Privacy Policy

This is the plain English account of what Full House collects about you, why we collect it, who else sees it, and what you can ask us to do about it. If anything here is unclear, write to nick@viralcow.com and a person will answer you.

1. Who we are and where this applies

Full House is operated by ViralCow Ltd (registered in England and Wales, company number 17109092). Our registered office is 71-75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. We are the data controller for what this page describes, with one shared exception: if you allow advertising cookies on our website, we and Meta Platforms, Inc. are joint controllers for collecting a few facts about your visit and sending them to Meta, as section 14 explains. We are registered with the Information Commission, the UK’s data protection regulator (still known as the ICO), under number ZC114004.

Full House is offered in the United Kingdom only. UK data protection law applies to everything below.

2. Who this covers

• Creators. Local food and lifestyle creators who visit venues, film, and post.
• Restaurants. The venues that host those visits, and the people who work at them.
• Anyone who reports something to us. You can report content or behaviour by email without ever having an account. If you do, we hold what you sent us, and this policy covers you too.
• Visitors to our website. If you only browse fullhouse.social, section 13 (cookies) is about you, and so is section 14 (Meta) if you allow advertising cookies.

3. What we collect and why

We collect what the product needs to work, and we say below which parts are optional.

Your account and profile

• Required. Your name and email address. You cannot have an account without them.
• Required, for creators. Your postcode. We turn it into a point on the map, and that point is how we work out which venues are near enough for you. For your profile we keep your postcode, not your street address, and no restaurant ever sees it. If you take cash out, the tax rules also need your home address, explained below.
• Required, for creators. At least one Instagram or TikTok account of yours, with the four digit code we give you added to its bio, so we can see the account is yours.
• Optional, for creators. Your phone number, the part of London you live in, the areas you can reach, a second social account, the kinds of food you cover, and how far you will travel. Your profile works without any of them, and they exist so we can match you to a venue you will actually enjoy.
• Optional, for creators. Whether you eat vegetarian, vegan or pescatarian. If you pick vegetarian or vegan, we keep you away from restaurants you could not eat at. A restaurant can see your answer only for a table you have booked there, so its kitchen can cook for you. We do not ask about allergies, religion or health: tell the restaurant about an allergy on the day. Leave the question blank and everything else still works.
• Required, for restaurants. Your venue name, address, phone number, photographs of the place and the food, and the brief you set. A venue page cannot be published without a photograph, because the photograph is the page.
• Signing in is handled by Supabase. If you sign in with Apple or Google, we receive your name and email address from them and nothing else.

Content you create

• Creators give us the links to their films, never the video files. Our server then fetches each film’s cover picture and its public view counts. The restaurant you visited sees the content made for it. When you join, you give that restaurant the right to reshare it on its own channels, with credit to you, and to use it in its own paid ads. That right is part of joining, and it stays with the restaurant if you close your account. Our terms set it out in full.
• Restaurants upload their own photographs of the place and the food. We remove location data from every photo before we store it.
• Optional. The apply form on our website takes one photo of you, if you choose to add one. We remove its location data too.

Public social data

• To check that an account is yours and to judge fit, we read public information from the social profiles and recent posts you tell us about, through a data provider called Apify: your bio, where we look for the four digit code we ask you to add, your profile picture, your follower count and how your recent posts perform. We read them when you apply, right after the screen tells you so, then about once a month while you are approved. If we invited you, we also read them once before we sent the invitation. When you post for a visit, we also read the public views, likes, comments and shares on that post 1, 3, 7, 30 and 37 days after you post it. The count at day 30 is the one we pay on. Apify reads only what is already public. We never ask for your social passwords and we never post as you.

Visits and attendance

• The tables you book, whether you turned up (the door code the restaurant typed, or the answers you and the restaurant gave when it did not), and any strike we confirm, with the reason.

