- Your phone number is never shown to other users. Not on your signal, not in chat, not anywhere. Messaging is in-app precisely so you never have to hand it out.
- Browsing never puts you on the map. Nobody can see you until you deliberately post something.
- We keep one point — your latest position — while the app is open with location on, so proximity alerts can tell what is actually near you. It is overwritten each time, never a trail, and never shown to anyone. Turn location off and we keep none of it.
- A rider on a job is the one exception. While a rider is doing your errand, you see exactly where they are, so you know when your things will arrive. Only that job's customer sees it, and it is erased the moment the job ends.
- Asking a rider shares your errand with riders, not the public. The map shows the kind of errand and your fare. The addresses, names and notes you type go only to approved riders near you, and then only to the rider you choose.
- By default your position is blurred by about 100 metres before anyone else sees it.
- Your Circle is private and opt-in. The contacts and groups you approve can see your presence only when you deliberately start sharing, at the detail you choose — and no stranger ever sees any of it.
- A place's contact number is never sent to anyone's browser, and nothing in the app dials it.
- Emergency broadcasts reach you by area, not by identity. They use the same single position your alerts use — and the organisation that sent one is never told who received it.
- Directions are worked out by an outside routing service. When you ask for a route, it is sent your starting point and the destination — nothing else about you.
- Photos are stripped of hidden GPS data before we store them.
- We do not sell your data, and we do not run ads against it.
- Sponsor banners depend only on roughly where you are. A business can sponsor the whole country or just its own region, province, city or neighbourhood. To pick the banners for your area, the app sends our server your approximate location (to about 100 metres) without your account, and nothing else about you is used. When you tap one we count the tap without recording who you are.
- You can delete your account from Settings any time, and ask us to erase your data.
Giggora is a hyperlocal community platform operating in Naga City, Philippines. In the language of the Data Privacy Act of 2012 (RA 10173), we are the personal information controller for the data described here.
Questions, requests, or complaints: support@giggora.com
- Your mobile number. This is your identity on Giggora and how we verify you are a real person, by one-time code. It is never displayed to other users.
- A display name. This can be a trade name, a stall name, or a nickname — it does not have to be your legal name.
- Optionally: an email address and password (an alternative way to sign in), and a profile picture.
- What you wrote — the title, description, price note, category, and the emoji or photo you chose.
- The location you are broadcasting from, subject to your privacy setting below.
- How far away you are willing to be contacted from.
- Messages you send and receive through Giggora.
- Alerts you set up — the keyword and/or category you asked to be told about, and the radius you chose. For a place alert, the place you picked, or the words you typed ("gas", "Jollibee").
- When a place alert goes off — a note in your notifications of which place you came near and roughly how close. Explained under Location below.
- What you search for with Find Nearest, and the point you search from — used to answer the search, and not saved to your account.
- Your most recent position, while the app is open with location on. One point, overwritten each time, never shown to anyone — it is how we work out whether an alert is genuinely near you. Explained in full below.
- Your Circle — the contacts and groups you add or join, and, only while you are actively sharing your presence, a short-lived log of your position (kept about 48 hours). Covered in full below.
- A notification token, only if you turn on notifications. It identifies the browser, not you.
- Referral information — the code you joined with, if any, and the code you share.
- A trust score and community points, calculated from your activity on Giggora.
Two checks run on what you post publicly. Both are plain automated rules — no profiling, no advertising, no machine learning on your content, and neither one touches your private messages.
- A category word check. When you post, we compare the words in your title and description against a fixed list of trade words for each category, to catch a listing filed in the wrong place. If a post is held for review because of this, we store a short note of which words triggered it so the reviewer can see why — and that note is cleared once the post is approved.
- A content screen for the things listed in the Terms, using the same fixed-rule approach.
Neither is used to build a picture of you, and no decision either makes is final — a person reviews anything that gets held, and you can edit or delete the post yourself at any time.
- Which listing, which account asked, the number checked, and whether it matched. Attempts that fail are kept too — that record is how we notice someone probing at listings that are not theirs.
