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How Hobber collects, uses, and protects your personal data.
Version 1.2 · Effective date set at publish · Market United Arab Emirates · Issued by Hobber Advertising LLC Supersedes: version 1.1
This is the version published for United Arab Emirates.
This policy explains what Hobber does with Personal Data about the people who use the Hobber app, the Hobber website and Hobber AI to find, plan and book Experiences. It is written in plain English. It is a notice, not an agreement: you do not sign it, and nothing in it takes away a right you have under the laws of the United Arab Emirates.
If you use Hobber for a business that sells Experiences, or for a venue that hosts them, read the Vendor Privacy Policy instead. It covers Vendor Users and Hub Partner users as individuals.
This policy covers you if you are:
It covers the Hobber consumer app, the Hobber website, Hobber AI, the Vouchers and invoices we issue, the emails, push notifications and messages we send you, and the conversations you have with a Vendor or with Customer Support through the Platform.
A Vendor User or a Hub Partner user who also holds a customer account is covered by this policy for what they do as a Customer, and by the Vendor Privacy Policy for what they do for their business. One sign-in can serve both, and deleting that sign-in acts on both. The Terms, section Your account, explains how one account can hold more than one role.
This policy is published in Arabic and in English for United Arab Emirates. Both versions say the same thing. Nothing in the English text limits a right you have under the laws of the United Arab Emirates.
Your Home Market is the Market you selected when you created your account. The version of this Privacy Policy published for your Home Market governs your Personal Data and your data rights, wherever you browse and wherever you book.
Browsing or booking in another Market does not change that and does not ask you to accept this policy again. The text of this policy is the same in every Market. Only the Market Schedule published with it differs. The Terms, section Where these Terms apply, sets out the same rule for the Terms and for each Booking.
We record which version of this policy you accepted and when, at registration and again in the snapshot taken at each checkout. That record is the Consent Record.
Hobber is the controller of the Personal Data described in this policy. That means we decide why and how it is processed, and we are the party you hold responsible for it.
Hobber runs the Platform, sells each Experience as the Vendor's disclosed commercial agent, collects your payment as the Vendor's payment collection agent, and issues the tax invoice for the Experience on the Vendor's behalf. The Vendor delivers the Experience. Hobber is responsible to you under the laws of the United Arab Emirates for the Experience being delivered as described, and refunds you under the Refund Policy. Hobber is not a neutral notice board and does not describe itself as one. The Terms, section What the Platform is and Hobber's role, set that role out in full. This policy covers the Personal Data side of it.
| Company | Hobber Advertising LLC |
| Address | Madinet Zayed Office Tower, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates |
| Commercial licence | Commercial licence CN-3761457, Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development |
| Tax registration number | TRN 104317953800003 |
| Privacy contact | privacy@hobber.ai |
| Customer Support | the support chat in the Hobber app |
We apply Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data (we call it the PDPL in this policy) to everything described here. We are established in the United Arab Emirates, so we apply the PDPL to Personal Data about people inside and outside the country.
Where we operate. The Platform is offered in the Markets listed in the Market Schedule. Prices are set and charged in the Booking Market's currency, and every Experience takes place in a Market. We have no establishment and no representative in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we do not run marketing campaigns there, we do not price in euro or pounds, and we do not direct the Platform at people there. If you use the Platform from another country, this policy and the PDPL apply to you. We review this statement whenever we open a new Market or start marketing in a new country.
We have a data protection contact channel that reaches the person responsible for data protection at Hobber. You can write to it directly at privacy@hobber.ai about anything in this policy, including a complaint, and you do not have to go through Customer Support first.
Your first and last name, the full name we show on your Voucher and your invoice, your email address, your password (kept only as a cryptographic hash and never in readable form), your mobile number and its country, and your profile photo if you upload one.
If you sign in with Google or with Apple, we receive from that provider the provider identifier, the email address, whether the provider has verified it, a phone number where the provider holds one, a display name and a photo address. Google and Apple are the only third-party sign-in providers Hobber uses.
If you sign up with your phone number, an email address is optional and you can add it later so that receipts reach you.
If your employer has a corporate arrangement with Hobber, we also hold the work email address you used to prove that you qualify, and the record of the request that confirmed it.
Whether your email address and your phone number are confirmed, the one-time codes we send you, how many times each was tried, and when it was used.
We keep an append-only security timeline for each person. Each entry records what happened (for example a sign-in, a failed sign-in, an email or phone change, a device registration, a Consent Record, a Review submission), when, who did it, the IP address, the browser or app user agent string, and the old and new values of any field that changed. Because the old values are recorded, an email address or a phone number you used in the past stays in that timeline after you change it. When your account is deleted, every email address and phone number in your timeline is replaced with a one-way code, as section 8 describes.
We also keep a ledger of every moment the Platform proved that a person controls a particular email address or phone number, and we use it to group accounts that belong to the same person. This is how we answer questions such as whether the same person has opened two accounts to abuse a promotion or to evade a suspension. When an account is deleted, the email addresses and phone numbers in the ledger are replaced with a one-way code. The code still tells us when a new account uses an address or a number that a deleted account used.
A change to your email address or phone number is stored as its own record, holding the new value and the confirmation of the change.
The Market you chose, the last city you looked at, the language you use, and the currency you asked us to display prices in. The last city is a record of a preference you expressed in the app, not a live position.
A random device identifier that the app keeps in the device's secure storage, and that the website keeps in browser storage. It is generated by Hobber and is not a hardware identifier. We use it as a security control, so that a sign-in from a device your account has never used asks for an extra emailed code. It stays on the device after you sign out, by design.
The push notification token for each device and platform you have signed in on, so that Booking updates, chat messages and other notifications can reach you.