Cash for your views (creators)

• If your cash is switched on, we keep a record of what each of your films earned, the views it was paid on, your balance and every withdrawal. No restaurant ever sees any of it.
• Required before your first withdrawal. Your legal name, date of birth, home address and National Insurance number, with your confirmation that they are right. Each January we report them to HMRC with the bank account we pay you into and what you earned with us the year before, as UK law requires of platforms like ours, and we send you a copy of that report. UK tax law makes us keep them, so we do, for 6 years after the end of the financial year (ours ends on 31 March) of your last earning or withdrawal, even after you delete your account. Once saved, the app shows you only a few characters of your number.
• Payouts through Stripe. You set up payouts on Stripe’s own pages, in a Stripe account in your name. Stripe collects your bank details and checks who you are. We get your sort code and account number only for the yearly report to HMRC. We give Stripe your email address and our reference for you, Stripe tells us whether your account can be paid, and we tell Stripe the amount of each withdrawal.

Notifications

• Optional. If you allow push notifications, we store a push token for your device so we can send offers, reminders and updates. We send transactional email through Resend. Turn either off in your settings or in your device settings.

Analytics and crash reports

• The app runs no analytics. It sends us no records of how you use it.
• Our website runs analytics only if you say yes. If you allow Analytics in the cookie choice, PostHog counts the pages you visit on our website and what you click, so we can fix what confuses people. Say no and nothing is counted. Section 13 has the detail.
• When the app crashes, it sends a crash report to Sentry: what went wrong, the app version, and the phone’s model and system version. It carries no name, email or other personal details.

Reports, blocks and moderation

• What you report, who you blocked, and what we decided about it. Section 5 sets this out in full.

4. Payments

Money moves through Full House in two directions, and Stripe handles both.

• Restaurant plans are billed by Stripe. You enter your card into Stripe, not into us. Stripe sees your billing email address and your card details directly. We never see or store your card number. We keep a record of your plan, your invoices and whether payment succeeded.
• Creators are paid by us, through Stripe. Cash for your views goes from us to your Stripe payout account and on to your bank. Nothing is ever bought inside the app, and no money for a meal passes through us: the restaurant hosts it directly.

Your card and bank details are never used for advertising. The one thing about a payment that reaches an advertiser is this: if a restaurant allowed advertising cookies on our website, we tell Meta when it opens checkout and when its first payment goes through, with the plan’s price, as section 14 explains.

5. Reports, blocks and moderation

• A report records what you reported, why, anything you typed, and who you are. You can also report by email without an account, in which case we hold whatever you send us, including the address you send it from.
• A block is silent. The person you block is never told that you blocked them. They simply stop appearing to you, and you stop appearing to them.
• If we act on a report about you, we tell you. You will be told what we did and why, and on what ground.
• We keep reports and moderation decisions as a safety record. Section 10 says how long.

6. Where your data lives

Our database is in London: your account, your profile and your content are stored there by Supabase, and our website and its servers run on Vercel in London.

Some of the companies that help us run Full House handle data outside the UK, mostly in the United States and the EU: Stripe (payments and payouts), Apple and Google (sign in and notifications), Expo (delivering notifications), Resend (email), Apify (reading public Instagram and TikTok pages), Sentry (crash reports), Instagram’s and TikTok’s players (when a film plays), PostHog (website analytics, only if you allow it, held in Frankfurt) and Meta (advertising, only if you allow it). Each transfer is made under the standard legal safeguards for international transfers.

7. Video players from Instagram and TikTok

When a film appears in Full House, it is played by Instagram’s or TikTok’s own official player running inside our app or website. We do this so creators keep their views and their credit on their own channel.

It does mean that Instagram or TikTok can see your device’s IP address and may set their own cookies inside that player, under their own privacy policies rather than ours. We do not send them your name, your email address or your account. Inside the app, we answer TikTok’s cookie question for you with “decline optional”, the most private choice it offers.

On a restaurant’s dashboard, and on our own review desk, the cover picture of an Instagram film may be loaded straight from Instagram, so Instagram can see the viewer’s IP address when the page opens, before anything plays.

8. Who we share it with

These are the companies that make the product work. Each one acts under contract and only on our instructions.

