Privacy policy

CHiiRO is a community platform for founders and investors. You can build a professional profile, join communities, post and answer questions, apply to jobs, register for events and message other members.

CHiiRO is operated by RooTree Analytic Inc., a corporation incorporated in Canada ("RooTree", "we"). RooTree decides what personal information is collected and why, and is accountable for it. More about the company: rootreeinc.com.

For privacy questions, rights requests and complaints, email hello@chiiro.co. If your request concerns your account, please write from the email address your CHiiRO account uses.

RooTree has not appointed a data protection officer.

Your device contacts. The invite screen can read your device's address book, but only if you allow it. This is optional, and you can refuse without losing any other feature. The contacts are read and shown on your device. We found no code in the app that sends them to our servers.

Our backend keeps request logs for security, abuse prevention and diagnosing faults. This processing is essential to running the service and cannot be turned off.

• What is recorded. The time, the part of the service used and the result, your account key when you are signed in, and technical connection details such as your IP address and the type of device or browser. We limit these logs to what those purposes need and protect them as described in clause 9.
• Secrets are never kept. Passwords, sign-in codes and session tokens are not recorded in our logs.
• How long. We keep server logs. After 13 months, the identifiers in them are de-identified in place.
• Who can reach them. Only authorised personnel, for the purposes above.

What the app sends depends on its version. At the date at the top of this page, version 1.0.16 is available through open testing on Google Play and through Apple TestFlight; the main Google Play release is an earlier version.

Versions up to 1.0.15 use Mixpanel and Google Firebase Analytics. From the first launch, without asking, they send usage events (screens viewed, app opens, certain actions) and your account identifier to those two services. They include no crash-reporting service.

From version 1.0.16, Mixpanel and Firebase Analytics are removed, and optional analytics and crash reporting are asked for through a privacy choice. The first time you open the app, a privacy sheet asks you to choose. It has three buttons of equal weight: Accept all, Essential only and Customise. You can change your choice at any time in Settings → Privacy.

• Essential is always on: sign-in, security, fraud and abuse prevention, and our own server records (2.3).
• Analytics & diagnostics is optional. It covers:
  • Crash reports, sent to Google Firebase Crashlytics: the crash stack trace, device model and operating-system version.
  • Performance measurements (from version 1.0.25), sent to Google Firebase Performance Monitoring: how long screens take to show their content and, on Android, how smoothly they draw, with the device model, operating-system version and app version. They contain no content you write and no account identifier.
  • Usage events (for example app opened and screen viewed), sent to our own servers. From version 1.0.16 the app sends usage data to no analytics company.

Nothing optional is collected until you have answered the sheet. If you choose Customise, the analytics switch starts in the on position, and you can turn it off before confirming. If you choose Essential only, or turn the switch off later, the app sends no usage events and crash reporting is switched off.

Data that versions up to 1.0.15 sent to Mixpanel and Firebase Analytics stays with those providers, under our accounts with them. Please update the app when a newer version is available to you.

• Precise location. The app never asks for precise (GPS-level) location. It asks only for approximate location, and only when you choose "Use my location" to see jobs near you. Sign-in security records use no GPS and hold no coordinates. Where this policy says "location" it means the city you type in, an approximate city and country worked out from your IP address, or that approximate position if you choose to share it. A backend table can store a precise position. It holds one record, dated October 2025, from before this policy.
• Payment or financial information. See clause 11.
• Health, fitness or biometric data.
• Cross-app tracking or advertising identifiers. The Android app removes the advertising-ID permission, and nothing in the app reads the iOS advertising identifier.
• No sale of personal information, and no sharing of it for cross-context behavioural advertising. The companies listed in clause 3.3 process data for us as service providers. That is not a sale.
• No third-party advertising and no advertising profiles.

Each time you sign in, we record the time, whether it worked, your IP address, the device you used, and an approximate city and country worked out from the IP address. This is not GPS. We never collect coordinates, and the city and country are only an estimate.

• Why. To keep your account secure and to prevent fraud. If you sign in from a device we have not seen before, or from a country we have not seen before, we alert you.
• You can see them. Your recent sign-ins and devices are shown to you in the Account tab of the app.
• How the location is worked out. On our own servers, offline, using the DB-IP database credited in clause 3.3. Your IP address is not sent to anyone to do this.
• How long. See clause 6. When your account is deleted, your identifiers are removed from these records (clause 8.2).

We send notifications to your phone (push) and keep a record of them in the app's Notification Centre, so you can find them later. A record holds the type, the title and text, the time, and whether you have read it.

• Delivery and open receipts. The app tells us when a push notification was delivered to your phone and when you opened it, so we can measure whether notifications reach people. The data is the message ID, the event (delivered or opened), your platform, and whether the app was open, in the background or closed. It contains no notification content.
• Who delivers them. Google Firebase Cloud Messaging delivers push notifications. On iPhone, Firebase Cloud Messaging passes them to Apple's push notification service. For devices on older app versions, OneSignal still delivers them (clause 3.3).
• How long we keep them. See clause 6.
• Turning push off. You can stop push notifications in your device's settings. Your notification history in the app remains.

• Anyone, signed in or not: what you post in public communities, and your questions and answers.
• Any signed-in member: your name, photo, banner, headline, city, bio, professional and education history, skills, interests, and connection and follower counts.
• Specific people, and us: your direct messages (the recipient, and our authorised personnel only where needed to operate the service, keep members safe or comply with the law); your job applications to roles posted on CHiiRO (the member who posted the role).
• Members of that community: what you post in a private community (3.2).
• Never shown to other members: your email, phone number, date of birth, password, device and technical data, search history, reports you file and your block list.