With your device's permission, an approximate position (accurate to roughly one hundred metres) so that we can show you Experiences near you and place you on a map. The last position is cached on your device and is sent to Hobber when you ask for a nearby view.
You can also choose to send a precise position yourself, as a message in a Booking conversation or in a support ticket. When you do, that position is stored with the message.
For a tour with a pickup, the pickup point you choose is stored on the Booking and shown to the Vendor. That point is often your hotel or your home, so choose it with that in mind.
You can turn the location permission off at any time in your device settings, and you can search by city or by place name instead.
For each Order and Booking: the Experience, the Slot, the option and any Add-on, the number of participants and attendees, the venue address and its coordinates, the pickup details where the Experience has a pickup, the time zone the Booking was made in, the Booking Value, the Voucher and its confirmation code, the Redemption record, and the status of the Booking including any Cancellation, Reschedule, No-show or Refund.
For Pay Together: who was invited, by whom, who accepted, who declined, what each person paid and against which payment.
Some Experiences cannot be delivered unless the Vendor has certain information or documents. The Listing shows you exactly what is required before you pay. Depending on the Experience, an answer may be a piece of text, a number, a date, a choice from a list, a photo or an uploaded document.
The answers we collect fall into two groups:
Uploaded files go straight to private storage. They are never published at a public address and are read only through short-lived signed links. Section 6 explains the narrow window in which a Vendor can see an identity answer, and section 8 explains when we delete it.
Answering is your choice. If you do not answer a required question, the Vendor may refuse you entry, and the Refund Policy, section If you do not show up, explains what that means for your money.
Hobber does not check your identity documents for you or for the Vendor. Checking them at the door is the Vendor's job.
Where a Market offers a price for people of determination and its Market Schedule says that Hobber may keep a copy of the official ID for it, you can save that ID on your profile, from your profile or at checkout when you book at that price. You choose what to save, among the forms the Market accepts: the number on the ID, a photo or scan of it, or a PDF of it. We keep one per Market.
The ID shows that you, or the person you save it for, have a disability, so we treat it as sensitive Personal Data. We keep it only with your explicit consent, which you give each time you save it. The file goes straight to private storage under your own account, is never published at a public address, and is read only through short-lived signed links.
When you book at the people of determination price, you choose whether to show your saved ID to the Vendor of that Booking. Section 6.1 explains what the Vendor sees and when. Saving it is optional and never a condition of booking: whatever you choose, you show the ID itself to the Vendor at the Experience.
You can view, replace or delete it from your profile at any time. Deleting it withdraws your consent: the Vendor of a Booking where you shared it stops seeing it. We do not check the ID, and we do not use it for anything else. No analytics, advertising or Hobber AI processing ever reads it or records that you saved one.
Hobber never receives your card number. Your card details are encrypted inside your own browser or app by Adyen, our payment processor, before they leave your device, and they travel to Adyen in that form.
What Hobber keeps is a reference to the payment method that Adyen holds for you, so that a saved card can be offered at checkout. The card brand, the last four digits, the holder name and the expiry date are fetched from Adyen when a screen needs to show them and are not stored by Hobber.
What Hobber sends Adyen with each charge is an internal reference to your account, your email address, your IP address, the country and the amount. We keep the payment record, the references Adyen gives us, the responses Adyen returns, the refund records and the currency facts of the transaction.
The tax invoice for a Booking carries the name we hold for you, the confirmation code and a customer reference, together with the tax identity of the party issuing it and the tax details recorded for the Vendor's supply. We do not collect or print a customer address or a customer tax registration number. The invoice is stored as a document and sent to you by email.
The Booking conversation between you and the Vendor: what each side wrote, when, who has read what, and any image or document either side attached. Attachments are stored privately and are opened through short-lived signed links.
Every plain text message is scanned before it is stored. Contact details (phone numbers, email addresses and web addresses) and offensive language are masked in place, so what is stored as the message, and what appears in a push preview, is the masked text. When the scan finds something, the unmasked original is kept in a separate moderation record with a note of what was matched. If you report a message, your report is stored against it.
A Hobber employee can join a Booking conversation to help. When one does, both sides see the sender as the Hobber Admin Team, not as a named individual.
Support tickets: what you wrote, the Booking it concerns, the category and the language, the attachments you sent, the internal notes our agents add, and any position you chose to share. We also record which help articles and help topics a signed-in Customer opened.
A Review is a star rating, an optional body of up to 2,000 characters and up to 4 photographs. We keep the original text of every Review even where our automated check has flagged it.
Review photos are published at a public web address. So is your profile photo. That means they can be opened by anyone who has the link, without signing in, and, on a Review of four stars or more, they appear in the public photo galleries on the Listing page and, unless you untick that option when you post, on the page of any venue whose boundary contains the Experience. Your given name and your profile photo are shown beside your Review. Your family name, your email address and your phone number are never shown.
The Terms, section Reviews, set out who may write a Review and the rules it must follow.
Hobber AI is covered by its own notice, the AI Consent, which you accept separately before your first conversation. This section describes the data. The AI Consent describes what you are agreeing to.
We store each conversation: the message you sent, the answer the assistant produced, the record of the tools it used, and a title derived from the opening words of your first message. We store the record of your acceptance of the AI Consent, and, where you build an itinerary, the structured brief taken from your free text request, including any note and budget you typed.
With each message, we send the model provider a short profile built from your account: your first name, the language you are using, up to four titles of Experiences you recently booked, up to two activity types your Bookings cluster around, and up to two other countries your Bookings point at. We do not send your family name, your email address, your phone number, your date of birth, your payment details or your device location, and the request carries no account identifier and no session identifier.
Every message you send is passed to a model provider at least once, including a message we then decline to answer, because the check that decides whether to answer is itself a model call. If you type something about symptoms or pain, that text reaches a provider before the reply telling you to see a doctor appears.
