FLOQ Privacy Statement

Last updated: October 13, 2026

FLOQ is a community platform built around shared interests. We want FLOQ to be a place where people can meet, talk and participate in communities without having to give up their privacy.

This Privacy Statement explains what personal data we collect, why we use it, how we protect it and what choices you have.

For the purposes of applicable data protection law, including the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we are the controller of your personal data.

1. What FLOQ is

FLOQ is a community platform organised around Flocks.

A Flock is a community around a particular interest, hobby, activity or subject.

Users can participate in discussions, join Flocks, communicate with other members and, where applicable, help moderate a Flock.

FLOQ is designed for people aged 18 and over.

We do not intentionally collect or maintain accounts for people under 18.

2. The information we collect

The information we collect depends on how you use FLOQ.

2.1 Account information

When you create an account, we may collect:

We do not require your real name.

Your display name can be a pseudonym.

2.2 Pre-registration (before launch)

Before FLOQ launches you can pre-register on joinfloq.com. We then collect:

We use this to reserve your display name and Launch OG badge, to email you about the launch, and to contact you if you offered to moderate. The legal basis is your consent, which you can withdraw at any time.

Pre-registrations that are not confirmed by email, and the display name they hold, are deleted after 7 days. Confirmed pre-registrations are kept until launch, plus 12 months if you do not create an account.

2.3 Contact form (support)

When you use the contact form at joinfloq.com/support, we send your name, email address, chosen topic, message and language by email to FLOQ HQ, so we can answer you. The message is not stored on FLOQ itself. To stop spam we keep, for 7 days, only a daily-changing hashed version of your IP address and a hash of the message text (neither can be turned back into the original). If your email address belongs to a FLOQ account, FLOQ HQ sees which account, to help with your question. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in answering your question; we keep the email conversation as long as needed to handle it.

3. Your profile

FLOQ is designed to be private by default.

Your profile is not intended to be publicly searchable on the internet.

Depending on your settings and the Flocks you belong to, other members may be able to see information such as:

You control which optional profile information you provide.

We will not make your profile publicly available simply because you have created an account.

4. Flock membership

When you join a Flock, we process information necessary to manage your membership.

This may include:

Some Flocks may require approval before you can join.

Flock moderators may see information necessary to manage and moderate their Flock.

When you ask to join a Flock that needs approval, its moderators see your screen name, the country you gave (if any), how long your account exists, and your answer to the Flock's question. On the moderator card of a member they see, for that Flock only: since when you are a member, how long your account exists, your posts and replies there, warnings and earlier removals. Never your email address or other Flocks.

Moderators do not have unrestricted access to your FLOQ account or to information belonging to other Flocks.

5. Conversations and content

FLOQ is primarily a text-based community platform.

When you create a discussion, post a reply, send a message or otherwise contribute content, we process the content you submit.

This may include:

Content you post in a Flock may be visible to other members of that Flock, depending on the Flock's settings.

Private conversations are only made available to the participants and to FLOQ personnel or systems where necessary for security, abuse prevention, legal compliance or investigation of reports.

5a. Flockmates and direct messages

Members can become Flockmates (Flockmaatjes): one sends a request, optionally with a short message, and the other accepts or declines it. Only Flockmates can send each other direct messages. Direct messages are text only.

6. Safety and moderation

Keeping FLOQ safe is an important part of the service.

FLOQ uses a combination of:

Moderators may review content or account information when necessary to enforce Flock rules, investigate reports or protect the community.

Serious safety reports may be escalated from a Flock's moderators to the FLOQ safety team.

7. AI-assisted safety

We may use automated systems, including artificial intelligence, to help detect:

Where appropriate, these systems may analyse text that you submit to FLOQ.

Language of a flock. Each flock has one language. Posts and replies are checked on our own server (no AI, nothing is sent anywhere) for the language they are written in; short texts don't count. If a member writes in another language several times within 30 days, the next such message waits for a moderator. We keep these counts for 30 days.

How the AI check works today. When a member posts or edits a post or reply, it may be checked: always for edits, for a member's first messages, for photos from accounts younger than 45 days (moderators included) and after a removal; otherwise a random selection. When it is checked, the text, the title, the photos in it (sent in reduced size) and the name and rules of the flock are sent to our AI provider, Anthropic (the Claude API), which returns a score of how likely the content breaks FLOQ's rules, with a short reason. Your name, email address and other account details are not sent. If the score is high, the content is held until a moderator has looked at it; the AI never removes content or restricts an account on its own. Text by a flock's own moderators is not checked; their photos are, during their account's first 45 days.