• Supabase. Your account, profile, content and files.
• Stripe. Restaurant subscription billing, and paying creators through Stripe Connect.
• Expo. Delivering push notifications to your device, through Apple and Google.
• Apple and Google. Signing you in, if you choose to sign in with them, and carrying notifications to your phone.
• Resend. Sending you email.
• Apify. Reading public social profile and post data.
• Sentry. Receiving the app’s crash reports.
• Vercel. Hosting the website, which keeps request logs.
• postcodes.io. Turning a postcode into a point on the map. We send it a postcode and nothing else, to find the map point for it.
• PostHog. Counting how our website is used, only for visitors who allow analytics.

Restaurants see the creator profiles and the content relevant to their own visits. A restaurant you booked keeps seeing your name and handle after the visit, even if you did not turn up, so it can block you. It never sees your email address, phone number or postcode, or anything about what you earn. We do not sell your personal data to anyone.

Meta is not on that list, because it does not act only on our instructions. If you allow advertising cookies, Meta receives the facts in section 14, and for collecting and sending them it is a joint controller with us. Nobody else receives your data for advertising.

We will also disclose data where the law requires it. That includes the yearly report to HMRC about every creator we paid, referring child sexual abuse and exploitation material to the National Crime Agency, and responding to a valid request from law enforcement, a court or a regulator. We do that whether or not the company involved is on the list above, and we do not need your permission for it.

9. Our legal basis (UK GDPR)

• Contract. Running your account, matching visits, taking payment, paying creators for their views and delivering content are what you signed up for. So are reading your public social profiles to check your application and match you, and the right each restaurant you visit gets to reshare your content with credit and use it in its own paid ads, which is part of joining.
• Consent. Push notifications, your dietary answer, the optional photo on our website’s apply form, analytics on our website, and advertising cookies with what we send to Meta because of them. You can withdraw any of these at any time: turn notifications off, clear your diet in your profile, ask us to delete the photo, or switch Analytics or Advertising off in Cookie settings. Withdrawing does not undo what was done while you had said yes.
• Legitimate interests. Keeping people safe on the platform, handling reports, making moderation decisions and keeping the record of them, preventing abuse, remembering your cookie choice and the invite code in a link you followed, and improving the product. We balance each of these against your rights.
• Legal obligation. Tax records, including your tax details and the record of what we paid you, the yearly report to HMRC about creators we pay, and disclosures we are required to make.

10. How long we keep it, and what deletion actually does

We keep your data while your account is open. You can close it at any time at https://fullhouse.social/delete-account, and that page has the steps for both kinds of account. Cookies, and the advertising records in sections 13 and 14, have their own shorter limits, set out there.

What goes. Your name, your email address, your phone number, your photograph, your social handles, your postcode and the map point made from it, your home area, the areas you can reach, your dietary requirements, your availability, your notification settings, and your sign in. If you signed in with Apple, deleting your account also tells Apple to end Full House’s access to your Apple ID. Your Stripe payout account is closed with Stripe and our link to it deleted, and your push and email delivery records go too. Your face is removed from our public image storage. Your four digit door code goes back in the pool. Any record of the ad or link that brought you to us goes too, with anything still waiting to be sent to Meta; what Meta already received is Meta’s to delete (section 14).

What stays, and this is the part worth reading. The films you posted for a restaurant stay. They live on your own Instagram or TikTok channel, the restaurant paid for them, and we go on showing them to that restaurant credited to “Deleted creator”. Their view counts stay with them. The link on them still points at your own public post, so anyone who follows it arrives at your channel rather than at anything we hold. If you want that link gone, take the post down on the platform it lives on, or ask us and we will remove the link.

We also keep, deliberately:

• Invoices, because tax law requires it.
• If you earned cash: what each of your films earned, your withdrawals, anything you gave up, the result of any check on a film, and your tax details, for 6 years after the end of the financial year (ours ends on 31 March) of your last earning or withdrawal, because UK tax law requires it. Any notes on them are blanked.
• The visits and offers themselves, so a restaurant keeps a straight record of its own months. They no longer carry your name.
• Safety records. Reports about you, and any moderation decision we made, with the reason for it. We keep these on legitimate interests, because a complaints record that vanishes when the subject deletes their account is not a complaints record. We delete them 6 years after your account is deleted.