Section 15 explains what Hobber AI can and cannot decide, and who inside Hobber can read a conversation.
The Experiences and venues you save, the itineraries you build, and, if you share an itinerary, the unguessable link that lets anyone holding it read the itinerary. A shared itinerary carries no owner identity and no payment information, and revoking the share or archiving the plan kills the link immediately.
If you use the friends feature, we hold your friend requests, your friendships, the people you have blocked and the counts that go with them. Other Customers can find you by username in order to invite you to share payment for an Order. There is no Customer to Customer messaging on the Platform.
Each app and each website page sends us events describing what happened: an identifier for the event, its name and version, when it happened, a pseudonymous identifier for the browser or the app installation, a session identifier and a counter, the app and platform and version, the Market, the cities you are browsing, the language, the screen or page, the page you came from, the device operating system and version, and the network type. We do not collect a device model, an advertising identifier, a hardware identifier or a device fingerprint in these events.
When you are signed in, our servers add your account identifier to the event. One event, sent immediately after you sign in, deliberately links the pseudonymous identifier used before you signed in to your account, so that the activity either side of a sign-in reads as one person. Section 15 says more about that.
Events can carry what you searched for, a confirmation code and an amount. The app keeps a list of up to two thousand Experiences this installation has viewed, so it can tell whether a view is your first, and it keeps unsent events on the device in encrypted storage until they can be delivered.
We record how you first reached Hobber and how you most recently reached it: the platform, the campaign, the source, the medium, the content, the term, the advertising click identifier and its kind, a share identifier, the channel, the page you landed on and when. The click identifiers we recognise are those used by Google, Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, X, Reddit and Microsoft. This record is written once for your account and is not overwritten.
In the app we use a mobile measurement partner, AppsFlyer, to work out which advertisement or link led to an installation and to report conversions back to the advertising platforms. On iOS the device advertising identifier is used only if you allow tracking through Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt. On Android the device advertising identifier is read only if you allow it when the app asks. Section 11 explains your choices.
If you allow it, we also send conversion events from our servers to advertising platforms when an account is created, when an Order is paid and when a Refund is made. Section 11 explains how you allow it and how you stop it. What leaves Hobber is described in section 6.
Your notification preferences by category, your marketing choices, the record of when you subscribed or unsubscribed and through which control, the email address and language on a newsletter subscription, the tokens that let a stop link work without signing in, and the suppression records that stop us mailing an address that has bounced, complained or asked us to stop.
A record of consent to marketing includes the IP address and the browser or app user agent string that were present when it was given, because that is the proof that it was given.
We also keep a record of each answer you give about advertising measurement, for each kind of device (the website, the iOS app and the Android app), against your account: what you allowed, on which control and when. Section 11 explains what that answer decides.
For the email we send you, our email provider records delivery, opens and clicks, including the address of a link you click. We use that to know whether our messages reach you and to fix delivery problems. Section 11 explains the split.
If you ask us to delete your account, we keep the request itself: when you made it, from which surface, the reason you picked, any free text feedback you gave, when it is scheduled to run, whether it was cancelled and why, and when it ran.
We do not collect your date of birth, your age or your gender. We do not run an age check at registration or at checkout. We do not collect your nationality. We do not collect biometric data. We do not read your contacts, your calendar, your photo library beyond the images you choose to upload, your microphone or the list of other applications on your device. We do not use a crash reporting or session replay tool in any Hobber app. We do not buy Personal Data about you from data brokers, and we do not sell Personal Data.
When you apply for a role through the careers pages we collect your full name, your email address, your telephone number if you give it, your LinkedIn and portfolio links if you give them, your CV file with its name, type and size, your answers to the questions asked for that role, the role and hiring campaign you applied to, and the time you gave your consent to this policy on the application form. The apply form is protected by a bot check run by Cloudflare, which sees your IP address for that purpose.
Your application is read by the Hobber employees who hire for that role. We record the stage your application reaches, who first opened it and when, the notes those employees write about it, and, if it is not taken forward, the reason recorded. Applications are not shared with anyone outside Hobber, and we do not run automated decisions on them: a person reads every application and decides.
Please do not put into your CV information we do not need, such as your date of birth, your marital status, a photograph, your religion or your health. We do not ask for any of these.
Most of it comes from you: what you type, what you upload, what you book and what you write. The rest comes from:
The PDPL allows processing only with your consent or on one of the grounds listed in its Article 4. It has no general balancing ground of the kind some other data protection laws use, and we do not rely on one. Every purpose below rests on the necessity of the processing for our contract with you, on a legal obligation, on the protection of your own interests, or on your consent.
Where a purpose rests on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time, as easily as you gave it, and withdrawing it does not make what we did beforehand unlawful.
