Privacy Policy

Last modified: 05/2520

Hi :)

In case you’re not familiar, Morphus is an app that makes it fun and easy to communicate with interesting people are around you. Have you ever been to an event and wondered who else is nearby and how they may be related to you? How about finding students around a college campus to do something together? So many missed oportunities that we'd like to save. With Morphus, you can easily find people that will become lasting companions in your life.

We understand that privacy is important when sharing your location. That’s why we encourage each and every one of our users to read the terms and privacy websites. We have prepared this Privacy Policy to make sure you are aware of our practices. This policy applies to your use of the Morphus app and any other services that Morphus, Inc. ( Morphus) may offer.

1. Important information

Before you read on, we would like to highlight important information.

  • When you use our services you share information with Morphus and companies within our corporate family. Morphus, Inc. is the data controller and responsible for processing your data.
  • To create your account we only require a name, birthday and email address. The name is used to identify you on Morphus, your birthday ensures you’re old enough to use the app, and your email address is used to authenticate your account.
  • Morphus is a location based application. In order to provide the services to you we need access to your location data.
  • In order to offer our services we may need to transfer your information to third parties based outside the EU. More information can be found in the section How we share information and Transfers outside of the European Union.
  • You can always email us at hello@morphus.ai if you have questions about our Privacy Policy, if you want access to your data, if you want us to correct your data, or if you want us to delete it. See Control over your information for details.
  • We have a data deletion and retention policy in place that details how long we store your information. As a general rule, we store the information we collect as long as you are actively using the Morphus app. If you haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete most of the data collected by us. For details, have a look at How long we keep your information.
  • If you’re based in the EU, you can always file a complaint with the supervisory authority in your Member State.
  • You have the right to provide us with instructions on how to handle the deletion and retention of your personal data after your death.

2. Information we collect

There are three categories of information we collect:

3. Information you provide

When you interact with our services, we collect information that you choose to share with us.

  • Registration. When you register through the app you provide us with a name (which could be your first and/or last name, or a pseudonym…it’s totally up to you), birthday and email address. You may also register via third party authentication methods such as Facebook.
  • Topics of Interest. To match you better we encourage you to provide several topics of interest that will match you with relevant people. This will make it easier and more fun to interact with your friends and people nearby. Of course, you're free to change your topics and knowledge reason at any time.
  • Address book. We also allow you to share your address book to easily find friends that are already active on Morphus. Sharing your address book also makes it easy to invite friends to Morphus and share the love! Note that we only upload the phone numbers of your contacts (not their names!).
  • Location. Morphus is a location based service. In order for the app to fully function we need permission to note your precise location. You provide us with your location through the permission settings on your phone. We collect your location using methods that include GPS, wireless networks, cell towers, WiFi access points, and other sensors, such as gyroscopes, accelerometers, and compasses. If, for whatever reason, you're letting someone else use your phone you can disable location sharing to keep their location private as well as prevent any misunderstandings about your own location.
  • Communications. You also provide us with any other information you send through our services, such as messages and emojis to your friends and/or our support team ( hello@morphus.ai).

4. Information we may get when you use Morphus

When you use our services, we collect information about how you use those services so we can provide you with a better experience. Here are some examples:

  • Usage information. We collect information with regard to your activity on Morphus. For example, how you communicate with your friends: names, usernames, times and dates of communications, the number of messages and emojis you exchange, your fave friends, the time at which you open messages, when you take a screenshot, and so on. This helps us understand what you like, and what we should improve!
  • Device information. We collect a variety of device-specific information, such as the battery level, the BSSIDs of wifi terminals, as well as the SSIDs but only for statistical purposes, whether or not headphones are connected, phone name, phone hardware model, operating system version, your phone’s advertising identifier, unique application identifiers, unique device identifiers, phone language, wireless network names, IP addresses, and general mobile network information (including the mobile phone number). This helps us protect your security, fix bugs, and improve the precision of your positions, for example.
  • Location information. We collect information on your most frequent locations based on your use of the app and its location data. For example, we may identify your home, school or work, or other locations. We do this mostly to let you know when one of your friends is available to do fun things, or if there are other fun people nearby that you should not miss out of meeting with.

5. Information we collect from third parties

We may collect information that other users provide about you when they use our services. For example, if another user allows us to collect information from their address book on their phone and you’re one of that user’s contacts we may combine the information we collect from that user’s address book with other information we have collected about you. We would do this in order to highlight that you use Morphus and can discover each other easier, for example.

