Privacy Policy

Angelpaws is a web platform ('we', 'us', 'our') that lists animals from verified shelters and rescue organizations, starting in Los Angeles, California, and helps prospective adopters find and inquire about them. Shelters and rescues create and manage their own animal listings; Angelpaws does not own or operate any shelter.

We collect different information depending on how you use Angelpaws:

• Browsing: none. You can search, filter, and view animal listings without an account or any personal information.
• Adoption inquiries: if you contact a shelter about an animal, we collect your name, email address, and the message you write. No account is required to send an inquiry.
• Adopter accounts (optional): if you create a light account to save favorites and searches, we collect your email address and password (handled by our authentication provider — we never see or store your password in plain text), plus your preferred language. We do not ask adopters for a name, phone number, or address.
• Favorites and saved searches: which animals you've favorited, and the filters of any search you've saved. This is tied to your account and nothing else.
• Shelter/rescue staff accounts: shelters register with an email and password, plus organization details they choose to provide (organization name, contact email, phone, website, city/county, and a description) so adopters and our admin team can verify and reach them.
• What we do NOT collect: payment or financial information of any kind. Adoption fees, if any, are handled directly between you and the shelter, entirely off our platform. We also don't ask adopters for a home address, phone number, or government ID.

We use Vercel Speed Insights, a privacy-oriented performance-monitoring tool, to measure how fast pages load for real visitors so we can keep the site fast. It measures aggregate page-performance metrics and does not use advertising cookies, does not build cross-site profiles of you, and is not shared with or sold to advertisers. We don't run any advertising trackers, social-media pixels, or third-party marketing analytics on Angelpaws.

• To operate the core service: showing you animals, letting you contact shelters, and letting shelters manage their listings.
• To maintain your account, if you have one, and the favorites/saved searches attached to it.
• To keep the platform secure, prevent abuse of the inquiry form, and enforce our Terms of Service.
• To help shelters meet their own recordkeeping obligations under California law for the animals they list.
• To measure and improve site performance (see Analytics above).

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.

• An adoption inquiry (your name, email, and message) is visible only to the shelter that posted the animal you asked about, and to Angelpaws admin staff for safety and moderation purposes.
• A verified shelter's organization information (name, city, description, verification status) is public, because that's how adopters find and evaluate shelters — this is organizational, not personal, information.
• We may disclose information if required by law, such as in response to a valid subpoena or court order.

Angelpaws's locked retention policy (see our internal Data Retention Policy) does not use hard deletion for business records — records are archived, not destroyed, except where you have a direct right to delete your own data (favorites and saved searches) or where we anonymize personal fields after the periods below.

If you are a California resident, you have the following rights over the personal information we hold about you:

• Right to know / access — you can ask us what personal information we have collected about you and why.
• Right to delete — you can ask us to delete your personal information. We will honor this request except where the law requires us to keep certain records (for example, California shelter recordkeeping law can require a shelter to retain adoption-related records for a set period). Where we can't fully delete a record for that reason, we anonymize the personal fields (your name and email are replaced with an irreversible placeholder) instead of deleting the whole record, and we'll tell you which legal basis applies. Note: today this anonymization is a manual process on our end rather than a fully automated one — we'll still honor your request, it just may take us a little longer than an instant self-service delete button would. Favorites and saved searches are the one exception where you can delete your own data yourself, instantly, at any time, with no request needed.
• Right to correct — you can ask us to correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you (for example, a misspelled name or an out-of-date email address on an inquiry or account). Email us as described below and we'll fix it.
• Right to non-discrimination — we will not deny you service, charge you a different amount, or provide a different level of service because you exercised any of these rights. (Angelpaws doesn't charge adopters at all, so this mostly means: your account keeps working the same either way.)
• We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

Email us at Lakerdar@gmail.com from the address associated with your inquiry or account (or tell us which one it is) and let us know whether you'd like to know what we have, or have it deleted/anonymized. We may need to verify it's really you asking before we act on the request.

• A language-preference cookie (NEXT_LOCALE) remembers whether you last viewed the site in English or Spanish.
• If you sign in, secure, httpOnly session cookies (set by our authentication provider, Supabase) keep you signed in between page loads. These aren't readable by page scripts and aren't used for tracking.
• We don't use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Angelpaws is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone we know to be under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us at Lakerdar@gmail.com and we'll remove it.

We use industry-standard safeguards appropriate to the limited data we hold: encrypted connections (HTTPS) everywhere, database-level row security so an account can only see the data it's authorized to see, and least-privilege access for our own staff. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we design the system to collect and expose as little as reasonably possible in the first place.

For support, safety, or moderation purposes, an authorized administrator may occasionally and temporarily sign in to your account to act on your behalf. Every such access is recorded in an audit log.

If we make material changes to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, post a notice on the site. We encourage you to review this page periodically.