- A one-time code is texted to the number the place is registered under. It is stored hashed, never as plain text, and erased as soon as it is used, expires, or the attempt is closed.
- We never show you the number on file for a place, whether your attempt succeeds or fails.
- If you ask a rider: the details you type — what to buy, bring or fetch, where, the pick-up and drop-off places, who receives it, a note, what the items cost and who pays first, when, and your fare offer. Also the offers riders send you, the rider you choose, and each step of the job.
- If you apply to ride: your motorcycle, its colour, its plate number, the services you do, and, if you add one, a photo of you with the motorcycle. Also the admin's decision, and the reason if your application needs a change.
- While you do a job as a rider: your position, sent from your phone while you have Rider open, so the customer can follow the delivery. Explained under Location below.
- The receipt, when a rider spends money for you: the amount, and the photo if the rider took one.
- Ratings: the stars and the optional comment that a customer and a rider give each other after a delivery.
This is the part worth reading properly, because it is the part people assume the worst about.
Giggora reads your location only while the app is open: while you are using the map and, if you use Rider, while you have the Rider page open. There is no background tracking, and closing the app ends it.
If you are only looking at the map, no other user can see you and nothing about you appears on the map. You are invisible until you deliberately post something.
While the app is open with location on, we keep one point — your latest position — against your account. This is what makes a proximity alert honest: to tell you a tricycle is within 300 metres of you, we have to know roughly where you are. Without it we would either alert you about things across the city or not at all.
- It is a single point that gets overwritten, not a history or a trail. We cannot reconstruct where you have been.
- It is never shown to another user and never sent to anyone's browser. It is only read on our server to answer "is this near them?"
- The 100-metre blur below is about what other people see. Nobody sees this point, so it is not blurred — we keep it as accurate as your phone reported it. Blurring a figure nobody ever looks at would only make your own alerts wrong.
- Set location to Area and we store no position at all. Turn location off and the same applies.
- It is only updated once you have stayed put for about 15 seconds — never while you are moving — so it does not become a record of your journey.
- It is erased when your account is erased.
The trade-off is simple and worth stating plainly: no stored position means no proximity alerts. If you would rather we did not keep it, turn location off — everything else in Giggora still works.
Everything on this page about your position never being shown has one deliberate exception. When you ride for someone through Rider, the customer of that job sees where you are on a small map, so they know when their things will arrive and can tell if something has gone wrong.
- Only that job's customer sees it: no other user, no other rider, and not the public map.
- Only while the job is running. It starts when the customer chooses you. The moment the job ends (delivered, cancelled, or dropped by you), the position is erased.
- One point, overwritten: your latest position, never a record of your route. A position more than 10 minutes old is not shown at all.
- It is exact, not blurred, because a customer waiting at the gate needs to know where you really are.
- It is sent only while you have Rider open: about every 15 seconds while you move, and once a minute when you stand still. Close it and the updates stop; your customer then sees how long ago your position was last updated.
Remembering where you are is not the same as showing it. When you post a signal, you are deliberately telling your neighbours where to find you — that is the entire point. That location is stored with the signal and shown on the map until you shelve or delete it, subject to the precision setting below.
Rider works the same way. A request for a rider is a post, placed where you are when you send it. Going live as a rider is a post too: your rider pin follows you while you have Rider open, and comes off the map when you go offline, or after four hours.
This changed on 27 August 2026, and it is worth reading even if you skip the rest. The map used to show you only what was near you, and the distance you set when posting decided who could see your pin at all. Now anyone can pan the map anywhere in the country and see every signal and place on it, including yours.
The distance you set has not stopped mattering — it moved. It now decides who is allowed to message or call you. Somebody outside it can look at your pin, read your description and get directions, but the app will not let them open a conversation with you, and the server refuses it rather than merely hiding the button. If you set 2 km because you only serve your own barangay, that is still exactly what it does.
What did not change: the precision setting below still decides how exact the published location is, and the blur still applies before anyone sees it. Browsing still puts nothing about you on the map. If you would rather not be visible at a distance at all, shelve or delete the signal — that removes the pin everywhere.
