The data controller is ПАВКО ПЕТ ДООЕЛ Битола, ул. Солунска бр. 33, 7000 Битола, Северна Македонија (tax number / ЕДБ: MK4002026580746; registration number / ЕМБС: 7946996).

For any privacy question or to exercise your rights, contact us at privacy@pawko.app or support@pawko.app.

Data you give us

• Account data: your name, your email address and your language. The website has no passwords: you sign in with a one time code we email you, or with your Google account. Where our mobile app offers a password, it is held in hashed form by our authentication provider, never by us.
• Profile data: your profile photo, phone number, city or service area and a short bio. If you are a sitter, this also includes your experience, the services and prices you publish, the languages you speak, your photos, and the details about your home and household you choose to publish: the type of home, whether there is a yard, whether it is smoke free, whether you have dogs or cats, whether children live at home and roughly what age range, whether someone is home during the day, and whether you have a car.
• Address and location data: the addresses you save, each with a precise map point and the entry directions you write. You can save more than one. A copy of the address, the map point and the directions is attached to each booking and stays on that booking. If you are a sitter, we also keep the exact address and map point of the place where you care for pets.
• Home access details: the entrance, the floor or apartment, any gate or door code, and how you hand over access (you are home, you hand over a key, a lockbox, a code, or open access). We save these on your address so you do not retype them, and we attach a copy to each booking.
• Pet data: your pet's name, species, breed, age, sex, size, behaviour, feeding, medications, allergies, vaccination status, microchip number and photos.
• Contact details of other people: to save a pet you must give us a vet's name and phone number and an emergency contact. We use them only to reach that person if something happens to your pet around a booking, and the sitter who has a booking for that pet can see them. Please tell those people that you have given us their details.
• Booking and message data: booking details, dates, special instructions, and the messages and images you exchange with other users.
• Reviews and replies: your star rating, your category ratings, whether you recommend the sitter, the review you write and, if you are a sitter, the reply you publish.
• Sitter application and screening data: the name, mobile number, city, short bio, years of experience, the species the sitter accepts, the languages they speak, their home and household details, and the services and prices they publish. Before a sitter can receive bookings, we speak with them, by video call or in person, we check their identity document during that conversation, and the sitter signs a separate written agreement with Pawko under which they undertake to provide the service. We do not keep a copy of the identity document, we do not collect references, and we do not run a criminal record check.
• Payment data: the amounts of your bookings and, if you save a card, a reference token from our payment provider together with the card brand, the last four digits and the expiry date. We never see or store your full card number.
• Payout data, for sitters only: the name as it stands on your identification document, your ЕМБГ, your address and your denar transaction account. We need these to pay you and to file the personal income tax we withhold. We enter them ourselves from the documents you show us during vetting, they are visible only to staff with finance access, and they appear only on your own payout statement and never on any document an owner receives.
• Lost and found reports: if you publish a lost pet report or report a sighting, the pet's details, your photos, the last seen location and the contact number you give.
• Support data: anything you tell us when you contact support, open a dispute or report a problem.

Data we collect automatically

• Device and request data: your IP address, your browser and device type, and the pages you request. Our hosting provider logs each request so we can operate and secure the Platform. We do not run any product analytics or behavioural tracking.
• Device identifiers: if you allow notifications, a push token for that device and a device identifier, so we can send you notifications and stop sending them to a device you no longer use.
• Cookies and similar technologies: see the Cookies section below.
• Location, only if you use a location feature and grant permission. During a handoff, the live map shows your position to the other party in that booking, and we do not store that position. Dog walk tracking is different: we do store the route on our servers, as a series of GPS points with the time and accuracy of each, the distance and duration of the walk, and a rendered image of the route. Recording continues while the app is in the background and while the phone is locked. The stored route can be seen by both parties to that booking and by our staff. These features are optional, are not available on every part of the Platform, and need your device's location permission, which you can turn off at any time. If you do not use them, or do not grant permission, we do not collect your device's location.

