Privacy Policy — VendMe

Last updated: 2026-09-16

1. Who we are

VendMe ("we", "the app") is a B2B wholesale marketplace connecting suppliers, distributors, and retailers in the fresh-produce sector. Operated by VENDME LTD, Israel. Contact: office@vendme.net.

2. Information we collect

• Account & identifiers: name, verified email, verified phone number, user role/type, user ID. When you sign in with Google/Apple, the identifier and email they provide.
• Business details: business name, business/tax registration number, business address and branches, opening hours, specializations, logistics details (vehicle type, delivery days, coverage areas). Some of these are visible to other users as part of marketplace activity (see section 3).
• Profile & business content: product catalog, listings, deals, and orders.
• User-generated content: chat messages, photos and videos, voice messages, posts, comments, ratings, and digital signatures on agreements.
• Calls — recording & transcription: in-app voice and video calls are automatically recorded (audio only) and transcribed to document the deal and show a transcript to call participants. Video is not recorded. The recording is used solely to produce the transcript and is deleted once transcription completes; transcripts are kept as part of the conversation record, available to both parties. Chat voice messages are likewise transcribed and the transcript is stored with the message.
• Signature evidence: when you sign a digital agreement we record your IP address, device/browser identifier (user agent), timestamps, and an action log, and embed these in the signed document, which the counterparty can download and share. The document does not include your phone number or business address. Server logs and error reports may include IP addresses.
• Identity documents (collateral/credit agreement signing only): a photo of an ID document, business stamp, and company registration deed — collected only if you choose to sign such an agreement, stored in access-restricted storage (no public access) and available only to the agreement's parties.
• Business verification ("verified business"): a condition for performing commercial actions in the Service and for using its commercial areas — among others publishing, writing a public comment on another user's content, sending a friend request, uploading images to your profile gallery, rating and writing a review, starting a conversation, and purchasing a subscription — and not a condition for using the Service; the feed, search, market prices and the supplier directory are open before verification is completed as well. The full list of actions and areas requiring verification appears in the Terms of Use. A request includes your business name, business/tax registration number, an optional free-text note, and, optionally, up to six images: a dealer certificate (תעודת עוסק מורשה) or a companies-registry extract, and/or photos of your business. We do not ask you to upload a national ID card; note that for a sole proprietor the business registration number is the owner's national ID number. Images are held in access-restricted storage, visible only to you and to VendMe administrators reviewing the request, and are never sent to any third party (no OCR, no AI, no external verification vendor).
• Inviting a supplier who is not yet a user: if you invite a supplier, you enter their phone number and optionally their name. We do not store the phone number itself — only a one-way keyed hash (HMAC) of it, its last four digits, and the name you entered. It is used solely to prevent the same supplier being invited twice and to credit the join to the inviter. The invitation is sent from your own device through whichever sharing app you choose — VendMe does not message the invitee. After 90 days the invite stops blocking that number, but the record is retained; you may request its deletion at office@vendme.net.
• Location: coarse/precise location (with permission, while-in-use only) for address autofill, showing suppliers and distributors near you, and marking pickup/dropoff points for transports. If you use "my location" during onboarding, your coordinates are saved to your profile and shown to other users only in approximate (~1 km) form; a precise pickup/dropoff point you set on a transport request is stored on the request and shown to the carrier and involved parties.
• Media & device permissions: camera and photo library (to upload images and for video calls) and microphone (voice messages and calls).
• Device & notifications: push notification tokens and the device platform (Android/iOS) to deliver notifications. We do not collect advertising identifiers and do not fingerprint devices.
• Third-party contact details: if you name a related party (e.g. your marketer's phone number), it is used to link or invite that account.
• Usage & diagnostics: in-app usage events (screen views and key actions), crash/error reports, and a referral code if you joined via an invite link.
• Marketing consent: we record the consent you gave — or did not give — to receive marketing updates and offers, together with the time it was given. No record counts as no consent. You can change this at any time in notification settings.
• Reporting a technical issue: if you choose to attach a screen recording to a report: on Android the recording is made at the operating-system level and not only inside the app — meaning it captures everything shown on the device screen, including other apps, so we recommend closing anything you do not want to share before you start. On iPhone the operating system records the VendMe screen only, and other apps do not enter the recording. The recording or the screenshot is sent to access-restricted storage together with your device model, operating-system version, and app version. To complete the report, each attachment is given a signed link valid for seven days, embedded in the WhatsApp message you send us — so the message and the links travel through WhatsApp, and anyone the message reaches can open them during that period.
• User guidance: if you approved a guidance request (see section 7), we store the request id, who requested it, the reason they recorded, the times of the request, the approval and the end, and the list of elements highlighted for you on screen together with the text the team wrote beside them. The content of your screen is not stored and is not viewed.
• Handwritten signature: when you sign a deal or an agreement you draw your signature on the screen. We store the signature strokes as drawn and show them to the counterparty — in the signed document and on the deal card in the app. In a group deal, your signature and your name are also visible to the other participants in that deal.
• Contact form: if you leave your details in the contact form — on the website or in the app, with or without an account — we store your name, phone number, the subject of the enquiry and the free text you wrote; the website join form also stores the line of business you selected. The details reach the VendMe team so we can get back to you, and they are retained even if you never registered.

