Privacy Policy

Effective October 12, 2026 · Last updated October 18, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how [COMPANY LEGAL NAME] ("ContextList," "we," "us," or "our") collects, uses, shares and protects information when you use the ContextList mobile app, the contextlist.ai website, ContextCard pages and claim links, and any related services (together, the "Services"). It also explains the rights you have, including under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act ("CCPA").

1. Information that stays on your device

The following is stored only in the app's local database on your phone and is not sent to our servers:

• Your contacts, when you grant Contacts access: names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, companies, birthdays and other address-book fields. The app never reads or writes the Notes field of your Contacts app.
• Imported files you choose, such as a LinkedIn connections export an Instagram followers and following export, a HubSpot contacts export, an Excel sheet or CSV, or a photo of a printed or on-screen list. These files are read on your device; photos of a list are read on your phone by Apple's text recognition and never uploaded, and only the people you confirm are saved. When an imported LinkedIn entry exactly matches a contact by phone number, email or a unique full name, the app may merge them on your device.
• Calendar information, when you grant Calendar access: event titles, dates, locations and attendees, used to note where and when you met people.
• Your notes, tags, categories and industries, the history of how each contact's details have changed over time, and the history of changes the app makes to your Contacts app (kept so you can undo them).
• Contact photos saved in your Contacts app. ContextList shows them but never uploads them.
• "How I know them" notes. These stay on your device and are never sent to any AI provider.
• Where You Met (on by default; iOS asks your permission for location first, and you can turn it off in Settings → Privacy or in your phone's location settings at any time). When you save a new contact, the app notes your location at that moment, using location only while the app is open, along with any in-person calendar event happening then. The coordinates, place name and event stay on your phone. Apple's geocoder names the place, the same way Apple Maps does; nothing is sent to ContextList servers or to AI features.
• Voice input. When you use the microphone in Ask, speech is transcribed by Apple's on-device speech recognition. No audio leaves your phone, and no audio is stored.
• Reminders and alerts. Birthday, reconnect and Keep in Touch reminders, and alerts that a contact joined ContextList or changed their card, are generated and scheduled on your device.

Backups. If you use Backup, the app creates a file containing your tags, categories and notes and lets you save it wherever you choose, such as Files or iCloud Drive. We do not upload it or receive a copy.

Because this data stays on your device, deleting the app deletes it, unless your device's own backups (for example, iCloud Backup, which Apple operates under its own privacy policy) include it.

2. Information we collect and store on our servers

Hashed identifiers

To tell you which of your contacts have published a ContextCard, the app converts phone numbers into salted hashes (HMAC-SHA256) on your device. Our server then keys each hash again with a secret that never leaves the server before storing or comparing anything. That server-side secret is what keeps stored values from being reversed with lookup tables. We use these hashes only to find matching ContextCards. Because they are derived from contact details, we treat them as personal information.

Your ContextCard

If you choose to publish a ContextCard, we store what you enter: your name, headline, job titles, company, industries, bio, public tags and, if you add one, your card photo, together with a hash of your verified phone number. Cards are matched by verified phone number only, never by email. Card photos are resized and stripped of location and other metadata on your phone before upload, are shown only to the same people who can see your card, and are deleted when you remove the photo or delete your card or account. Your card is shown only to ContextList users who already have your phone number saved in their own contacts and who are signed in or have verified their own number.

Your account (Sign in with Apple or Google)

To publish a ContextCard you sign in with Apple. We store a keyed hash of the user identifier Apple gives us. We do not request your Apple email address. Your account links the phone numbers you verify. If you change numbers, we keep your previous number linked to your account for one year so people who saved it can still find your card. Your new number is sealed, meaning it is encrypted with a key derived from your old number, so only people who already saved your old number can read it. You can sign out at any time. Signing out locks the app until the same Apple ID signs in again; a different Apple ID must erase the existing ContextList data on the phone first. App Lock, if you turn it on, also asks for Face ID or your passcode. Both keep other people out of the app; the data on your device is protected by iOS encryption, not by a separate ContextList password. Deleting your account also asks Apple to revoke ContextList's access to your Apple ID.

On Android you sign in with Google instead. We store a keyed hash of the user identifier Google gives us, and we do not store your Google email address.

Links on your card

If you add LinkedIn, Instagram or a website to your card, they are stored with your ContextCard and shown to people who have your number, and on your public link when Links is on. The links on your own card are never sent to AI features.

