Legal

Privacy policy

Last updated 23 August 2026.

This explains what OpenTips collects, where it goes, and what you can do about it. It describes the app as it works today.

1. Who we are

OpenTips is an information service, listing platform, and progress-tracking tool for human hair care that helps you understand your hair and answer the question, "What should I do with my hair?" Through smart AI, a rich knowledge base, and a community of experts, we provide personalized insights and monitoring tools to help you make your own informed decisions. We connect you to the right products, techniques, and professionals, but the choices are always yours, to help you achieve your healthiest, most beautiful hair. All content is for educational purposes only, and we are not liable for outcomes arising from your use of the platform. OpenTips is your guiding light in the world of human hair care.

2. What we hold about you

Your account - the email address and password you register with, your display name, and your profile photo if you add one. Authentication and the database run through Amazon SES and on our database.

Your Hair DNA - curl pattern, porosity, density, scalp type and the concerns you pick. This is the profile that personalises tips, product matching and the assistant's answers.

What you record - journey and progress entries, photos you attach to them, growth measurements, care plans, reminders and favourites.

What you post - community posts, comments and reviews, with the photos attached to them. These are visible to other members by design.

If you sell or offer services - your shop name, description, banner, contact details, listings and any business details you give us for verification.

How you use the app - your settings, language, notification preferences, what you have saved, and which policy versions you have accepted and when.

3. Things that happen only on your phone

Scanning a product label. The camera text recognition that reads an ingredients list runs on your device; Apple Vision on iPhone, Google ML Kit on Android. The photo of the label is not uploaded, and the ingredient verdicts are worked out on your phone.

4. The cloud assistant

When Ask OpenTips answers using the cloud, your question, your Hair DNA, and the OpenTips articles and product entries our search matched are sent to our gateway and from there to the AI provider configured at the time, currently OpenRouter, and DeepSeek where those are enabled. Your personal information such as name, email, e.t.c are not sent except your hair DNA which goes as anonymous to help give a personalized experience to you.

Two things worth knowing:

This only happens when you send a message in Ask OpenTips. No other screen sends anything to an AI provider.
If our search found nothing relevant, we log the question so we can write the missing guidance. It is stored with your account id and is visible to our staff. Please do not put anything into the assistant you would not want us to read.

We also record, per account, how many cloud questions you have asked and roughly what they cost so we can apply your monthly allowance. That record holds counts and totals, not the text of your questions.

You can avoid using the cloud entirely by deactivating Ask OpenTips in the settins.

5. Photos

Photos you attach to a journey entry, a post, a review or your profile are uploaded to our storage and served from our database. Journey photos are private to your account; posts and reviews are visible to other members.

You can delete a photo at any time from where you added it.

6. Location and weather

Location is off by default unless you turn it on. With it on, we use your coordinates to show nearby salons and to fetch local weather, and we store the place label and coordinates with the entries you record so you can see how weather relates to your hair.

Weather comes from Open-Meteo. Depending on configuration your coordinates reach it either directly from your phone or through our server.

7. Other services the app contacts

OpenStreetMap (tile.openstreetmap.org) - map tiles on the salons map.
YouTube - tutorial videos are embedded and played from YouTube, which receives your request as any visit to YouTube would.
Google Fonts - the app's typefaces are fetched once and cached.
Apple Maps, Google Maps, Waze or Yandex - only when you tap "directions".
WhatsApp - only when you tap to contact support or a seller.

Each of these receives your IP address as part of an ordinary request but not saved in our server, only for your user experience.

8. Email

Account email - confirmations, password resets is sent through Amazon SES from noreply@opentips.net.

9. Payments

Premium subscriptions and OpenTips e-books are bought through the App Store or Google Play, under their terms. They handle the payment and tell us only that a subscription is active. We never see your card details.

10. Advertising

Adverts in OpenTips are sold and served by us from our own database. They are chosen by where they sit in the app, not by tracking you across other apps or websites.

11. Why we are allowed to hold it

To provide the service you asked for and to perform our agreement with you (your account, your Hair DNA, what you post); with your consent where we ask for it (location, notifications); and for our legitimate interests in keeping the service safe and working (moderation, security, spotting abuse).

12. Who else sees it

Our staff can see what they need to run the service, moderation queues, support conversations, seller verification, and the unanswered-question log described above. Staff access is limited by role and privileged actions are recorded in an audit log.

We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with advertisers.

13. How long we keep it

We keep your account data while your account exists. Community posts and reviews stay until you delete them or we remove them under our moderation policy. Records we must keep, a purchase, a policy acceptance, a moderation decision, are kept for as long as the law requires.

14. Your choices and rights

In the app:

More → Your data → Export my data gives you a copy of what is on your

device.

More → Your data → Delete all data clears your Hair DNA, journey logs and

settings from that device. It does not delete your account or what is stored on our servers.

Individual posts, reviews, photos and listings can be deleted where you made them.

By contacting us at opentips.net@gmail.com you can ask for a copy of the personal data we hold, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete your account and its data, object to a use, or ask us to restrict one. Tell us which you want and we will confirm what we have done.

Depending on where you live - including under the EU/UK GDPR and the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 - you may also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.

15. Where your data is held

Our servers are in the Netherlands. Model files are served through Cloudflare. AI providers, app stores and the other services named above process requests in their own regions, so your data may be handled outside your country. Where that happens we rely on the transfer protections those providers offer.

16. Children

OpenTips is for people aged 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you believe a child has given us data, write to us and we will remove it.

17. Changes

We will post any update here with a new date. When a change is material we will ask you to accept the new version in the app before you carry on.

18. Contact

Version 23 August 2026