Temporary content ("stories") and views of it: an image or video you post as a story is stored by us in private storage and displayed for 24 hours. We also record who viewed each story and when — the record is surfaced to the story's author as a view count, and is retained by us after the content disappears from display.

3. What other users can see

• Business profile: every signed-in user of the service — including users from other sectors — sees your name, business name, city/region, bio, gallery, catalog, ratings and reviews (including reviewer names), activity statistics (completed orders, cancellations), join date, availability, and approximate (~1 km) location.
• Contact details: your phone number and WhatsApp link are not exposed to any other user — not even to a counterparty in a deal, order, or transport. Contact stays inside the app (chat and calls), and only you and VendMe administrators can access them. Your business address and website are shared with a counterparty in a shared deal, order, or transport for the purpose of performing it, and with any signed-in user only if you yourself enable that field's toggle in the profile editor; both toggles are off by default.
• New members: upon completing onboarding, a "welcome" card with your profile details appears in the sector feed for about 30 days.
• Sharing by others: a contact card shared in a chat carries name, role, and region only — no phone number. Users can also share signed documents outside the app.
• Media at public URLs: photos and videos attached to posts, listings, and profile galleries are stored at publicly reachable URLs — anyone with the link can view them without logging in.
• Browsing without an account: without registering and without signing in, a visitor can view a limited, filtered selection of the service's content: offer and surplus listings and available catalog items from verified businesses; business directory listings that are approved and either hold an active plan or belong to a government category; and business ads that are approved, whose publication period is currently running, and whose underlying business listing is itself approved and holds an active plan — together with their category names. The listings, catalog items and directory entries are served from dedicated public views that carry no contact-detail fields, but they do identify the publisher: the business name (or, failing that, the display name), its role and its region on listings; the seller's name, city and region on catalog items; and the business name, tagline and city on directory entries. In offer and surplus listings — in both the title and the body — and in catalog item descriptions, email addresses and Israeli phone numbers that are detected are masked automatically; this is best-effort masking, not a guarantee, and it does not apply to other fields, including publisher names and item names. On business directory entries and business ads there is no masking at all: the business name, tagline, ad headline, ad body and highlight lines are published exactly as written. In addition, wholesale market prices and the category, sector and role lists are also viewable without an account. The rest of the service's content requires a registered account, and the only action possible without an account is leaving your details in the contact form — on the website and in the app alike.

4. How we use information

To provide and operate the service (account, feed, catalog, deals, chat, calls, notifications); to secure the platform and prevent fraud; to support users; and to improve the product. We do not sell personal information and we do not track users across other apps or websites for advertising.

Competition-law compliance screening. In addition to the pre-publication screening described below, text in group conversations and the community forum is reviewed automatically and periodically by an AI model operated by Anthropic, which reads a limited window of the conversation — the new messages and a few preceding messages for context — even when no listed expression matched. The text is sent without names, user ids, or a conversation id, and each speaker is represented only by a letter alongside their role. While you type in a group, forum, or comment box, your draft may be sent for the same check to show a warning before it is sent; the draft is not stored, creates no record, and does not block sending. In this Anthropic path, private 1:1 chats and deal chats are not scanned, and neither are voice messages, images, or video. Only when a match is found is an excerpt of up to 500 characters retained, together with the user id and matched expressions, in an internal record visible only to VendMe administrators. The check may lead to enforcement action.

OpenAI pre-publication screening. Every supported item of public content that you ask to publish is checked automatically before publication. The screening applies to the general chat, public groups and discussions, Stories, posts and comments, products and volume deals, business listings and business ads, public profiles and galleries, ratings, and distributor products. Depending on the surface, text, images, video, and audio are checked. In public chats, the message text, attached media, and a limited window of preceding messages may be sent for context. For video, VendMe/Supabase infrastructure produces a WAV audio file, a poster image, and frames sampled across the video: the audio file is sent to OpenAI for transcription, and the transcript, sampled frames, poster image, and limited technical information, such as video duration and frame timestamps, are then sent for classification. For a voice message, the audio file is sent for transcription and the transcript for classification. A hashed account safety identifier is also attached to each classification request. The full MP4 file is not sent to OpenAI. Content classified as allowed is published automatically; content classified as a warning or block is not published. Private content, including private 1:1 chats and order, payment, and transaction content, is not sent to OpenAI under public-content screening. Exception: a deal voice/video call transcript may be screened separately — not under the public-content screening described here, but under the competition-law compliance screen — for signs of unlawful coordination between competitors (for example, joint pricing, customer allocation, or a boycott). This check never blocks or changes the call or its transcript; on a match it opens an internal review record visible only to VendMe administrators.