Public Link (opt-in)

If you turn on a Public Link for your ContextCard, anyone with the link or its QR code can see the fields you chose to show, such as your photo, headline, title, company, bio and tags. Your phone number and email are off by default. If you add them, they are encrypted on your phone with a key that exists only inside your link and in your device's Keychain; our servers store only the encrypted data and never receive the key. You can reset the link key or turn the link off at any time.

Network (opt-in, off by default)

If you turn on Network in Settings → Privacy, we store, linked to your account, a server-keyed hash of each phone number in your address book (up to 10,000, refreshed daily, with removed numbers dropped), a count of how many Network members have each number saved, and the time of your last sync. We never store names, emails, notes, companies, titles or labels for Network.

We use this only to show (a) another member who already has you saved that you know a number of people at a company, counted only against verified ContextCards listing that company and only when at least three exist, never who they are; and (b) how many members have a number saved, shown only when at least three do. Lookups are limited to members and capped daily. Your Network data is deleted when you turn Network off or delete your account.

If you turn on Let Contacts Ask Me for Intros, friends on Network can ask you to introduce them to someone in your contacts who turned on Open to Intros. You see who is asking and who they would like to meet, and you decide.

Warm Intros (opt-in)

Open to Intros is off by default. If you turn it on, a short description of your work that you write (no name, number, email or link) is stored with your ContextCard and shown to people one friend away who use Network. They see only that description and which of their contacts knows you, never your name, number or company, until that contact agrees to introduce you and you accept. When everyone agrees, your name and card details are shown to the person who asked, and the contact in the middle receives a scrambled form of each person's number so their phone can start the group text from numbers it already has. Intro requests (who asked, through whom, the note they wrote, and each answer) are deleted 30 days after the last change, or sooner when anyone involved turns off Network or deletes their account.

Because phone numbers come from a limited range, whoever holds our server secret could in principle test whether a particular number is in a member's list. That is why Network is opt-in.

Swap Cards and Export

Swapping cards by QR code uses your Public Link and adds no other server data. Export Everything creates a file on your phone with your contacts, tags, notes, categories, history and card, saved wherever you choose; we do not receive it.

Phone verification

Before you can publish, we verify that you control your phone number. Your number is sent to our SMS provider (Twilio) so it can text you a one-time code. We store the verification status and session details, not the code.

Invites, claim links and Context Pings

You can send a contact a link from your own phone's Messages app asking them to confirm their details. To make that link work, we store a short code, a hash of the recipient's number, a hash of your own number, the name you have saved for them, and your display name. If the recipient opens the link and submits the form, we store what they submit (for example, name, title, company, industry, skills and LinkedIn or Instagram handles) so it can be delivered to you. The text message itself is sent by your phone's Messages app, not by us.

Technical and usage information

The app creates a random install key on your device. We store a hash of it to authorize changes to your own card and to enforce daily limits on paid lookups, along with counts of how many lookups were used. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which can include IP addresses, timestamps and request details, for security and troubleshooting. Once a day while you are signed in, the app also tells our server that your account opened it, your platform and app version, how many contacts you have and how many of them have a ContextCard. It sends only those numbers, never names, phone numbers, emails, hashes or notes. We use them, combined into daily, weekly and monthly totals, to understand whether ContextList is working for people. This is on by default and you can turn it off in Settings → Privacy → Share Usage Counts. When you delete your account, its own record is deleted; the combined totals keep no identifiers. We do not use advertising identifiers and do not track you across other companies' apps or websites.

3. Optional features that send data to third parties

Except for Fill In From the Web and the Ask online fallback, which are on by default until you turn them off, these features run only when you use them, and the app asks you before anything is sent: a prompt before your first verification code, an opt-in for Claude AI in Settings → AI, and a confirmation before each lookup.

Under its commercial terms, Anthropic does not use API inputs and outputs to train its models. People Data Labs is a data provider with its own privacy policy and data subject request process.

4. Information about people who are not ContextList users

When you use ContextList, information about people in your contacts is processed on your device, and hashed identifiers, lookup requests and AI requests may involve information about them as described above. We do not build profiles of non-users on our servers, and we do not sell information about them. If you believe ContextList holds information about you, for example from a claim link or a ContextCard, you can ask us to delete it at privacy@contextlist.ai. Users are responsible for having the right to store and use the contact information they bring into the app.

5. How we use information

• To provide the Services: matching ContextCards, verifying phone numbers, delivering claim-link responses, and running the features you request.
• To keep the Services secure: preventing fraud, abuse and spam, enforcing rate limits, and debugging.
• To communicate with you about the Services, including support replies and important notices.
• To comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Service.

We do not use your information for targeted advertising, and we do not make decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects about you using automated processing.