Data we create or receive about you

• Safety and trust records: reports other users make about you, blocks, disputes, and our decisions about your account, including whether we closed it for a breach of our Terms. A report is visible to the person who made it and to our staff. We do not show it to the person it is about, so that reporting stays safe.
• Reliability records, for sitters: a record of the sitter's late cancellations, no shows and abandoned stays, and the score we calculate from them over a rolling 90 days, measured against that sitter's own recent booking volume, so a busy reliable sitter barely moves. A higher rate lowers where the sitter appears in search and, past a threshold, hides the listing from search and sends it to our staff for review. Section 7 of our Terms sets out the weights and thresholds in full, and every sitter can see their own record on their Standing page.
• Notifications and messages we send you: the in app notifications in your feed, which carry the details of the event including the other party's name, and a record of the emails and push notifications we sent you.

We use your personal data only where we have a legal basis to do so:

• To provide the Platform: create your account, show sitter listings, enable bookings, messages and payments, and connect owners with sitters (legal basis: performance of a contract).
• To publish sitter listings and the reviews written about them, so owners can find and choose a sitter (legal basis: performance of a contract and our legitimate interest in operating the Platform).
• To process payments, calculate commission, pay out sitters and issue invoices and receipts (legal basis: performance of a contract and compliance with legal and tax obligations).
• To withhold 10% personal income tax from every sitter payout and pay it to the tax authority (legal basis: legal obligation).
• To review sitter applications and listings, hold the screening conversation and check the sitter's identity before a listing goes live, and to keep the community safe (legal basis: our legitimate interest in a safe community).
• To send you service messages about your bookings, your account and security, by email and push notification. These are on by default and you can turn them off in Settings (legal basis: performance of a contract).
• To send you alerts about pets lost near you. Owners choose to receive these; approved sitters are included by default, and anyone can turn them off in Settings (legal basis: legitimate interests, and you can object at any time).
• To count late cancellations and no shows so we can rank listings and, where necessary, hide an unreliable one from search results (legal basis: our legitimate interest in reliable service). You can ask a person to review such a decision, see Your rights below.
• To provide support and resolve disputes (legal basis: performance of a contract and legitimate interests).
• To protect sign in and the Platform against abuse and fraud, which uses your IP address and your email address (legal basis: legitimate interests).
• To monitor technical errors so the Platform keeps working, keeping the personal data involved to a minimum (legal basis: legitimate interests).
• To remember which account signed in last on this browser, so you do not have to retype your email address (legal basis: legitimate interests; the cookie is described in the Cookies section).
• To send marketing messages, where you have given consent (legal basis: consent, which you can withdraw at any time).
• To comply with the law, including tax and accounting obligations and lawful requests from the authorities (legal basis: legal obligation).

We do not sell your personal data. We share it only as much as is needed for the Platform to work:

• Between users: when you book or accept a booking, the owner and the sitter see what is needed for the service, that is the name, the photo, the relevant pet details including the vet and the emergency contact, your messages, and the address. The sitter sees the owner's exact address, the map point, the owner's entry directions and access details, including any gate code, only once they have accepted the booking, only for services where the sitter comes to the owner, and only while the booking is live. Those details stop being shown once the booking is finished or cancelled. During a handoff the other party sees your live position; for a dog walk they also see the stored route.
• Publicly, to anyone on the internet: an approved sitter's listing, with the photos, bio, household details, services and prices, and a map point offset by up to 400 metres from the actual home. Reviews are also public, each shown with a shortened form of the reviewer's name (for example Jovana M.), together with the sitter's reply. No account is needed to read any of this and search engines can index it. Images on the Platform, including profile, pet, sitter and lost and found photos, can be opened by anyone who has the direct link to the image.
• Lost and found: if you publish a lost pet report, the pet's details, your photos, the last seen location and the contact number you give are shown publicly on the board, and can be seen by people without a Pawko account, until you resolve or remove the report. We also alert users in the same city who have these alerts on.
• Our payment provider: card payments are handled by an authorised payment service provider established in North Macedonia. You enter your card on their page, not ours, so we never see or store your full card number. We pass them the amount, a booking reference, your email address and the billing name and contact details on the payment form. If you save a card, we receive back only a reference token, the card brand, the last four digits and the expiry date.
• Google, if you choose to sign in with Google: Google handles that sign in as its own controller and tells us your name and email address.
• Our staff: a small number of authorised staff can see your account, bookings, payments, reports and, where a booking used live tracking, the recorded route, so that we can provide support and handle reports and disputes. Your private messages are visible only to the two people in the conversation; our admin tools do not show their contents.
• Advertising partners: with your consent, we use the Meta (Facebook) Pixel, provided by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, to measure our advertising. When active it shares data such as your IP address, device information and actions on the Platform with Meta, which may process that data outside North Macedonia, including in the United States of America. You can give or withdraw this consent at any time from the cookie banner or from "Cookie settings" in the footer; see Meta's Privacy Policy (facebook.com/privacy/policy) for how Meta uses that data.
• Authorities and advisors: tax authorities, accountants, lawyers, courts or regulatory bodies where the law requires it, or where it is needed to protect our rights.
• Business changes: if Pawko is involved in a merger, acquisition or sale of assets, data may be transferred as part of that transaction.