| What we do | What we use for it | Our legal basis under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data |
|---|---|---|
| Create and run your account, sign you in, verify your email address and phone number, and recognise a device you have used before | Identity, verification, device data (3.1, 3.2, 3.4) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9) |
| Show you the Platform in your Market, your language and your chosen display currency | Market, language and preference data (3.3) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9) |
| Show you Experiences near you, place them on a map and calculate a distance | Approximate position (3.5) | Necessary to take steps at your request, Article 4(9). Your device asks your permission before it shares a position, and you can withdraw it at any time |
| Take an Order, confirm a Booking, issue the Voucher, run Redemption, handle Cancellation, Reschedule and No-show | Booking and Order data (3.6) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9) |
| Give the Vendor what it needs to admit you and deliver the Experience | Given name and family initial, party size, confirmation code, pickup point, Booking Requirement answers (3.6, 3.7) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9) |
| Keep your people of determination ID and show it to the Vendor of a Booking where you choose to share it | The ID you save (3.7a) | Your explicit consent, Article 6, given when you save it and when you choose to share it on a Booking. Deleting the ID withdraws it |
| Collect the answers and documents a Vendor requires as a condition of participation | Booking Requirement answers (3.7) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9). Where an answer reveals health, dietary or accessibility information, your consent, Article 6, because you choose whether to give it. Where the information exists to keep you safe at the Experience, the protection of your interests, Article 4(7) |
| Take payment, offer a saved card, make Refunds and answer chargebacks | Payment data (3.8) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), a legal obligation, Article 4(10), for the payment and record keeping duties, and Article 4(3) where a claim has to be established or defended |
| Issue the tax invoice and keep the tax and transaction records | Name, Booking and invoice data (3.6, 3.9) | A legal obligation, Article 4(10) |
| Run the Booking conversation, scan and mask contact details and offensive content, keep the unmasked original for moderation, and act on a report | Messages and attachments (3.10) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), and a legal obligation, Article 4(10), to keep the Platform lawful and to remove unlawful content when required |
| Answer your support requests, handle complaints, and investigate and decide a Refund Request | Support data, Booking data, evidence you send (3.6, 3.10) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), and a legal obligation, Article 4(10), to provide complaint channels and to settle disputes promptly |
| Publish your Review and its photos, run the rating mechanism, and moderate Content | Review data (3.11) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), and a legal obligation, Article 4(10), because UAE e-commerce law requires us to provide a rating mechanism and to remove unlawful content |
| Run Hobber AI and send your messages to a model provider | Conversation data and the short profile (3.12) | Your consent, Article 6, recorded through the AI Consent. The transfer outside the country rests on your explicit consent, Article 23(1)(b) |
| Keep your account and the Platform secure, prevent and detect fraud and abuse, apply rate limits, block a compromised sign-in and investigate an incident | Security timeline with IP address and user agent, device records, verification records, the identifier ledger (3.2, 3.4) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), because we cannot provide a safe account and a safe payment flow without it, and a legal obligation, Article 4(10), to provide a secure technical environment and to protect Personal Data |
| Send you service messages: codes, confirmations, the Voucher, changes to a Booking, Refund outcomes, security alerts and notices about this policy | Contact details (3.1) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9). These cannot be switched off while your account is open |
| Send you notifications about Bookings, chat and your social activity | Push tokens and preferences (3.4, 3.17) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9). You can switch each category off |
| Send you marketing email, newsletters, offers and announcements, including marketing push | Contact details and preferences (3.1, 3.17) | Your consent, Article 6, given separately and never as a condition of buying anything |
| Measure how the app and the website are used so that we can fix and improve them | Usage data and analytics identifiers (3.15) | Your consent, Article 6 |
| Measure which advertisement or link brought you to Hobber, and report conversions to advertising platforms | Attribution and advertising identifiers (3.16) | Your consent, Article 6 |
| Meet a duty owed to an authority, answer a lawful request, and establish, exercise or defend a legal claim | Whatever the duty or the claim requires | A legal obligation, Article 4(10), and Article 4(3) |
| Keep audit records of what happened on an account and of what our employees did | Security timeline, moderation records, decision records (3.2, 3.10) | A legal obligation, Article 4(10), to keep a record of our processing, and necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), so that a decision about you can be explained and reviewed |
| Handle your deletion request and keep the record that we handled it | Deletion request data (3.18) | Necessary to perform the contract, Article 4(9), and a legal obligation, Article 4(10) |
| Consider your job application, contact you about it and keep a record of the decision | Job application data (3.20) | Necessary to take steps at your request before a contract, Article 4(9), and your consent, Article 6, which you give on the application form and can withdraw by writing to privacy@hobber.ai |
We never rely on a balancing of interests, because the PDPL does not provide for one.
We do not sell Personal Data. Sharing your Booking details with the Vendor that delivers your Experience is not a sale. It is how the Booking is delivered.
The Vendor that delivers your Experience receives only what it needs, and the Platform limits that at the source:
Closing the identity answer window changes what the Vendor sees. It does not delete the answer, and Hobber's own support and administration staff continue to see it until it is deleted. Section 8 says when that happens.
A Vendor is an independent controller of the Personal Data it receives to deliver your Experience. It may use that data only to deliver the Experience and to answer a dispute about it. It may not market to you, build a contact list, take the relationship off the Platform or pass the data on. Those obligations are in the Vendor Terms, section Customer data, and in Schedule 4, Data Sharing terms.
A Hub Partner is a venue operator whose boundary may contain the location of an Experience. A Hub Partner receives no Personal Data about you: no Bookings, no visitor identities, no contact details and no analytics.
Two things about a venue page are worth knowing. The page shows a count of how many people looked at it today, derived from records that may reference a signed-in Customer. And the page republishes Review photos from Experiences inside the boundary, with the author's given name and profile photo, on the same basis as the gallery on the Listing itself, except the photos whose author unticked that option when posting.
These process Personal Data on our instructions and under contract.
