Stumble is an iOS app for discovering clothing from small independent brands. You swipe through pieces, save what you like, and connect with friends over what you both saved. It is free, with no ads, no subscriptions, and no in-app purchases.
What follows describes what actually happens to your information in the iOS app. If you only want the gist, the short version above covers it.
What we collect, and why
All of this goes to Stumble's own servers and is tied to your account. We use it to run the app: to sign you in, build your feed, and connect you with friends.
Account information
- Your display name. You set it at signup and can change it whenever you like.
- Your phone number. Required: it is how signing in works, and how friends find you.
- Your email address, but only if you sign in with Google or Apple. They pass it to us as part of that sign-in.
- A profile photo, if you upload one.
What you do in the app
- Which pieces you saved, passed on, and were shown. This is what teaches the feed your taste.
- What is in your cart.
- What you search for.
- Your friends, your matches, and the reactions and messages you send on a match.
Technical
- An account identifier, which travels with every request the app makes.
- A push notification token, if you allow notifications.
Your contacts
This is the part people ask about most, so here is exactly what happens.
"stumble checks your contacts for friends who are already here. numbers are matched once and never stored."
That is the promise in the app's permission prompt. Here it is at more length.
It is optional. We only read your contacts after you grant permission in iOS, and only when you choose to look for friends. Decline, and the rest of the app works normally.
Nothing is written down. The numbers are sent to our server, put into a standard format in memory, and checked against existing Stumble accounts in one read-only lookup. The matches come back to you, and that is the end of it. No database record, no queued job, no cache, nothing passed on to anyone else.
There is nowhere for them to go. No part of our system can hold a contact's phone number. The only phone numbers we store belong to Stumble users, from their own signup.
Adding a friend doesn't save a number either. A friend connection records two account identifiers and who added whom. No phone number, no contact name, nothing else from your address book.
Not even by accident. Our error logs are configured to leave out query values, so a database failure can't spill a contact's number into a log. We have automated tests that fail if a contact number is ever written anywhere.
One thing worth being straight about. The numbers are sent to us as they are, rather than scrambled first. Scrambling them would look safer than it is: there are few enough possible phone numbers that a scrambled one can be turned back into the original in seconds.
So the real protection isn't scrambling. It is that we never keep them. That is a promise we can write a test for, so we did.
What we don't collect
Most of what people want to know is on this list.
- No location data, of any kind.
- No payment or card details. Checkout happens on the brand's own website, so we never see them.
- No health, fitness, or biometric data.
- No advertising identifiers, and no tracking of you across other apps or websites.
- No third-party analytics or crash reporting. There are no kits of that sort in the app at all.
- We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with data brokers or advertisers.
Who else touches your data
A few companies help us run Stumble. They handle data on our behalf, as service providers. They are not parties we sell anything to.
- Google, only if you choose to sign in with Google. Google's own privacy policy covers that sign-in.
- Apple, only if you choose Sign in with Apple. The same applies.
- Apple Push Notification service, which delivers notifications to your phone.
- Railway, which hosts our backend and our database.
- Cloudflare R2, which stores uploaded profile photos.
- OpenAI, which runs the automatic check that keeps objectionable content off Stumble. Your display name, your profile photo, and the text of a message you send on a match are passed to OpenAI when you post them, so they can be checked against the rules in our terms before they go up.
- The brands themselves. When you tap through to buy, you leave Stumble and land on that brand's own store. Anything you do there, including paying, is between you and the brand, under the brand's privacy policy. We do not receive your order or your payment details.
The screening check is worth spelling out, because it involves what you write to a friend. When you set a display name, upload a profile photo, or send a message on a match, that content goes to OpenAI once, at the moment you post it, purely so it can be checked against the rules before it appears.
OpenAI handles it as a service provider — under our account, on our instructions, on the same footing as the other companies above. It is not advertising, it is not analytics, and nothing is sold.
It is not used to train anything. Content sent through OpenAI's API is not used to train their models. They hold it for up to 30 days to check for misuse, then delete it, unless the law requires them to keep it longer.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account from inside the app: Profile tab → "delete account" → confirm.
It is immediate and permanent. No grace period, no recovery window, no way for us to restore it, and no deactivate-instead option.
Deleting removes your profile, saved pieces, browsing history, cart, friend connections, matches, and the reactions and messages attached to them.
Matches belong to two people. When your account goes, your matches also disappear from the other person's board, along with the reactions and notes on them.
Any other device still signed in will be signed out the next time it contacts our server.
If you sign up again later with the same phone number, you get a brand new, empty account. It is not the old one coming back.
Security, and how long we keep things
- Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted while it travels.
- Your sign-in token is kept in the iOS Keychain on your own device.
- We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. When you delete the account, it goes.
- Contact phone numbers are not kept at all, so there is nothing there to delete.
- We do not keep database backups, so a deleted account does not linger in one.
- The one exception is the screening check. OpenAI holds what it checked for up to 30 days before deleting it, so a display name, photo, or message from the last month can still sit in their systems after you delete your Stumble account. We cannot reach into that copy to delete it early, and it expires on its own.
Children
Stumble is rated 13+ and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe someone under 13 has an account, write to hello@shopstumble.com and we will remove it.
Your choices
- Your profile. Change your display name and photo in the app at any time.
- Contacts. Always optional. You can switch the permission off later in iOS Settings, under Stumble.
- Notifications. Turn them off in iOS Settings → Notifications → Stumble.
- Deleting everything. Use delete account in the Profile tab. It takes effect straight away.
- A copy of your data. There is no self-serve export today. Email hello@shopstumble.com and we will put it together by hand.
- Fixing something. If what we hold about you is wrong, or you want something removed without deleting the whole account, email us.
- Opting out of a sale. There is nothing to opt out of. We do not sell personal information.
Changes to this policy
If we change what the app does with your information, we will update this page and change the "Last updated" date at the top. The current version always lives at shopstumble.com/privacy.
How to reach us
Questions about any of this, or about your own data, go to hello@shopstumble.com. A person reads it.
Stumble is operated by Harrison Wang, at harrison@shopstumble.com.
This page describes how the Stumble iOS app handles your information. It is a description of what the app does, not legal advice.