- Approximate (the default) — we shift your position by roughly 100 metres before anyone sees it. Close enough to find your street, not close enough to find your door.
- Precise — your exact pin. Useful for a fixed stall or shop.
- Area — your barangay only.
Change this any time in Settings → Location & Privacy. It applies to everything you post from then on.
To be clear about how this fits with the point above: this setting decides what other people see. The single position we remember for your alerts is not shown to anyone, so the blur does not apply to it — except on Area, where we simply do not keep one.
Phone cameras quietly write GPS coordinates into photo files. When you upload a picture, we re-encode it and that hidden data is discarded — we never store your original file. A photo you post cannot give away where it was taken.
To find the nearest ATM or pharmacy, the app sends our server your current position — or the middle of the map, if location is off — and what you searched for. We use them to answer, and do not save them to your account. Your last few searches are kept on your phone only.
To draw a route — for Find Nearest or Get Directions — your phone asks an outside routing service, OSRM, for the road between two points: your current position and the destination. That is all it is sent. It is not told who you are, though like any website it sees your connection's IP address.
An alert for a place, or for words like "gas" or "Jollibee", is matched on your phone. Our server tells it which places the words mean around the point you are passing — without keeping that point — and your phone works out the distance itself.
When an alert goes off, your phone tells us, and we add it to your notifications: which place you came near and roughly how close, so it is there if you missed the banner. That note says you were near a particular place at a particular time, so we treat it as personal data — only you can see it, and it is erased when your account is erased.
- Your messages are stored on our server so your conversation history is there when you come back, and so we can act on reports of abuse.
- They are not end-to-end encrypted. We are telling you plainly rather than implying a protection we do not provide. Do not send passwords, card numbers, or anything you would not want reviewed if the other person reports you.
- Our real-time system is told only that a message arrived — never what it said.
- Messages are not automatically deleted. Blocking someone stops them reaching you; it does not erase what was already sent.
- We do not read your messages routinely. We look only when someone reports a specific conversation, or where the law requires it.
With Rider you can ask a motorcycle rider near you to buy, fetch or deliver something, or apply to be one. A job puts two people who have never met in touch with each other's errand, so this section says exactly what each of them sees.
- On the public map, your request is a pin showing the kind of errand, a short summary of what it is, and your fare offer. It is placed like any of your posts, blurred by your precision setting. A Pasurprise says only "a surprise delivery".
- The details are shown only to approved riders who do that service and are within reach of your request, so they can decide whether to take it. That means the full list, where to buy, the pick-up and drop-off places as you typed them, who receives it, your note, the cost and who pays first, and the time. They also see your display name and how other riders have rated you.
- Once you choose a rider, the request leaves the map and other riders are no longer shown it. If that rider drops the job, it is shown to riders again until you choose another.
- Your application (motorcycle, colour, plate number, services and optional photo) is checked by a Giggora admin, who also sees whether your number is verified and how long you have been a member.
- When you go live, your rider pin is public like any post. It shows your display name, the services you do, your motorcycle, its colour and its plate number, so customers can recognise you.
- Every offer you send reaches the customer as a chat message with your price, how soon you can be there, your motorcycle and your plate.
- The customer who chooses you sees your display name, motorcycle, colour and plate, your photo if you added one, your rating, and how many jobs you have done. While the job is running they also see where you are, as explained under Location above.
- Use what you learn about a customer only for that job. That includes their name, their address, and who receives the parcel. Do not save it, pass it on, or use it to contact them about anything else. Misusing it breaks our Terms and can break the law.
- Steps and the receipt. The rider marks each step: bought or picked up, on the way, delivered. When the rider spends money for you, they can add the receipt amount and a photo of the receipt, and both of you can see them. Like every photo, the receipt is stripped of hidden location data.
- Money never passes through Giggora. If you agree to pay by GCash, the number you exchange in the chat is stored with your messages like anything else you write there.
- Ratings. After a delivery you each give the other one to five stars and, if you like, a short comment. Your average and your number of jobs are shown to the riders or customers you deal with later. The comment goes only to the person you rated.