To decide how strict the check is for you, FLOQ keeps an internal trust score (0-100), based on how long you have been a member, how other members respond to your posts (likes and reactions, counted, not who gave them), how much of your content stayed up, whether you use two-step login and whether you were admitted to flocks. It is never shown to you or to other members, only to FLOQ's superadmins, and it is never used for anything else. If content of yours is removed or a report about you is upheld, it starts again from 0. FLOQ keeps the score and reason of each check for 90 days to measure how well the check works.

AI-assisted systems are used to support safety and moderation. They are not intended to create a detailed personal profile of you for advertising or commercial purposes.

We do not sell conversations or use private conversations to build advertising profiles.

Where a significant moderation action is based on automated detection, appropriate human review and appeal mechanisms will be available where required by applicable law.

8. Blocking and reporting

You can mute or block other members from their profile. Muting hides their posts, events and replies from you and stops notifications about what they do; blocking also stops them from replying to, liking or reacting on your posts and events, inviting you, or viewing your profile.

When you mute or block someone, FLOQ stores who you muted or blocked and when, only to enforce it. Only you can see your list; the other person is not told, and moderators do not see it. Someone you blocked sees your profile like a private one, and their likes, smileys, votes and flockmate requests simply never reach you; nothing tells them why. You can undo it at any time under Profile. The list is deleted when either account is deleted.

Moderators and FLOQ HQ can remove a member from a flock, with a reason. The member receives a statement of reasons and can appeal once; we keep the decision, the reason and whether the member may ask to join again.

You can also report users, discussions, messages or other content.

Reports may include:

We retain report and moderation information for as long as reasonably necessary to maintain platform safety, investigate repeated abuse and protect users.

Warnings and team notes. A flock's moderators can send you a warning with a reason; you see it in your notifications. They can also keep short notes about a member (for example "talked to them about staying on topic"), so the team decides consistently. Notes are visible only to that flock's moderators and FLOQ HQ, never to other members, and you are not notified of them. Warnings and notes are deleted after one year, and at once when your account is deleted. You can ask for the notes about you through a data access request.

Polls. When you vote in a poll, FLOQ stores your vote only so you vote once and can change it. Nobody, including moderators and FLOQ HQ in the app, is shown who voted what; only the totals. Your votes are deleted with your account.

Spam accounts. When FLOQ HQ identifies an account as spam or a bot, everything it posted can be removed in one step and the account banned, with its IP addresses blocked for a year. The account holder receives the usual statement of reasons and can appeal.

9. Moderator information

FLOQ takes the role of moderators seriously.

Moderators may receive additional verification before they are allowed to manage a Flock.

For example, we may process:

Moderator accounts may be subject to additional security requirements, including two-step authentication.

We may maintain moderation audit logs recording actions such as approving, removing, banning or restoring content or users.

These logs help us investigate abuse and maintain accountability.

10. Super Admin and platform administration

FLOQ's platform administrators may have access to additional information where necessary to:

Administrative access is restricted and should only be used where necessary.

Administrative actions may be logged.

The FLOQ HQ team. FLOQ HQ consists of the superadmin and a small team of at most five helpers the superadmin invites. Helpers have used FLOQ for at least 30 days, use two-step login and have accepted written guidelines, including confidentiality. They handle:

Helpers never see email addresses, trust scores, private profiles (except the reported part of a profile that was reported) or chats that were not reported. They cannot suspend or ban accounts. A helper never handles a case about themselves or about another FLOQ staff member, and appeals against the superadmin's own decisions stay with the superadmin. Everything a helper opens and decides is written to the audit log, which the superadmin can review. The superadmin can remove a helper at any time, which ends all their sessions.

11. Information about your device and use of FLOQ

When you use FLOQ, we may automatically collect limited technical information such as:

We use this information primarily for:

We do not use this information to create advertising profiles.

12. IP addresses

IP addresses can constitute personal data.

We may temporarily process IP addresses for security, fraud prevention, abuse detection and technical operation.

Where a full IP address is not required, we may use shortened, hashed or otherwise transformed information.

We retain security logs only for as long as reasonably necessary for the relevant security purpose, unless a longer retention period is required by law or is necessary to investigate an incident.

