Privacy Policy

This policy covers everyone who uses Avatar Walk: guests who book and watch sessions, and Avatars who host them. Where a practice applies to only one of the two, this policy says which.

Avatars are independent contractors, not employees. That does not change what is collected about them; it is spelled out because sections 4 and 5 describe collection that happens while an Avatar is working.

Creating an account stores your email address, a display name, and whether the account hosts tours. Passwords are handled by Firebase Authentication (Google) and are never stored by Avatar Walk. If you sign in with Google or Apple instead, those providers tell Avatar Walk your email address and name.

A profile photo is optional. When you upload one it is stored in Firebase Storage and is visible to other users wherever you appear — on a listing, in a chat thread, on a review you wrote, and in the admin console.

Avatars may also publish a bio, social links, specialties, and a city and country on their public profile. Everything in that profile is public by design.

Avatar Walk also records roughly when you last used the app, so staff can see how many accounts are still in use. This is a single date and time on your account that is overwritten each time, at most once an hour. No history is kept, and nothing records what you looked at, how long you stayed, or which pages you visited — the only thing stored is that you were here.

Applying to host collects your phone brand and model, whether you own a gimbal, and your city, state, ZIP or postal code and phone number. Your name, email address and profile photo are copied onto the application at the moment you submit it, because the review queue could not otherwise show an administrator who applied.

This information exists so a person can decide whether your equipment will hold a paid live stream, and so support can reach you about a session in progress. Applications are read by Avatar Walk administrators and by you. Other users never see them.

An administrator's decision, the reviewing administrator's identity, and any comment they wrote are stored on the application. The comment is shown to you when an application is rejected.

This section applies to Avatars only.

While you are hosting a live session, your device sends your location to Avatar Walk roughly every ten seconds. Avatar Walk uses it to show a real-time operations map of sessions currently in progress, so that staff can see where hosting is happening and respond if something goes wrong.

Specifically, and with no part of this softened:

• It is precise. These are your actual coordinates, along with the accuracy, heading and speed your browser reports. They are not rounded, blurred or approximated. This is different from the location shown publicly on a listing or a stream, which is deliberately offset by a random distance of up to 200 metres so that strangers cannot find where you are standing.
• It happens only during a live session. Your location is not collected between sessions, before one starts, or after one ends. Avatar Walk does not track you when you are not hosting.
• Only the latest position is kept. Each update overwrites the previous one. There is one record per hosting Avatar and it holds a single point. No movement history, route, or trail is stored, so there is no record of where you walked — only where you were as of the most recent update.
• It is deleted when the session ends. The record is removed at that point and nothing about it is retained afterwards.
• Staff see it; clients do not. The precise position is visible to Avatar Walk administrators through the internal operations map. It is not shown to the guest who booked you, to viewers, or to anyone else, and it is not published in any collection or endpoint the public can read.

Your browser will ask for location permission before any of this can happen, and you can withdraw that permission in your browser or device settings. Location is what the operations map is built on, so withdrawing it means Avatar Walk cannot see where a session in progress is taking place.

Avatar Walk staff can join and watch any live session while it is happening. This is done for safety, security and fraud prevention.

You are told in advance. Before a session begins, both the Avatar hosting it and the guest who booked it are shown a notice that the session may be monitored for safety and security, and have to acknowledge that notice to continue. Avatar Walk records that acknowledgement for each session.

You are not told when it happens. There is no on-screen indicator during a session and no notification at the moment a member of staff joins — not at the time, and not afterwards. Neither party ever learns that a particular session was watched.

That distinction is the whole of it: you know in advance that any session may be watched, and you do not know when any given session is being watched. Treat every live session as one Avatar Walk may be viewing at that moment.

Staff join as viewers only. They cannot send video or audio into a session, appear in the chat, or speak to either party.

Because the people in a session cannot see monitoring happening, the control on it is internal rather than visible: every time a member of staff is given access to watch a session, Avatar Walk writes an audit record of who they are, which session it was, and the reason they gave. Those records are not readable by any user, including the parties to the session.

Stated so this policy does not over-claim in either direction:

• Staff monitoring under section 5 does not record the session. Watching produces no video or audio file. It is live viewing only, and when a member of staff stops watching, nothing of what they saw is kept. The internal audit record described in section 5 notes that a session was watched and by whom; it holds none of its content.
• Avatar Walk does not sell your location data, and does not sell what staff observe while monitoring. It does not sell any of the other information described in this policy either.
• Sessions themselves are not recorded. Avatar Walk does not generate, store, or deliver a recording of a session, and the booking page no longer offers an option to request one. Bookings made earlier, while that option was still shown, still carry the choice that was made at the time; nothing was ever produced from it. If recording is introduced, this policy changes with it.
• Avatar Walk does not run analytics or advertising trackers of its own. Your signed-in session is kept in your browser's storage by Firebase Authentication so you stay logged in. Third-party components the site loads — Stripe, Google Maps, Agora — set their own storage under their own policies.

