Privacy Policy

1. What we collect

• Account: your name, email, date of birth (to confirm you are 18+), and mobile number (verified by a one-time code we text you). If you sign in with Google, we receive your name and email from Google.
• Bookings: vehicle plate, make/model, and colour, the dates and times you book, and your stated relationship to the condo (visitor / renter / owner) for building access context.
• Payments & payouts: booking amounts. Card and e-wallet payments you make are processed by PayMongo — we do not store your card details. If you receive payouts or refunds, we store the bank/GCash/Maya account details you provide solely to remit your earnings or refunds to you. Payouts and refunds are sent manually by us through the channel you choose (bank transfer, GCash, or Maya) — not through PayMongo, which only processes the payments you make. We use these details for that purpose alone.
• Owners — listings & verification: slot and building details, and the documents you upload (proof of ownership/lease, government ID, and a selfie holding that ID) so an administrator can verify your listing. To confirm the selfie belongs to the person on the ID, we compare your face in the selfie against the photo on your government ID using automated facial-recognition technology (see §4 and §7). As with bookers, we keep a one-way fingerprint (hash) of the government-ID image to detect the same ID being re-used across accounts.
• Bookers — identity verification & biometric check: a government ID and a selfie holding it, collected only when you make a repeat booking (from your second booking onward — never from a one-off visitor), so we can confirm you are a real, accountable booker and prevent abuse. To confirm the selfie is genuinely you, we compare your face in the selfie against the photo on your ID using automated facial-recognition technology. This facial comparison uses biometric data — a form of sensitive personal information — which we process with your consent, asked for at the point you submit these documents (see §3, §4, and §7). We keep a one-way fingerprint (hash) of the ID image to detect the same ID being re-used across accounts.
• Communications: the in-app chat messages on your bookings, and any refund request text and photo evidence you submit.
• Ratings & reviews you give or receive.
• Technical: standard server logs needed to operate and secure the service.

2. Why we use it (purpose)

To provide the parking marketplace: create your account, process bookings and payments, let a booker and owner coordinate a booking, verify booker and owner identity and listings — including comparing your selfie against your government ID to confirm they are the same person — handle refunds and disputes, prevent fraud and keep the service safe, send you transactional notifications, and comply with legal obligations.

3. Our legal basis

We process personal data on the bases allowed by the Data Privacy Act: your consent; because it is necessary to perform your booking (a contract); our legitimate interests in operating and securing the platform and preventing fraud; and compliance with law.

Because the selfie-to-ID facial comparison uses biometric data — sensitive personal information under the Act, we rely specifically on your consent for that check, which we request when you submit your ID and selfie. You may withdraw that consent at any time (contact our Data Protection Officer below); if you do, we may be unable to verify you and, as a result, unable to allow repeat bookings.

4. Who we share it with

• Your booking counterpart: the other party to a booking sees a shortened name (first name + last initial). To authorise physical entry, the slot owner — and, where a building requires it, its property management office — receive your full name and vehicle plate for that booking.
• Service providers who process data on our behalf: PayMongo (payments), Cloudinary (image hosting), Resend (email delivery), Semaphore (SMS delivery, e.g. your verification code), Amazon Web Services (AWS) (the facial-recognition service that compares your selfie against your ID for identity verification), and Supabase and Vercel (database and hosting).
• Authorities when required by law or to protect rights and safety.

Cross-border processing. Some of these providers process your data on servers outside the Philippines — in particular, the AWS facial-recognition service processes your ID and selfie images in Southeast Asia (Singapore). Where personal data is transferred abroad, we use providers that offer a comparable level of protection and rely on the safeguards required by the Data Privacy Act.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

5. How long we keep it (retention)

• Booking chat messages are deleted about 90 days after the booking, except where a refund or dispute is still under review, in which case they are kept until it is resolved.
• Report and dispute evidence you upload — including any government ID — is deleted about 90 days after the report or dispute is resolved; only a minimal, non-sensitive record of the outcome is kept for audit.
• Transaction and financial records are kept for as long as required by law (for example, tax and bookkeeping rules).
• Verification documents (owners): a listing’s ownership documents are kept while the listing is active and are deleted about 90 days after the listing’s yearly ownership attestation lapses without renewal (for title owners) or its sublease validity ends (for sublease holders).
• Identity documents (government ID + selfie): kept while your account is active. If your account has no activity for about 3 months it is marked Inactive, and your identity documents are then deleted about 90 days later (about six months of inactivity in total). Deletion purges the image files from our image host — not just our record of them.
• Facial comparison (biometric): the selfie-to-ID check is a one-time, in-memory comparison. Our provider (AWS Rekognition CompareFaces) runs a stateless operation: it processes the two images to return a match score and does not persist or store the image bytes after the request completes. On our side we keep only the numeric match score — never a facial template, map, or any re-usable biometric identifier.
• Account information is kept while your account is active; an account unused for about 3 months is marked Inactive, and its identity documents are deleted as described above.

When personal data is no longer needed for its purpose, we delete or anonymise it.

6. How we protect it

We use encrypted connections (HTTPS), access controls that limit each user to their own bookings, database row-level security, and one-time-code verification of mobile numbers. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable and appropriate safeguards as required by the DPA.

Secure deletion. When personal data reaches the end of its retention period, we delete it from our active systems — including purging the stored files from our image host, not merely our record of them. Any residual copies within our routine, encrypted database backups are overwritten as those backups rotate — within about 7 days (our database provider retains automated daily backups for 7 days on our current plan).

7. Automated identity checks & human review

To verify a booker’s identity we use an automated facial comparison (described above) that produces a similarity score. Where the score is clearly high, your identity may be approved automatically, so you can book again without waiting. Where it is lower, unclear, or cannot be computed, a member of our team reviews your ID and selfie and decides. Owners’ documents are always reviewed by a person — the score is only an aid.

You have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing where it significantly affects you. You may ask for a person to review an automated approval or rejection, express your view, and contest the outcome — contact our Data Protection Officer below.

8. Your rights

Under the Data Privacy Act you have the right to be informed, to access your data, to correct it, to object to or withdraw consent, to erasure or blocking, to data portability, to damages, and to lodge a complaint with the National Privacy Commission (privacy.gov.ph). To exercise any of these, contact our Data Protection Officer below.

9. Cookies & sessions

We use a session cookie to keep you signed in. We do not use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

10. Children

Parqo is not directed at children under 18 and we do not knowingly collect their personal data.

11. Changes

We may update this policy; the date at the top shows the latest version. Material changes will be notified in the app.

12. Contact — Data Protection Lead / Interim Data Protection Officer

Our Data Protection Officer function is currently led by Jennie Estrada (Founder, Parqo) as interim Data Protection Officer / Data Protection Lead. Contact: privacy@parqo.ph [add a mailing address / phone before public launch].

As an early-stage startup we are still formalising this role: we are seeking legal guidance and will designate and, where required, register a Data Protection Officer with the National Privacy Commission (privacy.gov.ph). You may also lodge a complaint with the Commission directly.