For a signed-in session and for blocking an address that was used for abuse, we keep a stable keyed hash of the IP address (not the address itself): with the session until 30 days after it ended, and with an IP block until the block ends.

13. Cookies and similar technologies

FLOQ may use cookies and similar technologies.

Some cookies are necessary for the operation and security of the service, including:

Where we use optional analytics, personalisation or other non-essential cookies, we will request consent where required by law.

We do not use advertising cookies to build advertising profiles across the internet.

14. No advertising profiles

FLOQ is designed around communities rather than advertising.

We do not sell your personal information.

We do not sell access to your conversations.

We do not create advertising profiles based on your interests, conversations or Flock memberships.

We do not allow advertisers to use your FLOQ activity to target you with personalised advertising on FLOQ.

If this business model changes in the future, we will update this Privacy Statement and obtain consent where required.

15. Email

We may use your email address to:

We may also send optional product or community updates where permitted.

You can unsubscribe from non-essential marketing or promotional communications at any time.

We will still send essential service communications when necessary.

16. Push notifications

Push notifications are off until you turn them on for a device under Notifications → Settings (your browser asks permission too). When you do, we store the address your browser gives us at its push service (Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft, depending on your browser), the encryption keys for it, a label such as "Chrome · macOS" and when we last sent a push. The content of a push (for example "anne replied to “Crosswind tips”") is end-to-end encrypted for your browser: the push service cannot read it.

You choose per kind of notification what appears in your bell and what may also arrive as a push. Notifications about your own account (moderation decisions, appeals, messages from FLOQ HQ) always appear in the bell. Announcements from FLOQ never arrive as a push, and you can switch them off.

Signing out, resetting your password or deleting your account removes the push addresses of that browser or account. Turning push off in your browser has the same effect: we delete an address as soon as the push service says it no longer exists.

When someone mentions you with @your name in a flock you are a member of, we store that mention so we can tell you once. We don't record mentions by people you blocked or muted, nor mentions in flocks you are not a member of.

17. How we use your personal data

Depending on the circumstances, we use personal data to:

18. Legal bases

Depending on the processing activity, we rely on one or more of the following legal bases under the GDPR:

Performance of a contract

We process information necessary to provide FLOQ and its features to you.

For example:

Legitimate interests

We may process information where this is necessary for our legitimate interests and those interests are not overridden by your rights.

Examples include:

Consent

Where required, we ask for your consent.

For example, this may apply to certain optional communications, cookies or other optional processing.

You can withdraw consent at any time.

Withdrawal of consent does not affect processing that took place before the withdrawal.

Legal obligation

We may process personal data where necessary to comply with applicable law or a legally binding request.

19. Sensitive information

FLOQ is not designed to collect sensitive personal information.

Please do not post sensitive personal information about yourself or other people unless it is genuinely necessary for a particular conversation.

This includes information such as:

Because FLOQ is a community platform, users may nevertheless voluntarily include sensitive information in their conversations.

Where such information is submitted, it may be processed as part of providing, securing and moderating the service.

We do not intentionally request sensitive personal information for advertising or profiling purposes.

20. Who we share information with

We do not sell your personal information.

We may share or make personal data available to carefully selected service providers that help us operate FLOQ.

These may include providers of:

These providers may only process information according to our instructions and applicable data protection law.

A current list of relevant categories and, where appropriate, providers is available on request or may be listed in this Privacy Statement as our service providers become final.

21. AI and third-party processing

Where FLOQ uses third-party AI services for safety, moderation or other platform functionality, we carefully consider what information is sent to those providers.

We aim to minimise the amount of personal information included in AI processing.

We will not intentionally send unnecessary account information to an AI provider.

Where a provider processes personal data on our behalf, we require appropriate contractual and security safeguards.

We do not permit third-party AI providers to use FLOQ user content to train their own general-purpose models where this is prohibited by our agreement with that provider.

Currently we use Anthropic (Claude API) for the AI safety check of posts and replies and for translating flock names. Anthropic processes this content on our behalf under its commercial terms and data processing agreement, which do not allow it to train its models on the content we send. Anthropic is based in the United States; the transfer is covered by the safeguards described in the next section.

22. International transfers

Some of our service providers may process data outside the European Economic Area (EEA).

Where personal data is transferred outside the EEA, we use an appropriate legal mechanism under applicable data protection law.

This may include:

Where required, we will provide additional information about relevant safeguards.