A booking stores who booked, which listing or stream, how many minutes, the price agreed and the commission rates in force at that moment, the session's status and its timestamps. If you leave a note for the Avatar when booking, that note is stored on the booking and shown to the Avatar.

Card details are entered directly into Stripe and never reach Avatar Walk's servers or database. Avatar Walk stores the Stripe payment identifier so a charge, refund or payout can be matched to a booking. What Stripe does with your payment information is governed by Stripe's own privacy policy.

Avatars who take payouts connect a Stripe account. Stripe collects the identity and bank details it needs to pay them and to meet its own legal obligations; Avatar Walk stores the resulting account identifier, the payout status, and its own ledger of earnings, payouts and fees.

Private conversations. Messages between a guest and an Avatar are stored and readable by the two participants. Once sent, a message cannot be edited or deleted by either party — money changes hands on this marketplace and the record of what was agreed has to stay trustworthy for disputes.

Live chat. Chat inside a live stream is visible to everyone watching that stream and is stored with your display name and profile photo.

Reviews. A review stores your star rating, any category scores, your written text, and your display name and profile photo copied at the time of writing. Reviews are public.

Reports. If you report a profile, Avatar Walk stores who you reported, the reason, any detail you wrote, and your identity as the reporter. Reports are readable by administrators and are not shown to the person reported.

Support tickets. A ticket stores your topic, subject and message, along with your name and email address copied at the time of writing and, optionally, the booking it concerns. Tickets routinely contain personal details and payment complaints; they are readable by you and by Avatar Walk administrators, and by nobody else.

Avatar Walk sends in-app notifications about your bookings, payments, reviews, messages and equipment application. Email notifications are on by default and can be turned off in your settings; browser push notifications are off until you enable them and grant your browser's permission.

Enabling push stores a device registration token and your browser's user-agent string, so a stale registration can be identified. Turning push off deletes the registration.

Avatar Walk does not sell your information. It is shared with:

• Stripe — payments, refunds and Avatar payouts. Stripe receives your payment details directly and, for Avatars taking payouts, the identity and bank information it requires.
• Google (Firebase) — authentication, the database that holds everything described above, file storage for photos, and push delivery. Google Maps renders the maps in the app.
• Agora — the live video and audio transport. Your camera and microphone stream passes through Agora to reach viewers.
• Resend — sending notification emails, which means Resend handles your email address and the contents of those emails.
• Upstash — the scheduling service that fires timed callbacks for booking expiry and session end. It carries booking identifiers, not personal details.
• Law enforcement or regulators — where Avatar Walk is legally required to disclose, or where disclosure is necessary to address fraud, safety or a legal claim.

Other users see what the product shows them: your display name and profile photo, your public profile and listings if you host, your reviews, and messages you send.

Live location is deleted when the session ends, and only the latest position exists at any moment before that (section 4).

Staff monitoring produces no recording, so there is no session footage to retain (section 6). Two records around it are kept: your acknowledgement of the pre-session monitoring notice, and the internal audit record written each time a member of staff is given access to watch. Both are kept as part of the session's history rather than deleted when the session ends, because a record of who watched what is only useful if it outlives the thing it describes.

Everything else — your account, bookings, payment records, messages, reviews, equipment application, reports and support tickets — is kept for as long as your account exists, and afterwards where a record is needed for accounting, tax, fraud or dispute purposes. Avatar Walk does not currently run an automatic deletion schedule for these records; deletion happens when you ask for it under section 12.

You can see and change most of your own information in the app: your profile and photo, your notification settings, your listings and availability if you host, your bookings, and your equipment application status.

There is currently no self-service “delete my account” button. To ask for a copy of your information, a correction, or deletion of your account and the information associated with it, email Info@avatarwalk.com from the address on your account. Avatar Walk will confirm your identity before acting, since these requests are also the shape a takeover attempt takes.

Some things cannot be deleted on request. Messages are immutable once sent, so a conversation cannot be edited after the fact. Payment and payout records are kept where accounting, tax or anti-fraud obligations require them. Where a request cannot be met in full, Avatar Walk will say which part it could not do and why.

Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA, including the right to object to or restrict certain processing and the right to complain to your local data protection authority. Use the same address to exercise them.

Avatar Walk is for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to use it, as a guest or as an Avatar, and the platform is not directed at children. Avatar Walk does not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, email Info@avatarwalk.com and the account and its information will be removed.

Access is enforced in the database itself rather than only in the interface: a user can read their own account, their own bookings, their own tickets and the conversations they are part of, and the collections holding payment ledgers, listings, notifications and live locations cannot be written by any client at all. Administrator status is granted out of band and cannot be self-assigned.

No system is perfectly secure, and Avatar Walk does not claim otherwise. If you find a problem, report it to Info@avatarwalk.com.

This policy describes what the platform does today. When the platform's behaviour changes — including if session monitoring, live location handling, or recording ever change — this policy is updated to match, and the effective date at the top changes with it. A policy that promises something the code does not do is worse than no policy.

Questions about this policy, or about anything in it, go to Info@avatarwalk.com.