
• Taste profile — one summary row per account (see section 9), rebuilt continuously and deleted with the account. The events behind it (likes undone, hides, unfollows) are kept 180 days; the list of things you hid, 90 days.
• Ranked feed sessions — the exact order you were served, kept 24 hours so that scrolling stays consistent, then deleted.
• Popularity counters — daily figures per post are kept 35 days, per restaurant and per area 100 days. They are aggregate counts, not a record of who did what.
• Moderation records — kept while they are needed for accountability, so we can answer for our own enforcement decisions.
• Backups — routine encrypted backups roll over on their normal cycle. They are never used to restore something you deleted.

These are not favours we grant. Most of them you can exercise yourself, right now, without asking anyone.

• See what we hold — email support@bitely.store and we will send you a copy of your data. No charge, and we aim to answer within 30 days.
• Correct it — most of it is editable in the app. Anything that is not, ask us.
• Delete it — any post, comment or review at any time, or the whole account from Settings.
• Object to something — if you think a particular use of your data is unfair, tell us. We will either explain why we do it or stop.
• Get a human decision — see section 9.
• Control what you see — block an account or a restaurant to clear it from your feed and map, and unblock later from Settings.
• Report anything — reports are anonymous to the person reported.
• Withdraw permissions — location, camera, microphone, photos and notifications can each be revoked in your phone's settings. The app keeps working without camera, microphone, photos or notifications. Withdrawing location stops the app being able to show you nearby food, which is most of what it does.
• Control your data use — pick a video quality or turn on Data saver so reels use less of your mobile allowance.
• Secure your account — turn on two-step verification, review signed-in devices, and revoke any you do not recognise.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, tell us first — support@bitely.store, and we will take it seriously. If we cannot put it right between us, you can raise it with the relevant authority in Pakistan, and nothing in this policy or the Terms is intended to stop you.

You can delete your Bitely account yourself from Settings → Account → Delete account. It is deactivated immediately and hidden from everyone else, and permanently deleted after 30 days. Signing back in during those 30 days brings it back — that window exists for the person who taps delete at 2am and regrets it by morning.

After the 30 days it is gone and cannot be recovered. Everything you made goes with it: profile, posts, comments, likes, saves, follows, reviews, orders, reservations, messages, saved addresses, and any business listing you own.

Two honest exceptions. Copies other people saved before you deleted are beyond our reach. And if the law requires us to keep a specific record — a fraud investigation, a legal claim — we keep only that, only for as long as we must.

• Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. We cannot read them, and neither could anyone who walked off with the database.
• Traffic between the apps and our servers is encrypted in transit over HTTPS.
• Two-step verification, if you turn it on, means a sign-in from a new device also needs a code from your email.
• Sign-in sessions rotate, and a stolen token that gets reused invalidates the entire chain automatically — the thief and the real owner are both logged out, which is the right outcome.
• Chat photos and voice notes live in a private bucket and are served only over short-lived signed links. They are not publicly browsable and cannot be found by guessing a URL.
• Access to production systems is limited to the people who need it, and mutating admin actions are logged with who did them.

No online service can promise perfect security and we are not going to be the first to try. What we will promise is this: if a breach ever affects your personal information, we will tell you what happened, what was exposed, and what to do about it — promptly, and without waiting to see whether anyone noticed.

If you find a security problem in Bitely, please tell us at support@bitely.store before telling anyone else. We will not threaten you for reporting it in good faith.

Bitely is not for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email support@bitely.store and we will remove it and delete what it holds.

Between 13 and 17, an account needs a parent or guardian's agreement — the Terms explain why, and it is a requirement of Pakistani contract law rather than a preference of ours. A parent can ask us at any time to see what an account holds or to delete it.

We update this when the app changes, and the date at the top always reflects what you are reading. Where a change genuinely affects you — a new kind of data, a new purpose, a new provider handling your information — we give notice in the app or by email before it takes effect rather than quietly editing the page. Continuing to use Bitely after that means you accept the updated policy.

A question about your privacy, a request for your data, or a complaint about how we have handled it — write to support@bitely.store. We answer every message, and a person reads it before answering.