Privacy

Your phone number is never shown to anyone

We ask for it once, to check you are a real person with a real number. That check is what keeps most fraudsters off a board like this.

It is never displayed on your profile, never included in a listing, never given to another user, and never sold. Other people see only the name you choose.

What we store

We do not ask for your date of birth, immigration status, identity documents, or bank or card numbers, and never will. We ask for an address only when something is to be delivered to it.

• Your phone number, and the date it was verified.
• A display name, and optionally a city and neighbourhood, if you enter them.
• The listings you post, including photographs you upload.
• Messages you send to other users on Sefer.
• Reports you make, and moderation decisions about your posts.
• Basic technical records needed to run the site.
• If you order through ማድረሻ or join a ቅርጫ round: the delivery address you type and its position on the map, what you ordered, the number of guests for an event, your note to the kitchen, the Zelle reference of your payment, and what you tell Sefer privately after an order ("How was it?").
• If you drive for Sefer: your vehicle, the days you can drive, your yes-or-no answers about licence and insurance, when you are Online, the deliveries you made, and the Zelle name and handle Sefer pays you at.
• If your kitchen or market sells through ማድረሻ: its permit number, address and position, menu and prices (with every price change), and the Zelle name and handle Sefer pays it at.

Who else processes it

Sefer is small and runs on other people's infrastructure. These companies necessarily handle some of your data:

Each processes data on our instructions to make Sefer work. None is given your data to use for their own purposes.

• Supabase — the database and accounts. Everything above is stored there.
• Vercel — hosting. Sees the requests your browser makes.
• Twilio — sends your verification code, and therefore receives your phone number. It also places the calls that tell a kitchen it has a new order, and staff that an order is waiting: those carry the kitchen's or staff member's number, the kitchen's name and the order code.
• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim) — receives the text of a delivery address, and nothing else about you, so that its distance from the kitchen can be measured.
• Apple, Google and Mozilla — deliver push notifications to your phone or browser if you turn them on; they see that a notification was sent, with its short text.
• Your bank and Zelle — when you pay Sefer or Sefer pays you, the payment goes through your bank's Zelle, under your bank's own privacy terms. Sefer sees the name and memo your bank shows it.
• Anthropic — screens submissions. Receives the text of a listing and its cover photo, and returns a decision. It does not receive your phone number, your name, or your messages.
• Resend — will send email notifications if you provide an email address. Not currently active.

Who sees your delivery address

The kitchen or market you ordered from, the driver Sefer assigns, and Sefer's staff — nobody else. It is never shown on a public page, and it is not written into logs or measurement.

Your phone number is not given to the kitchen or the driver. They reach you through Sefer.

What you tell Sefer privately after an order is read by Sefer's staff only, never by the kitchen or the driver. A recommendation you choose to write is public, with your display name.

About the automatic screening

Every listing is read by an automated system before it appears, and messages are scanned for known scam patterns so we can warn whoever receives them.

For listings, what is sent is the title, description, category, price, city, and the cover photograph. For messages, the check runs on our own servers against a pattern list, and the message is not sent anywhere outside Sefer.

Nobody reads your conversations for any other reason.

What is public

Your listings and the display name attached to them are visible to anyone on the internet, including search engines. Assume anything you write in a listing can be read by anyone.

Messages between you and another user are private to the two of you. An administrator can access them only where investigating a report of harm.

How long we keep it

Listings expire after 30 days and can be renewed. A deleted listing is hidden immediately and its record is kept so that a moderation decision can be explained later.

If you delete your account, your profile and listings are removed. Some records connected to reports of harm may be kept longer, because deleting them would erase the evidence of what happened to someone else.

Orders and payments through ማድረሻ and ቅርጫ are kept for as long as tax and accounting law requires, even after an account is deleted: they are the record of money Sefer received and paid out.

Cookies and measurement

One cookie, to keep you signed in. That is all we set.

We count page visits in aggregate to know whether the site is being used. That measurement is cookieless, does not identify you, and does not follow you to other websites. There is no advertising, and no advertising trackers.

Your choices

You can edit or delete any listing, and delete your account entirely, from your Account page. You can ask us what we hold about you.

You cannot remove your phone number while keeping the account, because verification is what the account is.

Law enforcement

We will provide information where the law genuinely requires it. We will not hand over information about our users voluntarily, and we do not collect immigration status, so we cannot disclose what we never asked for.

This is a draft

Sefer is new and this policy has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. It describes the system accurately as built. If anything here matters to you in a serious way, ask us and we will answer plainly.