Our providers

These companies process personal data on our behalf, only on our instructions and under a data processing agreement:

• A hosting, database and storage provider, which runs the Platform and holds the data described in section 2.
• An email delivery provider, which sends the emails we owe you, including your sign in code.
• Push notification services, which deliver notifications to your device.
• A mapping and address lookup provider, used when you view a map or enter an address.
• An error monitoring service, used to find and fix technical faults.
• Security and infrastructure services, used to keep the Platform available and to protect it against abuse.

Our payment provider is in North Macedonia. Most of our other providers are established outside it, mainly in the European Union and the United States of America, and process data on servers outside the country. Using the Platform therefore does mean your personal data leaves North Macedonia.

Where data is transferred abroad we rely on the standard contractual clauses agreed with each provider, or on a transfer to a country with an adequate level of protection, so that your data stays protected to the same standard. If you want a copy of the clauses we rely on, or to know where a particular provider stores your data, write to us at privacy@pawko.app and we will tell you.

We keep your personal data only as long as we need it for the purposes above. In practice, that means:

• Account, profile, pet, booking, message, review, address and access data: for as long as your account is open, and it goes when you delete your account.
• Invoices, payments and tax records: for the period accounting and tax law in North Macedonia requires, which is longer than the life of your account.
• Stored dog walk routes: they stay with the booking, and they are not removed when your account is deleted. See the section on deleting your account below.
• Safety and reliability records: reports, blocks, disputes and cancellation records stay for as long as your account is open. The reliability score only counts the last 90 days, but the underlying records are not deleted at 90 days.
• Marketing consent records: until you withdraw consent, and a short period after that so we can show when the withdrawal happened.
• Conversations you remove: removing a conversation hides it from your own inbox only. The other person keeps their copy, we keep the messages, and a new message brings the conversation back.

Apart from carrying out account deletions, we do not delete personal data on a fixed timetable. So unless this policy gives a period, treat the data as kept for as long as your account is open.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time from Settings in the app (the "Delete account" button), or by writing to us. When you ask us to delete it we lock the sign in straight away and carry out the deletion shortly afterwards, normally within 24 hours. This cannot be undone: once you confirm, you will not be able to sign in again or recover the account.

The booking and invoice records stay, because they are also the other party's records and the law requires us to keep them. What we remove is everything in them that identifies you: your name, photo, phone, city, addresses, pets and listing, the text you wrote anywhere on the Platform, and your device identifiers. A review keeps its star rating but loses your name. Your sign in email is replaced and the login is locked for good.

Some categories are kept after that:

• Invoices, payments and tax records, for as long as accounting and tax law requires.
• A minimal record that the account existed and was closed, so the other party's history stays intact and the account cannot be reopened.
• What we need to run the Platform safely and settle balances: reports and blocks, your credit, membership, referral and coupon balances, and technical logs. If we closed your account for a breach of our Terms, we keep your email so it cannot be used to register again.
• Content that also belongs to someone else: booking details copied onto past bookings, images you sent in a conversation, and notifications already delivered.
• Files you uploaded, and any route recorded during a tracked walk, are removed from the Platform but stay in our storage until we clear them.

Ask us if you want the position for a particular record.