| Recipient | What it does for us | What it receives | Country of processing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon Web Services | Hosting: the database, file storage for documents, photos and invoices, the cache, the event bus and the secret store | Everything described in section 3 that we store | AWS ap-south-1 (Mumbai, India) |
| Adyen | Payment processing, saved payment methods, refunds and chargebacks | The encrypted card details, the cardholder name, the amount and currency, an internal reference to your account, your email address, your IP address and the country | Netherlands |
| Twilio SendGrid | Sending our email, attaching invoices, and reporting delivery, opens and clicks | Your email address and name, the subject, the full rendered message, the template data it contains (Booking details, invoice numbers, reset links, Voucher codes) and any attachment | United States |
| Twilio Verify | Sending one-time codes by SMS | Your phone number and the code | United States |
| Google (Firebase Authentication) | Verifying a Google or Apple sign-in | The provider identity token, your email address, whether it is verified, a phone number where held, a display name and a photo address | Google's global estate |
| Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging) | Delivering push notifications | The device push token, the sender's display name, the title and the preview text, and the identifiers of the conversation or Booking the notification points at | Google's global estate |
| Google (Maps and Places) | Drawing maps and resolving places | Map and place requests from your device, including the area you are looking at | Google's global estate |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, Apple Pay and the App Store | The identity token, and the name and email address you allow at first consent, which may be a private relay address | Apple's global estate |
| DeepInfra | Hobber AI model host: runs the language models Hobber AI uses on its own servers | Your conversation and the short profile described in section 3.12, when a conversation is routed to it | United States |
| Google (Gemini) | Hobber AI model provider | As above, when routed to it | Google's global estate, outside the United Arab Emirates |
| AppsFlyer | Mobile measurement: working out which advertisement or link led to an app installation, and reporting conversions | The pseudonymous app identifier, the device advertising identifier where you allow it, the installation referrer, and the events described in section 3.16 with the Experience, the quantity and the amount | United States and Israel |
| Meta, Google Ads, Google Analytics, TikTok, Snapchat, X and Reddit | Measuring the advertising that brings people to Hobber | A one-way cryptographic digest of your email address, a digest of your phone number, a digest of your account identifier, the advertising click identifier belonging to that platform, the value and currency of the Order, the Experience and the order reference. Only if you allowed it, as section 11 explains | United States, and Singapore for TikTok |
| Meilisearch | The search index, running inside Hobber's own private network | Listing, venue and place records. The only field that can name a person is a Vendor's trading name | Same hosting region as above |
| Cloudflare | Bot protection on our public forms | The challenge token and the IP address of the person completing the form. It is not used on Customer sign-in, Booking or payment surfaces today | United States and globally |
| jsDelivr | Delivering the daily exchange rate file our servers read | Nothing about you. It is an outbound request made by our servers | Global content delivery network |
| Hobber's own analytics service | Storing and querying the usage events in section 3.15 | The full event, including the account identifier our servers add | Hobber's own account in the same hosting region |
The list of advertising and measurement recipients can change. When it does, we publish the change in the next version of this policy and, for the web surfaces, in the Cookie Policy.
Every recipient in this table is required by contract to protect your Personal Data to the same or an equivalent standard as this policy describes, and to process it only on our instructions.
Anyone you invite to pay their share of an Order through Pay Together sees that you invited them and what the Order is for. Anyone you send an itinerary link to can read the itinerary. Anyone at all can see your Review, your given name, your profile photo and your Review photos, because those are published.
Hobber employees see your Personal Data only through role based access, with permissions granted per department. Sensitive actions are separately permissioned and recorded, our audit ledgers cannot be edited or deleted except for the one change account deletion makes to email addresses and phone numbers (section 8), and every employee who signs in to our internal console must use multi-factor authentication.
We give a court, a regulator, a tax authority, a police force or another competent authority what the law requires us to give, and no more. We give our auditors, lawyers and insurers what they need to advise us. If we sell or reorganise our business, Personal Data may pass to the buyer or successor, and we will require it to give your Personal Data the same protection this policy gives.
Our systems run in Amazon Web Services in AWS ap-south-1 (Mumbai, India). That means the database, the storage that holds your documents, photos and invoices, the cache, the event bus and the secret store all sit outside the United Arab Emirates. The other recipients named in section 6 process Personal Data in the Netherlands, the United States, China, Singapore, Israel and across Google's and Apple's global estates.
The United Arab Emirates has not published a list of countries whose data protection law it treats as adequate under Article 22 of Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data. That route is therefore not available to anyone in practice today, and we do not claim it. We rely on Article 23:
If you want to know which safeguard applies to a particular recipient, write to privacy@hobber.ai and we will tell you.
We keep Personal Data only for as long as the purpose it was collected for lasts, and then we delete it or keep it in a form that no longer identifies you, except where the law requires us to keep it or where we need it to defend a claim. This is the schedule.
| What | How long, and why |
|---|---|
| Your account and profile: name, email address, phone number, password hash, photo, market and preferences | Until your account is deleted. See the deletion rules below |
| Verification codes and contact change records | Codes are replaced when a new one is issued. The record of a confirmed change is kept as part of the security history until your account is deleted, and is deleted with it |
| Bookings, Orders, Vouchers, Redemptions, Cancellations, Reschedules and No-shows | Kept after deletion, in a form that resolves to a deleted user, because they are the record of a transaction and the evidence in a dispute |
| Payments, Refunds, chargebacks and disputes | Kept for the period UAE law requires, which is 5 years, and for as long as a claim can be brought |
| Invoices and tax records | Kept for 5 years, as UAE tax law requires |
| Your people of determination ID (3.7a) | Until you delete it from your profile, or until your account is deleted. The file is removed from storage at the same time |
| Identity answers (identity documents and identity text) | Deleted within a short, fixed period after the Booking reaches its end state. The files are removed from storage, the text is emptied and only a marker that an answer once existed remains |
| Operational answers (dietary, accessibility, sizes, notes) | Visible to the Vendor for 30 days after the Booking ends, and kept by Hobber with the Booking record |
| Booking conversations, attachments, moderation copies of masked messages and message reports | Kept while a dispute, a complaint or a claim about the Booking is possible. There is no fixed deletion schedule for them today |
| Support tickets, notes and attachments, and help page records | Kept while a dispute, a complaint or a claim is possible. There is no fixed deletion schedule for them today |