- Share details works on your phone. It passes the rider's name, motorcycle, plate and the job's current step to whoever you pick in your phone's share menu. Giggora does not send it anywhere.
- Report a problem sends the job's conversation to Giggora's team, who read it in order to act on the report.
Circle is a separate, private layer from the public map. The public map is about strangers and vendors nearby; Circle is about the specific people you have added and who have accepted — family, close friends, a regular driver. Nothing in Circle is ever public, and no stranger on the map can see any of it.
Being someone's Circle contact does not by itself let them see you. You become visible only when you start a sharing session yourself, and each time you choose:
- Who — all your trusted contacts, one specific group, or nobody's map at all (status only).
- How much detail — see the next part.
- For how long — 30 minutes, a couple of hours, or until you stop it. Any session can be stopped instantly, and one Stop all sharing control ends everything at once.
- Status only — whether you are online, moving, idle or offline, and roughly when you were last seen. No location at all. This is the lightest option, and for many people the only one they will ever use.
- General area — a coarse location, roughly a kilometre across.
- Approximate — within about 100 metres.
- Precise — your exact position, for someone you fully trust.
The detail a contact sees is set by the session you started (and, for a group, by that group's setting). A contact never sees more than the level you chose to broadcast to them, and a status-only session shares no coordinates whatsoever.
- While a session is active and the app is open, Giggora records your position from time to time so your contacts can see you move. This presence log is kept for about 48 hours and then deleted automatically — a short rolling window, not a permanent trail.
- It updates only while the app is open and a session is running. Close the app or stop the session and the updates stop; contacts then see your last position with a "last seen" time until the session ends.
- The people you are sharing with can see you on a small Circle map and in a glanceable status list — only those specific people, and only at the precision you chose.
- Stop anytime — end one session or all of them in a tap. Timed sessions also end on their own.
- Hide my status (Settings → Location & Privacy) is a master switch: turn it on and you disappear from your entire Circle at once, whatever sessions were running.
- Remove a contact and they can no longer see you. Block them and they can neither see you nor send you a new request.
- You can create groups — a family, a convoy, a meetup — and share your presence with the whole group at once, at the group's chosen detail.
- Sending or accepting a contact request or a group invitation may send the other person a notification, if they have notifications turned on. The notification says who and what, not your location.
A Broadcast is a public notice from a verified local organisation — a flood warning, a road closure, a vaccination schedule. When one is posted, we work out who is nearby and notify them. This section says exactly what that uses.
We compare the broadcast's location against your latest position — the single point described above, the same one proximity alerts use. Nothing new is collected for this, and no new permission is asked for.
- If you have never used the map with location on, you cannot receive one. We simply do not know where you are, and we do not guess from your phone number, your signals, or anything else.
- We use a position up to about three days old for broadcasts — longer than for ordinary alerts, because someone whose phone last reported from a barangay two days ago most likely still lives there and a water interruption still concerns them.
- Your position is never sent to the organisation that broadcast. They are shown a rounded estimate of how many people are in range — "about 400" — never a number that could identify anyone, never a list, and never a map of who received it.
So that a broadcast can be shown as read or unread, and so we can answer "was this actually delivered?" after an incident, we keep one row per recipient per channel: which broadcast, which channel, how far away you were, when it was sent, and whether you have opened it.
- Only the most serious alerts — fire, flood, evacuation, earthquake — can send an SMS, and only if a verified organisation has been permitted to. Everything else is in-app and push only.
- SMS goes only to numbers that have been verified by one-time code. Your number is passed to our SMS provider solely to deliver that message.
- You can turn broadcast SMS off in Settings at any time. In-app and push notices are unaffected.
Some categories — a missing person, for instance — would publish details about somebody who has not consented, and possibly their photograph. These are switched off by default. Where they are ever enabled, they are restricted to police or an official spokesperson, must carry a case or blotter reference, expire quickly, can be taken down in one step, and any photograph is deleted from our storage when the notice ends — not merely hidden.