Closing a restaurant account removes you, your contact details and your notification settings. It does not close the venue, because a venue is shared business data and somebody else may work there. When the last person leaves a venue, we clear the venue’s contact name, email address, phone number and notes as well.

11. Your rights

You can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, give you a copy to take elsewhere, or stop a particular use of it. Email nick@viralcow.com and we will act on it, normally within a month. For anything Meta holds about you from our website, you can come to us or go to Meta directly (section 14).

If you are unhappy with how we have used your data, you can complain to us first, at the same address. We will tell you we have your complaint within 30 days, and then deal with it. You can also complain to the Information Commission, the UK’s data protection regulator (still known as the ICO), at ico.org.uk.

12. Children

Full House is made for adults. We do not offer it to under 18s, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. The first step of a creator application asks you to confirm you are 18 or over, and we keep a dated record of it. If you believe a child has an account, tell us at nick@viralcow.com and we will close it.

13. Cookies, and other notes we keep in your browser

A cookie is a small note a website keeps in your browser. Our website uses a few, and our home page and creators page also keep a few notes in your browser’s own storage. When you first visit our website, we ask what you allow (the four pages our app opens, this one among them, do not ask; they carry the Cookie settings link instead). You can change your answer at any time with the “Cookie settings” link at the foot of this page, of our home page and creators page, and of every sign up form. We ask again after six months, or sooner if what we ask about changes.

Set without asking

These make the site work, remember your choices, or credit the creator who invited you. None of them follows you onto any other website.

• fh_consent remembers your cookie choice, so we do not ask on every page. It tracks nothing. It lasts six months, and then we ask again.
• Cookies whose names start sb- keep you signed in. They are set only when you sign in, last up to 400 days, and go when you sign out. While you sign in with an email link, Google or Apple, or reset your password, one of them (its name ends code-verifier) proves it started in this browser.
• lt_intake keeps your place in a creator application on our website, which has no password. It lasts 30 days, or until you sign out of the application.
• fh_ref remembers the invite code in a creator’s link you followed, so the application you start is credited to the creator who invited you. It lasts until you close your browser.
• fh_showroom remembers that a signed in restaurant switched on demo mode, which shows a sample restaurant. It lasts a year, or until you switch it off.
• On our home page and creators page, fh-c1-loader, fh-swap, fh-side-chip and fh-side remember, until you close the tab, that you have seen the opening animation, where you were when you switched between the two pages, that you closed the welcome back note, and which of the two pages you chose last, so we can welcome you back. None of these four holds anything about who you are, and none is sent to us.

You can delete any of them in your browser’s settings. The site still works, though you may need to sign in again.

Analytics (only if you say yes)

If you allow Analytics, PostHog counts the pages you visit on our website, how long you stay and what you click, so we can fix what confuses people. It keeps a cookie and a few notes in your browser’s storage whose names start ph_, holding a random number for your browser and your visit, the address you first arrived at and the site that sent you, for a year. It may also set a test cookie for three seconds, to find out which address to use. PostHog keeps what it counts for one year, on servers in Frankfurt, and works only on our instructions. Say no and PostHog never loads; switch Analytics off later and it stops, and we delete its cookies and notes from your browser. One note saying you said no (its name starts __ph_opt_in_out_) can stay until your next page, so PostHog remembers your no.

Advertising (only if you say yes)

• fh_touch is ours. It remembers the ad or link that brought you to us: Meta’s click id (fbclid) and the five campaign labels in its address (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content and utm_term), the page you arrived on, when you first came, and a random number for your browser, so we can find these records if you change your mind. It lasts 90 days from your last visit.
• _fbp and _fbc are set on our site by Meta’s pixel: a random number for your browser and, if you came from an ad on Facebook or Instagram, the click that brought you. Each lasts 90 days.
• Meta’s pixel itself tells Meta which page of ours you are on. It never runs on our sign in and password reset pages, a restaurant’s dashboard, our admin pages, or any page whose address carries a private link.