| Reviews and Review photos | Kept and stay published after your account is deleted, shown as written by a deleted user, so that other Customers keep the context they relied on. Delete a Review yourself at any time and it goes |
| Hobber AI conversations | We redact the words of a conversation 90 days after it happened, leaving the operating and cost figures that carry no conversation content. The record of your acceptance of the AI Consent is kept. The AI Consent states the same position |
| The security timeline (sign-ins, IP addresses, user agents, old email addresses and phone numbers) and the identifier ledger | Kept after account deletion, because they exist to investigate fraud and account takeover and to answer a dispute. When the account is deleted, every email address and phone number in them is replaced with a one-way code made with a secret key that we keep apart from the data. The code still tells us when a new account uses an address or a number that a deleted account used, and it cannot be turned back into the address or the number. Nothing else in them can be edited |
| Consent Records, including the version of this policy you accepted and the snapshot frozen at each checkout, and your answers about advertising measurement | Kept, because they are the proof of what you were shown and what you chose, and when |
| Marketing consent records, unsubscribe records and suppression records | Kept for as long as we hold the address, because they are the proof that you asked us to stop. They are keyed to the address, so they survive the deletion of an account |
| Newsletter subscriber records | Kept, and not removed by account deletion, because they are keyed to the address and not to the account |
| The record of how you first reached Hobber, and the conversions we reported | Kept while your account exists. When your account is deleted, the click identifier, the share identifier, the page you landed on and your most recent visit are deleted from it, and any conversion not yet reported is deleted. The platform, campaign and channel are kept so that our advertising figures still add up |
| Usage events | Kept as statistics. The link between an event and your account or your device is removed 24 months after the event, so older events can no longer be tied to you. When your account is deleted, that link is removed from all of your events at once, however recent: within minutes in our live records, and within two days in our archive |
| Your deletion request, its reason and your feedback | Kept as the record that you asked and that we acted |
| Job applications, including the CV file, answers, notes and the decision | Kept for 12 months after the decision on the role, so that we can consider you for a similar role and answer any question about the decision, then deleted. Write to privacy@hobber.ai at any time to have it deleted sooner |
You can ask us to delete your account from the app (Settings, then Security, then Delete account), from the website deletion page, or from the Vendor Dashboard if your sign-in also serves a business. Nobody has to approve it. The countdown starts when you confirm.
Your account is deleted 30 days after your request. Signing in to any Hobber product during that period cancels the request automatically, and we email you when that happens. Checking the status of your request on the website is not a sign-in and does not cancel it. We email you when the request is scheduled and again when it has run.
A request cannot run while you still have an active Booking, an incomplete Pay Together Order or an open Refund Request. We tell you which one is holding it, and we try again each day.
When it runs:
These things are not deleted, and we want you to know before you decide:
If any of that is unacceptable to you, write to privacy@hobber.ai before you delete, and we will tell you exactly what we would hold afterwards.
Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data gives you the rights below. Use any of them by writing to privacy@hobber.ai from the address on your account, by raising it with Customer Support in the app, or by using the control named in the row where there is one. We may ask you to confirm who you are before we act, and we do not charge you.
Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data does not set a deadline for answering these requests, and the Executive Regulations that will set one have not been issued. We do not claim a statutory deadline and you should not read one into this policy. What we commit to, as our own promise to you, is an answer within 30 days of a complete request, and a message telling you why if a request is complex enough to take longer.
| Right | What it means | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Information, Article 13 | To be told what types of Personal Data we process, why, what decisions we take by automated means, who receives it inside and outside the country, how long we keep it, how to correct, erase, restrict and object, what safeguards apply to transfers, what we do if there is a breach, and how to complain to the regulator | This policy answers all of it. Write to privacy@hobber.ai for anything specific to your account |
| Access and a copy, Articles 13 and 14 | To receive the Personal Data we hold about you. Where we process it by automated means on the basis of your consent or of our contract, to receive it in an orderly, machine readable form and to ask us to pass it to another controller where that is technically possible | Write to privacy@hobber.ai or ask Customer Support. We prepare this by hand today, and there is no self-service export |
| Correction, Article 15 | To have inaccurate Personal Data corrected without undue delay | Edit your name and photo in the app. Your email address and phone number change through a verified request. For anything else, write to privacy@hobber.ai |
| Erasure, Article 15 | To have Personal Data deleted where it is no longer needed for the purpose, where you withdraw the consent we relied on, where you object and there is no other ground, or where processing was unlawful | Delete your account in the app (Settings, then Security, then Delete account) or on the website deletion page. Section 8 sets out exactly what that removes and what we must keep. For anything narrower, write to privacy@hobber.ai |
| Restriction, Article 16 | To have us stop using Personal Data while a dispute about its accuracy or about our grounds is resolved, and to ask us to keep Personal Data rather than delete it because you need it for a legal claim | Write to privacy@hobber.ai. We will tell you before we lift a restriction |
| Objection, Article 17 | To object to processing for direct marketing, including profiling for direct marketing, to object to processing for statistical surveys, and to object where processing breaches the processing rules in Article 5 | Use the unsubscribe link in any marketing message, change your push notification preferences in the app, or write to privacy@hobber.ai. We act on a marketing objection without asking why and without asking you to justify it |
| Objection to an automated decision, Article 18 | To object to a decision reached by automated processing, including profiling, that has a legal effect on you or seriously affects you, unless the automated processing is part of the contract, is required by law, or is something you agreed to in advance | Write to privacy@hobber.ai or raise it with Customer Support. See section 15 |
| Human review, Article 18(4) | To ask that a person reviews a decision reached by automated processing | Write to privacy@hobber.ai or ask Customer Support. A named person looks at it and answers you. No decision that affects your money, your Booking or your account stands on automated processing alone |
| Withdraw consent, Article 6(2) | To withdraw any consent you gave, as easily as you gave it. Withdrawal does not affect what we did while the consent was live | Use the control where you gave it. For Hobber AI, stop using it and write to privacy@hobber.ai, and we will record the withdrawal by hand |
| Contact us, Article 19 | To reach us about your Personal Data through a clear channel | privacy@hobber.ai |
When we may refuse. Article 13(3) lets us refuse a request that is unrelated to the Personal Data we hold about you, that is excessively repetitive, that conflicts with a judicial procedure or an investigation, that would harm information security work, or that would reveal someone else's Personal Data. If we refuse, we tell you why and what you can do next.