6. How we share information

We share personal information only with:

• Service providers that process it on our behalf under contract, including Convex (database and hosting), Twilio (SMS verification), People Data Labs and Trestle (reverse lookup, only when you request it) and Anthropic (AI processing if you opt in to Claude, and the Fill In From the Web lookup and Ask online fallback unless you turn them off).
• Other users, limited to your published ContextCard, and only users who already have your verified phone number saved.
• Legal and safety recipients, when we believe in good faith that disclosure is required by law, subpoena or court order, or is needed to protect the rights, property or safety of ContextList, our users or the public.
• A successor in a merger, acquisition, financing or sale of assets. That successor will remain bound by this policy for the information it receives.

We do not sell personal information and do not "share" it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as those terms are defined under the CCPA, and we have not done so in the past 12 months.

7. Retention

• Your ContextCard and its hashes: until you delete or unpublish it.
• Your account and its Apple identifier hash: until you delete your account. Previous phone numbers linked to your account: one year after you change numbers.
• Phone verification records: while your card stays published. Unused code sessions are deleted one day after they expire.
• Claim links: unclaimed links are deleted within an hour of expiring. Answers are deleted as soon as your phone saves them, or after 30 days if never picked up.
• Deleting your ContextCard also deletes every verification and invite, sent or received, for the numbers your device published or verified.
• Lookup usage counters: daily counts used for rate limits, kept no longer than needed for that purpose.
• Server logs: for the limited period our hosting provider retains them, unless needed longer to investigate a security incident.

8. Security

Only devices that are signed in or have verified a phone number can look up ContextCards or use AI features, and both have daily limits. The AI features answer questions about your own contacts only. Verification texts are sent only to United States and Canada numbers. On Android, ContextList data is excluded from device backups.

We use encryption in transit (TLS), keyed hashing of contact identifiers, a server-side secret applied before storage, access controls and data minimization. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by law.

9. Your choices and rights

Choices in the app

• Turn Contacts, Calendar or notification access on or off at any time in iOS Settings.
• Choose whether to use reverse lookup and AI features. Each runs only when you start it.
• Delete Account (on My Card and in Settings → Privacy) deletes your ContextCard and every server record tied to it, including every verification, claim link and invite, sent or received, for the numbers you published or verified. It also erases everything ContextList keeps on your phone. If you only want to take your card down, use Delete My ContextCard & Unpublish Info in Settings → Privacy. Changes the app already wrote to your Contacts app stay there unless you undo them first.

California privacy rights

If you are a California resident, you have the right to:

• Know and access the categories and specific pieces of personal information we have collected about you, the categories of sources, our purposes, and the categories of recipients;
• Delete personal information we have collected from you, subject to legal exceptions;
• Correct inaccurate personal information;
• Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. We do not sell or share it, so there is nothing to opt out of;
• Limit the use of sensitive personal information. We use sensitive personal information only as permitted by the CCPA (for example, to verify your phone number and secure your account), so this right does not apply;
• Not be discriminated against for exercising these rights.

To make a request, email privacy@contextlist.ai with the subject "California Privacy Request." We will verify your request, typically by confirming control of the phone number or email involved, and respond within 45 days. We may extend that by another 45 days when reasonably necessary, and will tell you if we do. You may use an authorized agent; we may ask the agent for proof of authorization and ask you to verify your identity directly. We honor Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out of sale and sharing, although we do neither.

CCPA notice at collection

We collect these categories from you, from your device, from people who respond to claim links, and, when you request it, from People Data Labs. Retention periods are listed in Section 7.

Shine the Light

California Civil Code § 1798.83 lets California residents ask which personal information we disclosed to third parties for their direct marketing purposes. We do not make such disclosures.

Other locations

If you live in another U.S. state with a consumer privacy law, or in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you may have similar rights to access, delete, correct and port your data and to object to processing. Contact us using the details below and we will honor them as required by applicable law. Where the GDPR applies, we process data to perform our contract with you, for our legitimate interests in operating and securing the Services, and with your consent for optional features. You may also complain to your local data protection authority.

10. Children

ContextList is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us information, contact us and we will delete it. We do not sell the personal information of anyone, including consumers under 16.

11. International users

We are based in California, and our service providers process data in the United States. If you use the Services from outside the United States, your information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country.

12. Do Not Track

We do not track users across third-party sites, so we do not respond differently to browser Do Not Track signals. We do honor Global Privacy Control as described above.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. If we make material changes, we will notify you in the app or by other reasonable means before they take effect, and update the "Last updated" date above.

14. Contact us

[COMPANY LEGAL NAME]
[MAILING ADDRESS]
Email: privacy@contextlist.ai
Website: contextlist.ai