What is posted in a private community is readable only by that community's members. If you believe you can see content that you should not be able to see, please tell us at hello@chiiro.co (see clause 9.2).

Direct messages are not sent to a third party. They are carried by a Matrix server that RooTree runs itself, on its own virtual machine in our Azure account (Central India).

City and country estimates from your connection. The approximate city and country described in clause 2 are worked out on our own servers, from a copy of the DB-IP “IP to City Lite” database. Your IP address is not sent to DB-IP or to anyone else to do this. IP Geolocation by DB-IP, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.

Processing agreements. No written data processing agreement is on record with any of the providers above.

We may disclose personal information if the law requires it, or if disclosure is necessary to investigate abuse, enforce our Terms of Use or protect someone's safety.

If CHiiRO or RooTree is acquired, merged or reorganised, personal information may transfer as part of that deal. You will be told before your information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

Wherever you live, you can ask to access, correct, download or delete your personal information. You can edit most of it yourself in the app. From version 1.0.16 you can change your analytics choice at any time in Settings → Privacy. You can turn push notifications on or off in your device's settings. You can see your recent sign-ins and devices in the Account tab, and your notifications in the Notification Centre.

You also have the right to restrict processing and to object to processing based on legitimate interests; to data portability; to withdraw consent at any time (withdrawal does not affect processing already done); and not to be subject to decisions based solely on automated processing with legal or similar effect (CHiiRO makes none). You can complain to your data protection authority or, in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

Under PIPEDA you can learn what we hold and how it is used and disclosed, access it, challenge its accuracy, withdraw consent (subject to legal or contractual limits), and challenge our compliance: first with us (1.2), then with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

You can ask to know, delete and correct your personal information. We do not sell or "share" it, and we will not treat you differently for exercising a right.

Use the in-app controls where they exist, or email hello@chiiro.co. We respond within 30 days. If a request is complex we may take longer, and we will tell you why.

• In the app: tap your profile photo (top left of Home), then the gear icon to open Settings, then Delete Account at the bottom. The app shows what will be removed. Type DELETE and confirm. Your account is hidden and you are signed out straight away. It is deleted 30 days later unless you restore it (8.2).
• On the web: chiiro.co/data-deletion explains the steps and works without the app.
• By email: write to hello@chiiro.co from the address your account uses. We will act within 30 days and confirm by email.

CHiiRO is a community where people answer each other's questions. If deleting an account erased everything it ever wrote, the answers other people came for would disappear, and conversations others took part in would have holes. So deletion removes you, not the discussion others contributed to.

Deletion happens in two steps, 30 days apart. We do not hard-delete data at either step.

When you ask.

• Your account is hidden straight away. Other members can no longer find or open your profile, and your posts show “Removed account” instead of your name and photo.
• You are signed out on every device.
• We email you the date on which your account will be deleted.
• You have 30 days to change your mind. Sign in to the app again and choose Restore. Your account comes back as it was. The Restore option is in version 1.0.17 and later; if you do not see it, update the app first.

After 30 days, if you have not restored it, your account is deleted. You can no longer sign in to it or restore it.

• Removed from the service and moved to an encrypted archive: your name, email address, phone number, date of birth and gender; photo, banner, bio and about text; work history, education, skills and interests; uploaded files and documents; connections, follows, votes and bookmarks; search history; saved locations; your sign-in credentials; and the record that links your account to everything else. The archive is not used to run CHiiRO or for any other purpose. It is kept in an encrypted archive for 7 years, then de-identified.
• Direct messages: Messages you sent stay in the conversations of the people you sent them to.
• Kept, permanently detached from you: discussions, comments, questions and answers you posted stay where they are, shown as from "a removed account", with no name, photo or link to you. This cannot be reversed.
• Your devices: push tokens are removed so nothing more is sent to your phone. A record that a device was registered is kept, without the token.
• Notifications: the personal content of your notifications (titles, text and links) is erased. Only anonymised counts are kept, for example how many notifications of a type were delivered.
• Sign-in security events: kept, with your account key, IP address, user agent, device fingerprint and approximate city and country removed when your account is deleted. Only the shape of each event remains: what happened, whether it succeeded, and when.
• Server request logs are kept when you delete your account (2.3); the identifiers in them are de-identified in place after 13 months.
• Reports you filed: kept with your identity removed, so moderation can finish.

One limit we cannot remove. Free text can identify its author even after every identifier is gone. A post that names a company, a city and a year may point to the person who wrote it. If you want a specific post gone, delete it before you delete your account.

Asking for complete erasure. If you want the archived copy of your data erased as well, email hello@chiiro.co from the address your account used. We respond within 30 days (7.5) and will tell you if the law requires us to keep anything.

We protect your information with administrative, technical and organisational safeguards suited to how sensitive it is. Depending on the type of information, these include:

• encryption of information in transit between the app, this website and our servers;
• encryption of sensitive account information when stored, and one-way hashing of passwords;
• access controls that limit who can reach our systems and your information, with that access logged; and
• regular review and improvement of these measures.

Content you choose to post publicly is visible to other members by design. No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

If you have a security question or believe you have found a vulnerability, contact hello@chiiro.co. Please do not include passwords or sign-in codes in your message.