Complaining. You can complain to us at privacy@hobber.ai. You can complain about our handling of your Personal Data to the UAE Data Office under Article 24 of Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data. You do not have to complain to us first. For a consumer matter rather than a data matter, the consumer complaint routes for United Arab Emirates are the Ministry of Economy consumer line 800 1222 and the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development. Nothing in this policy limits any of those routes.
Service messages. While your account is open we send you the messages the service needs: verification codes, Order and Booking confirmations, the Voucher, changes to a Booking, Refund outcomes, invoices, security alerts and notices about this policy. These are not marketing and you cannot switch them off while the account is open.
Marketing email. We send you marketing only if you have asked for it. The control is separate from accepting the Terms and this policy, it is not ticked for you, and marketing consent is never a condition of making a Booking or of getting a price. Every marketing message names Hobber, gives our address, and carries an unsubscribe link that works in one click and without signing in. Mail clients that support one-click unsubscribe can act on it directly.
Newsletters. A newsletter subscription is confirmed by a link we email you, so that nobody can subscribe an address they do not control.
What unsubscribing does. Unsubscribing from everything stops marketing and reminder email. It does not stop the service messages listed above, and it is not meant to, because a password reset or a Refund notice is not marketing. Leaving one list leaves only that list.
Push notifications. You can switch each category on or off in the app: Booking updates, chat, social and marketing. We suggest you keep Booking updates on, because that is how we tell you a Vendor has confirmed, changed or cancelled something.
SMS. We use SMS for one-time codes and other transactional messages only. We do not send marketing SMS unless you have asked us to. If we ever do, it will be with your prior consent, sent under the rules the UAE telecommunications regulator sets for marketing SMS, and every message will carry the way to stop it.
Withdrawing. You can withdraw any marketing consent at any time, from the unsubscribe link in any marketing message, from the push notification preferences in the app, or by writing to privacy@hobber.ai. It takes effect on the next send, and withdrawing does not affect what we sent while the consent was live.
On the web. The Cookie Policy describes every cookie and every browser storage key our web surfaces use, what each one is for, how long it lasts and who provides it. We ask for your consent for analytics and advertising cookies on the website, and you can change your choice at any time. See the Cookie Policy, sections The categories we use and Your choices.
In the apps. The apps do not use cookies. They use the device storage and the identifiers described in sections 3.4, 3.15 and 3.16. The measurement and messaging components in the consumer app are:
There is no analytics, crash reporting or session replay component from any other company in the consumer app.
Advertising identifiers. On iOS, the device advertising identifier is used only if you allow tracking through Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt. We show you a plain explanation before that prompt appears, and you can change the answer at any time in your iOS settings under Privacy and Security, then Tracking. On Android, the app asks you before our measurement component reads the device advertising identifier, and it is read only if you choose Allow. You can change your answer at any time in the app, under Settings, then Ad measurement.
Conversion reporting. When you create an account, pay for an Order or receive a Refund, we report that fact to the advertising platforms named in section 6 only if you allowed it on the device where it happened: in the iOS app by allowing tracking when Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt asks, in the Android app by choosing Allow when the app asks or turning on Ad measurement in Settings, and on the website by allowing Marketing in the cookie banner. Google Analytics receives it if you allowed Analytics in the cookie banner, or tracking in the app. Your answer on one device does not count for another, and if you have not answered, we report nothing. We use a one-way digest of your email address and phone number, a digest of your account identifier and the advertising click identifier that brought you to us, together with the value of the Order and the Experience booked. We do not send your email address, your phone number, your name or your account identifier in readable form. If you withdraw your answer, we stop reporting anything we have not yet sent. We keep a record of each answer you give, against your account, as proof of what you chose.
Email tracking. Transactional and security email carries no tracking pixel and no rewritten links, deliberately, because a password reset or a Voucher should not pass through a redirector. Marketing email and reminder email do carry an opening pixel and rewritten links, so we can see whether a campaign worked. We record the fact, the time and the address clicked. We do not record your IP address, your user agent, your location or your device from those events.
The Platform is for people aged 18 and over. That is the minimum age to hold a Hobber account and to make a Booking, and it matches the age of majority in the United Arab Emirates.
We do not knowingly create an account for anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect Personal Data from a person under that age as an account holder. We do not collect a date of birth, so we rely on the representation you make about your age when you register, on the age rating of the app in each app store, and on the Vendor's own age checks at the Experience. The Terms, section Eligibility, set out the representation you make.
A person under 18 may attend an Experience only where the Listing allows it and only as a participant on a Booking held by an adult. That adult is the contracting party. When an adult books for a minor, the adult confirms that they are the parent or legal guardian of the minor or are authorised by one, provides the minor's age and any relevant health or accessibility information, and accepts the Vendor's participation rules on the minor's behalf. Personal Data about a minor participant reaches us only through that adult.
Where a participant is under thirteen, the booking adult must have the explicit consent of the child's custodian before giving us that child's Personal Data.
We do not send marketing to minors and we do not profile minors.
If you believe a person under 18 has created an account, or that we hold Personal Data about a child that we should not, write to privacy@hobber.ai. We will look into it and delete what we should not hold.
Article 20 of Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data requires security appropriate to the risk, measured against the best international practice, and it names encryption and pseudonymisation in particular. These are the measures we can state honestly today.