22a. Events

Members can propose events in a flock. A moderator approves an event before other members see it. Being "interested" in an event is only a count: FLOQ keeps no guest list and nobody can see who is interested. If you are interested, we email you a reminder 48 hours before the event and tell you if it is cancelled.

If the organiser chooses so, an approved event (title, photo, text, place, date, time and link) is also shown on FLOQ's public homepage, where anyone can see it without an account. Events and their replies are deleted 7 days after the event has ended.

23. How long we keep information

We do not keep personal data indefinitely.

Retention periods depend on the type of information and why we need it.

Examples include:

Account information

Normally retained while your account is active.

Flock membership

Normally retained while you are a member and for a limited period afterwards where necessary for security, moderation or legal purposes.

Discussions and posts

Content may remain available after you stop using FLOQ where it forms part of an ongoing community discussion.

Where technically and legally appropriate, content may be anonymised rather than deleted if deleting it would disrupt a conversation.

Direct messages

Deleted completely 90 days after the last message in a chat (see section 5a).

Security logs

Retained for a limited period appropriate to the security purpose.

Moderation records

Retained for as long as reasonably necessary to enforce community rules, investigate repeated abuse and protect users.

Legal records

Retained where necessary to comply with legal obligations or establish, exercise or defend legal claims.

When information is no longer required, we delete or anonymise it.

24. Deleting your account

You can delete your FLOQ account yourself, at any time, under Profile & security → Delete account. You confirm it with your password and, if you use two-step login, a two-step code.

When you delete your account:

Moderators first ask FLOQ HQ to hand over their moderator role, so a community never suddenly loses its team; after that they can delete their account in the same way.

What we keep: moderation decisions about your content keep their grounds (not the content itself) for accountability and appeals, and security and moderation logs keep an anonymous reference; your old name is replaced in them. A chat report someone made about you, with its copy of the messages, is kept while it is handled and up to one year after it was closed (our legitimate interest in keeping FLOQ safe).

Some information may need to be retained for a limited period where this is necessary to:

Content you have posted may be treated separately because it can form part of a community conversation.

Where appropriate, we may anonymise such content rather than deleting the entire conversation.

25. Your privacy rights

Depending on applicable law, you have rights including:

You can exercise your rights by contacting: floqhq@protonmail.com

We may need to verify your identity before processing a request.

This is necessary to prevent someone else from accessing or deleting your account.

26. Automated decision-making

FLOQ may use automated systems to identify potentially harmful content, spam, fraud or other policy violations.

Automated systems may generate recommendations or risk signals for moderators and the FLOQ safety team.

We do not intend to make decisions producing significant legal or similarly significant effects on users solely through automated processing.

Where applicable law gives you rights relating to automated decision-making, we will provide the safeguards required by that law.

27. Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect personal data.

These may include:

No internet service can guarantee absolute security.

If we become aware of a personal data breach that requires notification under applicable law, we will follow the applicable legal requirements.

28. Children

FLOQ is an 18+ platform.

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account or use FLOQ.

If we learn that we have collected personal data from someone under 18, we will take appropriate steps to delete the account and associated personal data, subject to legal requirements.

If you believe someone under 18 is using FLOQ, please contact us at: floqhq@protonmail.com

29. Community moderators

Flock moderators are independent members of the FLOQ community and are not employees of FLOQ unless explicitly stated otherwise.

Moderators may have access to information necessary to operate their Flock.

Moderators must follow FLOQ's moderator rules and privacy requirements.

They may not use member information for purposes unrelated to managing the Flock.

If you believe a moderator is misusing personal information, please report it to: floqhq@protonmail.com

30. Third-party websites

FLOQ may contain links to websites or services operated by third parties.

We are not responsible for the privacy practices of those third parties.

We recommend reading their privacy statements before providing them with personal information.

31. Changes to this Privacy Statement

We may update this Privacy Statement from time to time.

Examples of changes may include:

When changes are significant, we will provide appropriate notice.

The latest version will always be available on the FLOQ website.

The "Last updated" date at the top of this statement shows when it was last revised.

32. Contact us

If you have questions about privacy or how FLOQ handles personal data, contact us at floqhq@protonmail.com.

For privacy requests, please use: floqhq@protonmail.com

33. Complaints

If you believe that we have not handled your personal data correctly, please contact us first so that we can investigate the issue.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority responsible for your country.

For users in the Netherlands: Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens, autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl

You may also contact the relevant supervisory authority in another EU/EEA country where applicable.

FLOQ, Find your flock.

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