- Your signals and places: what you wrote, your category, your icon, and your location as governed by your setting above.
- What you write on the neighbourhood wall — shown as a chat bubble, with your display name, to anyone looking at that part of the map.
- Your display name and trust score.
- If you ride: your rider pin while you are live, showing your services, motorcycle, colour and plate number. If you ask a rider: the kind of errand, a short summary and your fare.
- Your messages.
- The details of a rider request: the places, names and notes you typed, and the cost. After you choose, only that rider sees them.
- The customer sees the rider's name, motorcycle, plate, photo, rating, the steps, the receipt and, while the job is running, the rider's position.
- The rider sees the customer's name, their rating, and the job's details.
- Your alerts, and your notifications — including where a place alert went off.
- The list of your recent Find Nearest searches, and whether you have the chat bubbles switched off — both kept on your phone only.
- Your mobile number, your email, and your password.
- A place's contact number. Even for shops and stalls, the number on the listing is not sent to anyone's browser and there is no button that dials it. It stays on our server, where it is used to check ownership when someone claims the place or asks for it to be taken down — and, once the place is claimed, to text its owner that a message is waiting in Giggora.
- Your stored position. The point we keep for your alerts is never shared, shown, or sent to another device. A rider's position during a job is a separate thing, shown only to that job's customer (see Location).
- Your online/offline status and, if you chose to share it, your location — at the precision you set (status only, general area, approximate, or precise). Visible only to the contacts or group members you are actively sharing with, and only while a session is running. See Circle above.
There are two ways that happens.
Many shops, offices and landmarks on Giggora come from OpenStreetMap, the free map of the world that volunteers build. We copied what it already published: the name, the kind of place, where it is, its opening hours, and — where OpenStreetMap listed one — a mobile number. These went on the map without being reviewed one by one.
A number that came from OpenStreetMap is treated like any other listing's: never shown to anyone, and used only to check who is claiming the place or asking for it to be taken down.
An encoder may have put a vendor or a place on the map on someone's behalf — that is how we get a neighbourhood started before everyone has the app. Those listings were made with the vendor's consent, recorded at the time.
- You can claim it by signing up with the mobile number it was registered under, and it becomes yours to edit or remove.
- You can also take it down yourself — see below.
- If it has no number on file, or none of that works, email support@giggora.com and we will correct or remove it.
Open the place on the map and tap Take Down. You give a reason and the contact number for that place. Proving it is yours takes two steps, because simply knowing a shop's number is not the same as owning it — that number is often on the signboard.
- 1. The number must match. We compare what you typed with the number already on the listing, on our server. We never reveal the stored number — we only ever answer match or no match.
- 2. You must receive a text. We send a 6-digit code by SMS to that number, and you enter it back. That proves you actually hold the phone, not just that you read it somewhere.
- Only after both steps does the listing come off the map — immediately, with no waiting on us.
What we keep, and why:
- Your request — the reason, the number you entered, and your account — so there is a record of who removed what, and so we can spot abuse.
- The SMS code is stored hashed, never as plain text, is tied to that one request, and is deleted once used or expired. It cannot be used to sign in to anything.
- Your mobile network can see that we sent you a message, as with any SMS.
- One request per place per day (and a small daily limit overall). This stops the check being used to guess a number, and stops anyone making us text a business repeatedly.
- If the place has no number on file, or somebody has already claimed it, we cannot verify you this way — use Report, or email support.
Giggora shows banners from businesses that sponsor it, in the Nearby and Trending lists. Each sponsor chooses who sees its banner: the whole country, or only its region, province, city, or a few kilometres around its place. So the banners you see depend on roughly where you are, and on nothing else — not your profile, not what you do in the app — and sponsors never receive your data.
- How your location is used for this. When your location is on, the app sends our server your position rounded to about 100 metres, without your account or login, so it can pick the banners for your area. It is used only for that choice: it is not saved to your account or to any record of what you saw, and sponsors never see it. With location off, you see only the banners shown nationwide.
- Tapping a banner opens the sponsor's website in your browser. That website sees your visit as it would any other, and its own privacy policy applies there.