Two things we will not claim, because they are not true today. Hobber accounts do not yet offer multi-factor authentication to Customers. And your profile photo and your Review photos are published at public web addresses, so they are not protected by any access control once the address is known. Do not upload a photo you would not put on a public page.
No system is perfectly secure. Keep your password to yourself, do not reuse it, and tell us in the support chat in the Hobber app if you think someone else has used your account.
If a breach happens that would harm the privacy, confidentiality or security of your Personal Data, we notify the UAE Data Office as Article 9 of Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data requires, from the moment we become aware of it. We tell it what happened, how it happened, roughly how many people and how many records are affected, who to contact at Hobber, the likely effects, what we have already done and what we plan to do.
Where the breach would harm the privacy and confidentiality of your Personal Data, we tell you as well, in plain language, with what we know at the time and what you should do about it.
The Executive Regulations that will set the exact reporting period under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data have not been issued, so there is no statutory clock to quote and we do not quote one. Our trigger is the moment we become aware. Our service providers are required to tell us without delay when a breach happens on their side.
We use automated processing in the ways described below. We set them out so that you know when to ask a person to look again.
Security and fraud checks. Rate limits on sign-in and on Voucher codes, checks on whether a device is one your account has used, the step-up code on a new device, and the grouping of accounts that share a proven email address or phone number. These can slow an action down, ask you for another code, or cause a person to look at an account. They are not a judgement about you.
Content checks. Every plain text message in a Booking conversation is scanned and masked in place before it is stored. Every Review is scanned. A scan flags. It does not decide. A person decides whether Content is removed, and the Terms, section Reviews, explain what happens to a Review that is removed.
Automatic timers. Some steps run on a clock with nobody deciding: a Booking that a Vendor does not confirm inside the Confirmation Window expires and the authorisation on the card is released, because nothing was charged, a Voucher that is not redeemed inside the Redemption Window becomes a No-show, a Walk-in Voucher expires on its date, and a deletion request runs at the end of its grace period of 30 days. The Terms and the Refund Policy set out each of these.
Linking your activity before and after sign-in. When you sign in, the pseudonymous identifier used before you signed in is linked to your account, so that the pages you looked at and the campaign that brought you are attached to you afterwards. This is profiling in the plain sense of the word. You can object to it under Article 17 by writing to privacy@hobber.ai.
Hobber AI. Hobber AI suggests Experiences and builds itineraries. It is software, not a person, and it can be wrong. It never books anything, never takes a payment and never cancels anything: every Booking is made by you in the ordinary checkout, one Slot at a time, and the price and availability shown at checkout are the ones that count. It does not give medical, legal or financial advice, and a message that describes symptoms or pain gets an answer telling you to see a doctor. How much you can use it in a day depends on how long you have held your account and on your recent Bookings. We can pause it in a Market or across the Platform. Full details, including the providers, the countries they operate in and what we send them, are in the AI Consent.
A named Hobber employee holding a restricted permission can read a Hobber AI conversation and the short profile that went with it. That permission is held by a small number of people and every grant of it is recorded.
Deleting a conversation. Deleting a conversation in the app removes it from your list. It does not erase the stored record. Section 8 explains when the words are redacted.
No decision with a legal effect is left to a machine. A Refund Decision, a suspension of your account, the removal of your Content and any other decision that affects your money, your Booking or your ability to use the Platform is taken or confirmed by a Hobber employee. You can ask for a person to review any outcome under Article 18(4), by writing to privacy@hobber.ai or by asking Customer Support.
We publish a new version of this policy rather than editing a published one. Every version carries its number and its Effective Date in the header block at the top, and we keep the earlier versions so that we can show which text was in force at any time.
If we make a material change, we tell you by email and by a notice in the app at least 15 days before the new version takes effect, we ask you to accept it the next time you sign in, and the snapshot taken at your next checkout records the version then in force. A correction that does not change what we do with your Personal Data takes effect when it is published. Continuing to use the Platform after the Effective Date of a new version means you accept it.
This is version 1.2. Version 1.2 adds section 3.7a and the matching rows in sections 5, 6.1 and 8: if a Market lets Hobber keep its people of determination ID, you may save yours on your profile with your explicit consent and choose to show it to the Vendor of a Booking. Version 1.1 describes how you allow or refuse the reporting of your sign-up, Orders and Refunds to advertising platforms on each device (sections 3.16, 3.17, 6 and 11), that the Android app now asks before it reads the device advertising identifier, that no advertising platform receives your account identifier in readable form, what account deletion now does to email addresses and phone numbers, to the record of how you reached Hobber and to your usage events (sections 3.2, 6.5, 8 and 13), and when Review photos appear in galleries and on venue pages (sections 3.11 and 6.2). Nothing else changed from version 1.0, the first version published for United Arab Emirates.
| Privacy and data protection | privacy@hobber.ai |
| Customer Support | the support chat in the Hobber app |
| Postal address | Hobber Advertising LLC, Madinet Zayed Office Tower, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates |
| Commercial licence | Commercial licence CN-3761457, Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development |
Write to privacy@hobber.ai to reach the person responsible for data protection at Hobber directly. You can use it for any request in section 9, and for a complaint.
If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the UAE Data Office under Federal Decree-Law No. 45 of 2021 on the Protection of Personal Data. For a consumer complaint rather than a data protection complaint, the consumer complaint routes for United Arab Emirates are the Ministry of Economy consumer line 800 1222 and the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development.
Related documents: the Terms, which are the agreement between you and Hobber and into which this policy is incorporated; the Refund Policy, which governs Cancellations, Reschedules and Refunds; the Cookie Policy, which covers cookies and similar technologies on our web surfaces; the AI Consent, which covers Hobber AI and which you accept separately; and the Vendor Privacy Policy, which covers Vendor Users and Hub Partner users as individuals.