Privacy
FriendsSale is a small, free site for selling your things to people you know. We collect as little as we can, we never sell your data, and there are no ads.
What we collect
- Your email address, to sign you in and send you sale emails (sign-in links, “you’ve been outbid”, new items, new sale passwords, and “bidding has closed”).
- Your name, if you give it when you first bid, so sellers know who’s bidding. You can change it on My stuff.
- An optional password, stored only as a one-way hash we can’t read.
- What you put in a sale: titles, descriptions, prices, photos, and the bids placed on items. By default, photos have their location and camera data (EXIF) removed before they’re stored.
- Basic usage data: page views and which items were viewed (counted with scrambled, anonymous IDs so sellers see numbers, never names), plus privacy-friendly, cookie-free site analytics.
- Security data: we briefly keep scrambled versions of IP addresses and emails to stop spam and abuse (for example, too many sign-in attempts).
Who can see what
- Sales aren’t listed or searchable. Anyone with a sale’s link can see it, unless the seller adds a password.
- People viewing a sale see items, photos and the current top bid, but not who placed it.
- The seller sees each bidder’s name, email and bid, so they can arrange pickup and payment.
- When bidding closes, each winner is emailed the seller’s email address, and the seller is emailed each winner’s name and email, so they can arrange pickup and payment.
- Link previews (when a sale link is pasted into a chat) show the sale title and a few photos. For password-protected sales they show only the title.
Services that help run FriendsSale
- Vercel hosts the site and stores sales and photos privately.
- Cloudflare handles our domain and sends our emails.
- AI providers (via Vercel’s AI Gateway): when you upload photos or list items, a small, location-free copy of the photo and the item name are sent to an AI model (currently Anthropic’s Claude) to identify the item, and the item name is used in a web search (Perplexity) to estimate a used price.
These services process data only to provide their service to us.
Cookies
We only use cookies the site needs to work: keeping you signed in, remembering that you entered a sale’s password, and an anonymous ID so a view isn’t counted twice. No advertising or tracking cookies.
Keeping and deleting your data
Sellers can delete items, photos and bids from their sales at any time. To delete your account data, or to get a copy of it, email hello@friendssale.com from the address you use here and we’ll take care of it.
Kids
FriendsSale isn’t meant for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information.
Changes
If we change this policy in a meaningful way, we’ll update the date above and note it on the site.
Contact
Questions? hello@friendssale.com