Privacy policy

Who we are

Bloom is run by Bloom, who is responsible for your personal data (the “data controller” under the EU General Data Protection Regulation, GDPR). For any privacy question or request, write to antonbebekis@hotmail.com.

What we collect

Your account

• Name, username, email address and your password (stored only in an encrypted, one-way form that nobody can read).
• Profile photo and bio, if you add them, your language, and your notification settings.
• Who invited you to Bloom, if you joined with a member’s invite link.

What you post and do

• Posts (photos, videos, music, captions), comments and replies, and the @mentions and #hashtags in them.
• Likes, saves, shares, follows, blocks, reports and “Not interested” choices.
• Private messages, including photos and voice messages you send, and calls (who called whom and when; calls themselves are not recorded).

How you use Bloom

• Which posts you see, how long you watch them and whether you watch them again. This is how the For You feed learns what you like.
• Your visits: pages you open, how long you actively use Bloom, how many posts you see, the website or app that sent you (for example a shared link or a search engine), campaign tags in the link, and what you do: links you click (their words, where they go and where on the page they were), changing the language, liking, saving, commenting, following, blocking, reporting, sending a message or starting a call (never what you write in messages, comments or posts), what you search for in the search box, opening a post's comments or a list of likes or followers, notifications you open or clear, which settings you change (not their values, except a new username), turning a video's sound on, coming back from another tab, joining, logging in, a log-in or sign-up that didn't work and why (never the password), and sharing a link.
• Your device: type (phone, tablet, computer), browser, operating system, screen size, language and time zone.
• Your IP address, and your approximate location (country, region and city) worked out from it on our own server. We keep these for every visit, to keep Bloom safe (spotting spam, abuse and fake accounts) and for our statistics. To tell new and returning visitors apart without a cookie, visits from the same IP address on the same kind of device, operating system and browser within 30 days are counted as the same person.
• Your logged-in sessions (IP address and browser), so you can see and end them in your account settings.
• To tell people from bots: which network your IP address belongs to (your internet provider, or a data center), whether Bloom’s page ran in your browser, whether your browser says it is remote-controlled or looks like one run by a program (no window, no graphics card), and whether you moved the mouse, touched, clicked, scrolled or typed at all (only which of these, never what you typed or where you clicked).

Who can see what

• Public: your profile (username, name, photo, bio, number of posts and followers) and your posts, with their captions and how many likes and comments they have. Anyone can see them, even without an account, and search engines like Google may show them in their results.
• Members only: who follows whom, and liking, commenting, following and messaging.
• Private: your messages and calls, what you saved, your email address and your settings.
• People you block can’t see your profile or posts while they are logged in.

Why we use it

The For You feed is chosen automatically from your activity. It only decides the order of posts you see; it has no legal or similarly significant effect on you.

Moderation

To keep Bloom safe, administrators can review reported content and, when needed to investigate abuse, the conversations and media involved. Reported or harmful content may be hidden or removed, and accounts that break the rules may be suspended.

Cookies and similar storage

Bloom also saves some things in your browser’s own storage, like where you were in the feed and your display choices, so pages open the way you left them. We use no advertising or tracking cookies from other companies.

YouTube videos play through YouTube’s own player, which may set its own cookies when you play them; see Google’s privacy policy.

Bloom uses only these essential cookies, so it doesn’t ask for a cookie choice.

Who else handles your data

We do not sell your data or share it with advertisers. It is handled only by:

• Our hosting provider, whose servers store Bloom and its data.
• Our email provider, to send you emails such as password resets and email confirmations.
• Your browser’s push service (for example from Google, Mozilla or Apple), to deliver push notifications if you turn them on.
• Authorities, only when the law requires it.

Locations are looked up with MaxMind’s GeoLite2 database, which runs on our own server: your IP address is not sent to MaxMind.

How long we keep it

• Your account and what you post: until you delete it, or delete your account.
• IP addresses in our visit statistics: 180 days, then erased.
• Visit statistics: 2 years, then deleted.
• Read notifications: 30 days; unread ones: 90 days.
• When you delete your account, your profile, posts, comments, likes and other activity are deleted. Copies in backups disappear as the backups are replaced.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can:

• get a copy of your personal data, and have it in a format you can take elsewhere;
• correct it (most of it directly in Edit profile);
• have it deleted: you can delete your account yourself in Edit profile;
• object to or restrict how we use it, and withdraw your consent at any time;
• complain to a data protection authority. In Greece this is the Hellenic Data Protection Authority (www.dpa.gr).

To use these rights, write to antonbebekis@hotmail.com. We answer within one month.

Age

You must be at least 15 years old to create an account on Bloom.

Changes

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top, and for important changes we will let you know on Bloom.