Say no, or switch Advertising off later, and Meta’s pixel does not load, we delete these three cookies from your browser, and nothing more about you is sent to Meta. Section 14 says what is sent, and why.

Other companies’ cookies

When you pay or set up payouts, you are on Stripe’s own pages, which set their own cookies under Stripe’s privacy policy. Instagram’s and TikTok’s players may set theirs once a film plays (section 7).

14. Advertising with Meta (only if you say yes)

We advertise Full House on Facebook and Instagram. To learn which of our ads work, and to help Meta show them to people likely to be interested, our website uses Meta’s pixel, and our server uses Meta’s Conversions API, a way to tell Meta that someone signed up. Both run only if you allow Advertising. Like many websites, ours then lets Meta collect information through its pixel and cookies, and Meta combines it with what it learns elsewhere on the internet to measure ads and to target and deliver them.

What Meta learns, and when

• While you browse our website, the pixel tells Meta which page you are on.
• When one of five things happens, our server tells Meta that it happened: a restaurant sends us an enquiry; a creator sends an application from our website; we approve that application; a restaurant opens checkout; a restaurant’s first payment goes through.
• With each of those we send what happened and when, our own reference number for it, the page of our website it belongs to, whether it is about a creator or a restaurant, your email address and, for an enquiry or a creator’s application, your phone number if you gave one. The email and phone are scrambled into a code that cannot be turned back (Meta uses it only to match you to a Facebook or Instagram account, then deletes it). We also send your IP address, your browser’s description of itself, and Meta’s browser and click ids from the cookies above. For a restaurant’s checkout and first payment we also send the plan’s price.
• To do this, our server keeps a record of each of those moments: the facts from fh_touch, Meta’s ids, your IP address, your browser’s description, the scrambled email and phone, and a copy of your cookie choice with its date.
• We never send Meta your name, your postcode, anything you wrote, or anything about what a creator earns.

Who is never reported. Anyone who has not said yes to Advertising, or whose yes is more than six months old. Creators who apply in our phone app, which has no cookies to say yes to. Our sample accounts, the logins we give app store reviewers, and our seeded test accounts. A payment made in Stripe’s test mode goes only to Meta’s testing tool, while we check the setup.

Who is responsible

For collecting these facts on our website and sending them to Meta, we and Meta Platforms, Inc. (1 Meta Way, Menlo Park, California 94025, United States) are joint controllers. In Meta’s UK Controller Addendum we have agreed who does what: we ask for your yes and tell you about it on this page, and Meta answers requests to see, correct, delete, restrict or take a copy of what it holds. Once Meta has the facts, it decides on its own what it does with them, as a separate controller, under its privacy policy at facebook.com/about/privacy, which also says how to use your rights with Meta.

What Meta does with them

Meta uses them to measure our ads and to deliver them to people more likely to be interested. Under its own terms it may also use them to personalise the ads and content it shows people, to keep its services safe, and to improve them. Meta says it does not let other advertisers target ads on our data alone.

Your choice

We do this only with your consent. To stop it, switch Advertising off in Cookie settings at the foot of this page: Meta’s pixel stops, we delete its cookies from your browser, and we cancel anything not yet sent. What was already sent stays with Meta until Meta deletes it. You can also choose how Meta uses information for ads in your Facebook or Instagram ad settings at facebook.com/adpreferences, and read about choosing which ads you see at youronlinechoices.eu.

How long

On our side, the record of the ad or link that brought you is deleted 12 months after it was made, or 30 days after you switch Advertising off, and the record of each message to Meta is deleted 90 days after it was sent, cancelled or given up on. A yes stops counting after six months: nothing more is sent on it, even if you never come back. Meta says it keeps what it receives for up to two years.

Your rights

You can use your rights about this data with us or with Meta. If you ask us for something only Meta can do, we pass it to Meta within seven days. You can complain to us first, and to the Information Commission (the ICO), as section 11 explains.

15. Changes

If we change this policy we update the date at the top. If the change matters to you, we will tell you in the app or by email.

16. Contact

Anything about privacy, including any of the requests in section 11, goes to nick@viralcow.com.