5. Sharing with service providers (sub-processors)

We share information only as needed to operate the service, with: Supabase (data storage, auth, backend); Google / Apple (sign-in; push delivery via FCM/APNs; and the operating system's geocoding services, which process coordinates or city names for address autofill and maps); Twilio (SMS verification codes); LiveKit (voice/video call infrastructure, including call audio recording); Cloudflare R2 (call-recording storage); Expo (push notification service and app updates — notification title and body pass through Expo, Google FCM, and Apple APNs infrastructure: for chat this is the sender's name and a short excerpt of the message; for an internal business-verification review alert it includes the applicant's business name and business/tax registration number); Resend (transactional auth emails); OpenAI (transcription of voice messages, voice input, and call recordings; and, for the public-content pre-publication screening described above, text and images and, depending on the surface, voice messages and video. For video, a WAV audio file is sent to OpenAI for transcription, and the transcript, poster image, sampled frames, and limited technical information are sent for classification; for a voice message, the audio file and transcript are sent. A hashed account safety identifier is attached to every classification request. The full MP4 is not sent to OpenAI); Anthropic (Claude) (AI-assistant answers — your questions plus relevant account data such as your deals, orders including amounts, and conversation previews — deal-summary extraction, which sends the business conversation's messages including the other party's messages, also when it is the counterparty who triggers the feature; and competition-compliance classification, which sends a window of a group, forum or general-chat conversation (the new messages plus a little context), a draft typed there but not yet sent, or a flagged excerpt — in every case without any name, user id or conversation id, with each speaker represented only by a letter — see section 4); Sentry (crash reporting, if enabled); data.gov.il (address autocomplete — search text only; and validation of a company/association registration number against the public registries — only the number is sent, never your name, phone or documents, and sole-proprietor numbers are not sent at all; the registry's answer is stored on your profile as a point-in-time record); OpenStreetMap and public CDNs (map tiles on the delivery-route screen); Tranzila (payment processing, if and when in-app payments are enabled — card details are entered directly with the processor and never stored by us).

6. Data retention & deletion

We retain data while the account is active and as legally required. The app provides account deletion (Settings → Delete account), which permanently closes the login and removes the profile's identifying details. Business records (orders, signed deals, payments) are retained as required by law, and content already delivered to other users (messages, documents, transcripts) may remain available to them. In addition, records used for enforcement and fraud prevention are not automatically removed when an account is deleted: business-verification requests and their attached documents, and open or flagged compliance-screening records (closed compliance records are deleted automatically after 180 days). A supplier-invite record you created is also retained. You may request deletion of these items by contacting us, and we will consider each request subject to our legal obligations. See the account deletion page for details. You may also contact office@vendme.net to request access, correction, or deletion — we will handle requests within 30 days at most.

OpenAI states that API data is not used to train or improve its models by default, unless the customer explicitly opts in to share it. By default, abuse-monitoring logs may include content and metadata and are retained for up to 30 days. Retention may be longer if required by law or reasonably necessary to protect OpenAI’s services or any third party from harm. Eligible customers may, subject to OpenAI approval, enable Zero Data Retention or Modified Abuse Monitoring to exclude customer content from those logs, subject to limitations. Images and files are scanned for child sexual abuse material (CSAM); if potential CSAM is detected, the image may be retained for manual review even when one of those retention controls is enabled.

In addition to the above, the internal audit record of guidance requests is also retained after the account is deleted — see section 7.

7. User guidance (remote guided support)

To help you over the phone, a VendMe team member can request "guidance": a request that appears on your screen with their name and the reason they recorded. Nothing opens without your explicit approval. The approval is for a single session only — there is no way to approve in advance or permanently.

What the team sees during guidance: the name of the screen you are on (for example "posting a listing") and the list of elements that can be highlighted on that screen. That is all the information that passes.

What the team does not see and does not do: it does not see your screen, does not read messages, contact details or documents, does not see text you typed but did not send, and does not perform actions on your behalf. The highlight shows you where to tap — the tap stays yours.

During guidance a fixed bar that cannot be closed is shown on your screen, with an end button. Guidance stops automatically after 15 minutes, and also when you or the team end it.

Transparency: every guidance request — including one you refused — is recorded, and is shown to you in the "Who guided me in the system" screen (Settings) together with what was actually highlighted for you; that screen lists the 50 most recent requests. Guidance cannot take place without being recorded.

Retention and deletion: the guidance records shown to you are deleted together with your account. In parallel we keep an internal audit record of every guidance request — carrying the identifier of the account the request was directed at and the reason the team member recorded — and it is not deleted with the account and has no fixed deletion date.

8. Security

Data is protected with encryption in transit and database access controls (RLS); chat media and credit/collateral-agreement documents are kept in access-restricted storage. Note that media attached to posts, listings, and profile galleries is reachable at public URLs (section 3). No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure.

9. Children

The service is intended for businesses and users aged 18+. We do not knowingly collect information from minors.

10. Changes

We may update this policy from time to time; the last-updated date appears above.

11. Contact

VENDME LTD · office@vendme.net · https://www.vendme.net