- We count how many times each banner is tapped. The count is only a number: it does not record who tapped or where they were.
We do not sell your personal data to anyone. We do not share it for advertising. A small number of services make the app work:
- Cloudflare — every connection to Giggora passes through its network, which speeds the app up and blocks attacks. It sees your IP address and what the app asks our server for.
- Google Firebase — carries the "something changed" nudge that keeps the map live. It is told an event happened, not what was in it.
- OpenStreetMap — supplies the map images your device draws, so it sees which part of the map you are looking at (not who you are). Many place listings come from it too — see above.
- OSRM, a public routing service — works out the road when you ask for a route. It is sent the start (your position) and the destination, nothing else.
- Our SMS provider — delivers the texts Giggora sends: one-time codes, a note to a claimed place's owner that someone has messaged it, and broadcast texts if you allow them. It is given the number and the message.
- Your browser's notification service (Google, Apple, Mozilla) — delivers notifications, if you turned them on.
- Our hosting provider — stores the database the app runs on.
We will also disclose data where the law genuinely requires it — a valid court order or lawful request.
- Your account and what you posted — until you delete them. See the note below for what deleting an account does.
- Messages — kept as your history; see above.
- Contact records (that someone tapped to reach you) — about 90 days.
- Your Circle presence log (the position updates recorded while you are actively sharing) — kept about 48 hours, then deleted automatically.
- Ended Circle sessions (the record that you shared) — cleared after about 30 days.
- Your most recent position — a single point that is overwritten every time it updates, so there is only ever one. Erased with your account.
- A rider's position during a job — only the latest point is ever kept, and it is erased the moment the job ends.
- Rider requests and jobs — the details, the offers, each step, the receipt and the ratings — kept as the record of the job, so that a problem can still be looked into later. Erased with your account.
- Rider applications — kept, with the admin's decision, for as long as you ride. Erased with your account.
- Notifications, including the note that a place alert went off — kept in your list until your account is erased.
- Take-down requests — kept as the record of who asked for a listing to be removed and why.
- Claim attempts — kept the same way, successful or not, as the record of who tried to take over which listing.
- Review notes on a held post (the words that triggered the check) — cleared when the post is approved. If a post is declined, the reason is kept with it, because that is the answer to "why is this gone?".
- Broadcast delivery records (that a notice was sent to you, on which channel, and whether you opened it) — about six months after the broadcast ends. The broadcast itself, and the total number of people it reached, are kept as a public record.
- One-time codes — deleted within a day. Each one stops working after 10 minutes.
Philippine data privacy law gives you the right to:
- Know what we hold about you and why.
- Access a copy of it.
- Correct anything wrong — most of it you can edit yourself in Settings.
- Erase or block it, subject to what the law requires us to keep.
- Object to how we process it.
- Damages, if you are harmed by misuse of your data.
Email support@giggora.com and we will respond. If we do not resolve it, you may complain to the National Privacy Commission (privacy.gov.ph).
- Traffic between your phone and Giggora is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
- Passwords, where you set one, are stored hashed — we cannot read them.
- Access to the live database is restricted.
No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise. If a breach ever affects you, we will tell you and the National Privacy Commission as the law requires.
Giggora is not intended for children under 13. If we learn that we hold a child's data without proper consent, we will delete it. If you believe a child has signed up, tell us at support@giggora.com.
Giggora is young and still changing. When we change how data is handled, we will update this page and the date below. If a change is significant — new data collected, or a new purpose — we will tell you in the app rather than quietly editing this page.
See also the Terms & Conditions and Help & FAQ.
What changed: a section on Rider — who sees your request, what a rider's pin shows, and the one exception to your position never being shown: while a rider does a job, its customer sees where the rider is, until the job ends. On 27 September: sponsor banners can be local, so the app uses your approximate location, and nothing else, to pick them. On 25 September: Find Nearest and directions, place alerts, places from OpenStreetMap, the services we use, and what deleting an account actually does.
Giggora · Naga City, Philippines · support@giggora.com