Subject to the conditions set out in the law, you have the right to:

• Access the personal data we hold about you and receive a copy.
• Correct data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
• Erase your data (the 'right to be forgotten') where there is no overriding reason to keep it. Section 6 explains what deletion removes and what we keep.
• Restrict processing, or object to it, including to direct marketing.
• Transfer your data, that is, receive it in a structured and commonly used format.
• Withdraw consent at any time, without that affecting processing already carried out.
• Ask a person to review a decision we reached automatically, such as a sitter being hidden from search results because of cancellations or no shows.

To exercise any of these rights, write to us at privacy@pawko.app. We answer within one month. If we need longer, we will tell you why. You also have the right to file a request with the Agency for Personal Data Protection (Агенција за заштита на личните податоци, azlp.mk) if you believe your rights have been breached.

We apply technical and organisational measures to protect your data. Concretely:

• Data is encrypted in transit.
• Access to your data is controlled at every level, so a request can only reach the records it is entitled to.
• Card details are entered on our payment provider's page and never reach our systems.
• A sitter's public map point is offset by up to 400 metres from the actual home, in a direction we do not publish.
• The owner's address, entry directions and access details, including a gate code, are never on a public page. They are shown to a sitter only after they accept the booking, only for services where the sitter comes to the owner, and only while the booking is live.
• Access by our staff is limited by role, and administrative actions are recorded.
• In our mobile app, your session is held in the device's own secure storage.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot promise absolute security. Section 4 explains which of our staff can see your data, and what they cannot see. We will notify you, and we will notify the competent authority, of a personal data security breach where the law requires it.

We use cookies and similar technologies so that you do not have to sign in every time, to remember your language and your settings, to keep the Platform secure, and, if you consent, to measure our advertising. We do not use cookies for product analytics.

The cookies we set

• pawko_locale: your language. Necessary, first party, one year.
• Session cookies (sometimes split across several cookies): keep you signed in. Necessary, first party, refreshed as you use the Platform.
• pawko_last_account: which account signed in last on this browser, so we can greet you instead of asking for your email address again. It holds your account id, your email address, your name and a link to your profile photo. First party, up to 400 days.
• pawko_consent: your cookie choice. Necessary, first party, 180 days.
• pawko_mode: whether you are using the owner or the sitter view. First party, one year.
• pawko_preview: only before public launch, it remembers that this browser unlocked the preview. Necessary, first party, one year.
• _fbp and _fbc, set by Meta Platforms Ireland Limited: only if you accept marketing cookies. Third party.

pawko_last_account deserves its own line: it keeps your email address and your name on this browser for up to 400 days, and it stays there after you sign out, because being recognised on your next visit is the point of it. On a shared or public computer, choose "Not you?" on the sign in card, or clear your browser cookies, to remove it.

Your choice

The cookie banner offers two categories. Necessary cookies keep the Platform working and cannot be switched off. Marketing cookies are set only if you accept them, and they power the Meta (Facebook) Pixel from Meta Platforms Ireland Limited, which helps us measure our advertising. Accept or reject them in the cookie banner, or change your choice at any time through "Cookie settings" in the footer.

Similar technologies

We also keep a few things in your browser's own storage rather than in a cookie: your light or dark theme, whether the account sidebar is collapsed, your recent searches, your scroll position within a page, and, if you start a sitter application, a draft of that application with the details you have entered so far, so you do not lose them. These stay on your device until you clear your browser data.

You can control or delete cookies through your browser settings. Blocking the necessary cookies may cause parts of the Platform to stop working.

The Platform is for adults. Our Terms require you to be at least 18 years old. We do not ask for your date of birth and we have no way to verify your age, so we rely on you honouring that, and we act on reports: if you believe a child has created an account or given us data, contact us and we will close the account and delete the data.

One thing to be clear about, because it is the only information about children on the Platform: a sitter may choose to tell owners whether children live in their home and roughly what age range (under 5, 6 to 12, or teenagers). If a sitter fills that in, it appears on their public listing, which anyone on the internet can read, next to the approximate map point of that home. It is optional, a sitter can leave it blank or change it at any time, and we collect no other information about children.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes we will update the date on the document and, where appropriate, notify you. If you keep using the Platform after the changes take effect, that means you accept the updated policy.

Questions about this policy or your data? Write to us at privacy@pawko.app, or to ПАВКО ПЕТ ДООЕЛ Битола, ул. Солунска бр. 33, 7000 Битола, Северна Македонија.