Privacy policy

Controller

The publisher of Buddies Nepal (Cause We Are Young). Contact for any question or request: [email protected].

What is collected, and why

• Account: you log in with the shared Cause We Are Young account (same publisher, its privacy policy), which manages your email, password and Google sign-in. This site keeps a copy: name, email, language, whether the email is verified, profile photo, date of last login; no password and no Google identifier. Purpose: recognising you (performance of the service).
• Trekker profile: gender, year of birth, nationality (optional), languages, level, budget, treks done, introduction. Other logged-in members see your first name and last initial, your age (never the year) and this profile; never your full name or email. Gender is used for women-only groups (self-declared, no ID); age to keep the site for people aged 18 and over. Your age and your nationality (if you give it) are shown with your first name to logged-in members only. Purpose: putting trekkers in touch.
• Departures and availability: trek, dates, group size, optional first names of your companions (without an account), style, guide, message. A departure is public: trek, dates, seats and members’ first names; their ages, nationalities (if given) and photos are for logged-in members only. Availability is only visible to logged-in members. Purpose: putting trekkers in touch.
• Requests to join, waiting list: your message to the organizer and the number of seats requested, seen by the organizer.
• Messages (one-to-one and group threads), never published. A new group member doesn’t see messages from before they joined, unless the organizer decides so; a member who leaves keeps reading access to the messages written until they left. The first three private messages each person sends in a conversation, and the texts of posts, are checked automatically (phone number, email, link, payment request, the same text sent to several people): a text spotted this way is only pointed out to the administrator; it is neither blocked nor changed. Group threads are not checked. The administrator may read a conversation for moderation and safety (a report, a scam, abuse), then remove a message or suspend an account; each reading is recorded in their log. Purpose: legitimate interest (protecting members).
• Comments under a departure: public, readable by everyone (without an account, only the author’s first name is shown); an account is needed to write. Checked like posts (phone number, email, link, payment): a comment spotted this way is only pointed out to the administrator. Kept with the departure, 18 months after the end of the trek.
• Reports: the reason and your details, seen by the administrator only; the reported person doesn’t know who reported them.
• Guides: to know whether an account has a published profile on Guides Nepal (same publisher), this site sends Guides Nepal only the account number and receives the profile type, its link and its photo, kept for 30 days at most. To suggest guides to a group, it sends the trek, dates, languages and group number (nothing about its members); when the organizer invites a guide from that list, it also sends that guide’s account number, the organizer’s first name, the trek, the dates and the invitation link, which Guides Nepal passes on to the guide by email.
• Emails: requests, answers, seats opening up, new messages (one per conversation until you read it), and alerts when a departure or an available trekker matches your dates (at most one a day). More rarely, news from the team (launch, new features), sent on the basis of our legitimate interest in informing you about the service you use: you can object at any time, without giving a reason. Message emails, alerts and news can be turned off in your profile or from each email (link at the bottom of the email, or your mail app’s “unsubscribe” button). Members of a group may receive information about their group from the team. A trace of each email sent (address, subject, success or failure; never the text) is used to check that they arrive; it is kept for 90 days.
• Administration: the administrator may export the list of accounts (name, email, language, activity on the site) or of groups to a file, to monitor and run the service (legitimate interest). These files stay with them, are never passed on to third parties, and are deleted once no longer needed.
• “Idea or bug?” feedback: your message, the page you write from, screen size, browser, language and site version; your account if you are logged in, otherwise your email if you give it. A fingerprint of your IP address (never the address) is only used to limit sending. Read by the administrator, who receives a copy by email, to improve the site (legitimate interest).
• Security: counters of what is sent (messages, new conversations, reports) to limit abuse, and a list of the trekkers shown to you (profiles, trekker lists, group members, compatible trekkers, comment authors, “Write to”) and of your searches, with a fingerprint of your IP address (never the address), kept for 7 days, to prevent profile scraping (beyond a certain number, a break is requested and the administrator is notified). For those 7 days, this list also tells which accounts viewed your profile; only the administrator looks at it, in case of abuse. The administrator is also notified of an unusual number of requests to join groups. If you delete your account, these rows are detached from your account but keep the fingerprint of your IP address (so that the address limit still holds); they are erased after the same 7 days. Purpose: legitimate interest (protecting members).

No data is sold or used for advertising.

Cookies

A single cookie, needed for the site to work (so it does not require consent): the session cookie __Host-bn_sess, kept for 30 days if you chose “Stay logged in” on the shared account, otherwise until you close the browser. No advertising cookie or third-party tracker.

Service providers

• IONOS (France / European Union): hosting of the site and database, sending of emails.
• Cloudflare (USA): delivery and protection of the site; sees requests, including your IP address.
• The shared Cause We Are Young account and Guides Nepal (same publisher, hosted by IONOS).

Transfers outside the European Union rely on the safeguards provided by the GDPR (standard contractual clauses or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework).

Retention

• Departure, members, requests and group thread: 18 months after the end of the trek, then deleted.
• One-to-one conversation: 18 months after the last message.
• Availability: 18 months after the end of the period.
• Profile: as long as the account exists. When the account is deleted, your profile, availability and requests are erased; your messages stay signed with your first name and last initial in their recipients’ conversations (until the 18 months above); if you organized a departure, it passes to the longest-standing member, otherwise it is cancelled.
• Handled reports and moderation log: 18 months.
• Trace of emails sent: 90 days.
• “Idea or bug?” feedback: 12 months on the site; the copy emailed to the administrator is deleted from their mailbox within the same period.
• Trekker profiles and searches you view (protection against scraping): 7 days; flag on an account that views a lot of them or sends many requests: until the administrator handles it (its trace stays in the moderation log, 18 months); “nothing to do” decided by the administrator: 7 days.
• Technical logs (errors, IONOS server logs, with IP addresses): a few weeks.

Your rights

You can access your data, correct it (“My profile”; name, email and photo in your Cause We Are Young account), receive it in a readable format, object to processing or ask for it to be erased. Deleting your account is done from your Cause We Are Young account and applies to all Cause We Are Young sites. For any other request: [email protected]. You may also complain to your data protection authority (in France, the CNIL: www.cnil.fr).

Updates

Policy updated on 29 October 2026.