We may also obtain information from other companies that are owned or operated by us—or any other third-party sources—and combine that with the information we normally collect through our services. For example, we may obtain information from third parties to help identify details of your location. This will help us understand if you’re in an airport and about to fly somewhere, and while your icon will not move on Morphus for some time, still provide an ETA. This also works if you’re riding to a party on your bike! In such case be ready to receive a lot of clock emoji if you are getting late!

6. How we use information

Our main goal is to offer the best possible service so you and your friends can connect with each other wherever and whenever based on your current location. Specifically, we may use your information to…

  • …develop, operate, improve, deliver, maintain, and protect our services.
  • …send you communications, including by email. For example, we may use email to respond to support inquiries or to share information about services, and promotional offers that we think may interest you.
  • …create statistical studies and monitor and analyze trends. For example:
    • Movement patterns. Predict your movement patterns based on your location data, a methodology we’ve developed by looking at the delay between two collection instants.
    • Statistical studies. Creating statistical studies on an anonymized basis. We will never disclose your identity. Not even your name.
    • Registration statistics. Determining which groups (e.g. country, users of different phone types, operating systems, etc.) are statistically relevant to the different studies that Morphus conducts on an aggregate basis.
    • Movements over time. Measuring and analyzing the movements of users over time.
    • Communications. Studying exchanges habits and communication between friends and people you communicate with.
  • …personalize the Morphus service. For example, suggesting friends or profile information or giving you an overview of where you’ve been.
  • …contextualize your experience by displaying your best friends and favorite locations in the app. For example, your best friends appear bigger than others to make it easy to connect with them. We may also display an icon above your location to identify your home or work address to help give your friends an idea of where you are.
  • …enhance the safety and security of our products and services, for example by detecting and preventing excessive friend requests. Nobody likes spam!
  • …send you advertisements and improve ad targeting, including through the use of your precise location data.
  • …send you push notifications. Of course, if you don't want to receive push notifications, just turn them off in the Settings.
  • …verify your identity to prevent fraud or other unauthorized or illegal activity.
  • …enforce our Terms of Service and other usage policies.
  • …store some information locally on your device, so that you can open the app and view content faster.

7. Bases for using your information

As an EU based company, we are only allowed to use your personal information when certain conditions apply. These conditions are called “legal bases” and, at Morphus, we typically rely on one of four:

  • Contract. One reason we might use your information is because it’s necessary to provide our services to you as described in our Terms of Service.
  • Legitimate interest. Another reason we might use your information is because we have a legitimate interest in doing so. For example, we need to use your information to provide and improve our services, including protecting your account, delivering Morphus’s services, providing customer support, and helping you find friends. An important point to understand about legitimate interest is that our interests don’t outweigh your right to privacy. So we only rely on legitimate interest when we think the way we are using your data doesn’t significantly impact your privacy or would be expected by you, or there is a good reason to do so.
  • Consent. In some cases we’ll ask for consent to use your information for specific purposes. If we do, we’ll make sure you can revoke your consent in our services or through your device permissions. Even if we’re not relying on consent to use your information, we may ask you for permission to access data like contacts and location.
  • Legal obligation. We may be required to use your personal information to comply with the law, like when we respond to valid legal process or need to take action to protect our users.

8. How we share information

We may share your information in the following ways:

  • With other Morphus users. Specifically, we may share the following information:

    • Information about you, such as your name, username, friend list, number of friends, and battery status.
    • Your location, but only if the user is your friend and you’ve allowed them to view it. We would also like to draw your attention to the fact that your friends may have access to your location regardless of theirs. This means that if a friend is traveling abroad he or she will still be able to see where you are, and vice versa. Remember: you can always limit the sharing of your location in the app anytime.
    • Information about how you have interacted with the service such as the day you joined, the day you became friends with another user, and messages and emojis you’ve both sent and received.
    • Any other information you have consented for us to share. For example, when you let us access your device’s address book, we may share information about you with other users who have your name and phone number in their device’s address book.
  • With our affiliates. That means that we may share information with entities within the Morphus, Inc. family of companies.
  • With third parties. Specifically:
    • With service providers and partners. We may share information about you with service providers who perform services on our behalf and business partners that provide services and functionality.
    • With third parties for legal reasons. We may share information about you if we reasonably believe that disclosing the information is needed to:
      • Comply with any valid legal process, governmental request, or applicable law, rule, or regulation.
      • Investigate, remedy, or enforce potential Terms of Service violations.
      • Protect the rights, property, and safety of us, our users, or others.
      • Detect and resolve any fraud or security concerns.
    • Other third parties. We may also share aggregated, non personally identifiable or de-identified information.
  • With third parties as part of a merger or acquisition. If Morphus, Inc.. gets involved in a merger, asset sale, stock sale, share sale, financing, liquidation or bankruptcy, or acquisition of all or some portion of our business to another company, we may share your information with that company before and after the transaction closes. Things like this can happen in the wild world of tech!
  • Also be aware that your friends may take screenshots of the app and/or share some information about their interactions with you on Morphus.

9. How long we keep your information

We store your information as long as necessary and as long as you’re a user of our service. We have different retention protocols in place depending on the information. As a general rule, we store the information we collect as long as you are actively using Morphus. If you haven’t opened or used the app for more than 12 months we will delete most of the data we’ve collected. Also note that we aggregate or anonymize information for certain purposes such as data analytics. Once we've anonymized the data we retain it indefinitely.

The following data is stored as long as you are actively using the Morphus app:

  • Your namename, username and email address
  • Your age and interests
  • Your encrypted address book
  • Friend requests
  • Your chats and images
  • Location data
  • Your device and usage information

Of course, we also respect your requests for account deletion. The following section, Control over your information, provides more information on how to delete your account.

10. Control over your information

It is very important to us that you have control over your information! Here are some ways we establish just that:

  • Location. You can change the location that is visible to your friends at any time in the app settings. We allow you to share only limited location information with certain friends, or even hide your location from them altogether. We’ve tried to make the best location control settings on the market, but think they can always be improved. If you have ideas on how to do that, please reach out! Morphus is built by users, for users.
  • Access. We strive to let you access and update most of the personal information that we have about you. Most of this can be done in the profile section of the app. If you need to access, update, or delete any other personal information that we may have, you can contact hello@morphus.ai. Note however that, we may ask you to verify your identity or provide additional information before we can provide access to your information.
  • Account deletion. We don’t like seeing you leave us but if, for some reason, you want to delete your account you can always contact us at hello@morphus.ai to request account deletion. You can also send an old school letter to 7-26-7 Shinjuku, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo - Japan.
  • Account un-deletion. If you’ve asked us to delete your account…and then you changed your mind and totally want it back you will have up to 30 days to restore your account before we delete your information from our servers. During this period, your account will not be visible to other users.
  • Right to object. You have the right to object to our use of your information. With many types of data, we’ve provided you with the ability to simply delete it if you don’t want us processing it anymore. For other types of data, we’ve given you the ability to stop the use of your data by disabling the feature altogether. You can do these things in the app. If there are other types of information you don’t agree with us processing, you can contact us at hello@morphus.ai.

11. Transfers outside the European Union

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that if your friends are outside the European Union, your information—including your location—will be available to them. Similar to our transfer of your data to third parties as described in How we share information, your data may be transferred and be accessible to third parties and users outside of the European Union, including to countries that may not have the same level of protection of your information as those within the European Union. Whenever we share your information outside the European Union with third parties we make sure adequate mechanisms are in place to protect your data, such as the Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Privacy Shield. We have included more details in the table below.

Purpose Type of data Country Recipient Transfer Mechanism
Data analytics App usage data and user data U.S. Data analytics providers Standard Contractual Clauses
Data analytics Anonymized location data U.S. Map provider Privacy Shield
Data storage All user data U.S. Cloud storage provider Standard Contractual Clauses
Internal communication Chats, texts and images U.S. Chat provider Privacy Shield
Support Messages from users U.S. Support provider Privacy Shield

We’re always happy to answer any questions you may have about data sharing to countries outside the European Union. If you do have any questions simply let us know at hello@morphus.ai.

Complaints? If you’re based in the EU, you can always file a complaint with the supervisory authority in your Member State.

12. Children

Our services are not intended for—and we don’t direct them to—anyone under 13. And that’s why we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. Additionally, you must be old enough to consent to the processing of your information in your country.

13. Revisions to the Privacy Policy

We may change this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we’ll let you know one way or another. Sometimes, we’ll let you know by revising the date at the top of the Privacy Policy (which is available on our website and in our app). Other times—especially if there is a major change—we’ll provide you with additional notice, such as adding a statement to our websites’ homepages or providing you with an in-app notification.

14. How to contact us

If you have any questions feel free to let us know at hello@morphus.ai or reach out to our data protection officer at dpo@morphus.ai.