Privacy Policy

OnlyPet is a web platform ('we', 'us', 'our') that lists animals from verified shelters and rescue organizations, starting in Los Angeles, California, and helps prospective adopters find and inquire about them. Shelters and rescues create and manage their own animal listings; OnlyPet does not own or operate any shelter.

We collect different information depending on how you use OnlyPet:

• Browsing: none. You can search, filter, and view animal listings without an account or any personal information.
• Adoption inquiries: if you contact a shelter about an animal, we collect your name, email address, and the message you write. No account is required to send an inquiry.
• Reclaim ('is this my pet?') messages: if you contact a shelter about a found animal you believe is yours, we keep the messages exchanged in that thread. They're tied to your original inquiry and kept under our Data Retention Policy. We also record the language you wrote to us in (English or Spanish) so the shelter's reply reaches you in the right one. If you don't have an account, you reply to the shelter through a secure, single-use link we email to you — no sign-in required.
• Adoption conversation messages: if you are signed in to an adopter account when you inquire about an animal for adoption, we link that inquiry to your account so you and the shelter can continue as a two-way message thread. We keep the messages you exchange under our Data Retention Policy. They are visible to the shelter you are talking with and to OnlyPet admin staff for safety and moderation. If you delete your account, we remove your name from these messages so they are no longer attributed to you, but the messages you already sent remain part of the shelter's record of the conversation. OnlyPet never handles adoption payments — arrange any fees directly with the shelter, never through these messages.
• Adopter accounts (optional): if you create a light account to save favorites and searches, we collect your email address and password (handled by our authentication provider — we never see or store your password in plain text), plus your preferred language. We do not ask adopters for a name, phone number, or street address.
• Your ZIP code (optional): you can give us a 5-digit ZIP code when you sign up, or add or change it later on your account page. We use it for one thing only — showing you animals near you first and setting the distance filter when you browse. Shelters never see it, we never use it for advertising, and we never ask for a street address. Leaving it blank changes nothing else about your account, and you can remove it at any time by clearing the field on your account page (or by deleting your account, which deletes it too).
• Favorites and saved searches: which animals you've favorited, and the filters of any search you've saved. This is tied to your account and nothing else.
• Saved-search email alerts (optional, off by default): if you turn on 'Email me new matches' for a saved search, we record that choice and when you made it, and we keep a note of when we last emailed you about that search so we only ever email you about newly listed animals. You can turn alerts off at any time on your account page, or instantly from the links in every alert email — no sign-in needed.
• Adoption applications: if you apply to adopt an animal (this requires a free account), we collect your name, a contact email, an optional phone number, and your answers about your housing, household, and experience with pets. Our forms deliberately do not ask for — and actively reject — government IDs, Social Security numbers, income, employer details, or date of birth.
• Adoption records and check-ins: when a shelter marks one of its listed animals as adopted, we keep a record of that adoption (the animal, the shelter, and the date). If you adopted through OnlyPet and the shelter connects your account to that adoption, the record links to your account so you can see your adopted animals on your own page — the record itself never contains your name, address, or contact details. If you answer a check-in about how the animal is settling in, we keep your one-tap answer and any short note you choose to add.
• Shelter/rescue staff accounts: shelters register with an email and password, plus organization details they choose to provide (organization name, contact email, phone, website, city/county, and a description) so adopters and our admin team can verify and reach them.
• What we do NOT collect: payment or financial information of any kind. Adoption fees, if any, are handled directly between you and the shelter, entirely off our platform. Outside of an adoption application, we don't ask adopters for a phone number — and we never ask anyone for a home address or government ID.

We use Vercel Speed Insights, a privacy-oriented performance-monitoring tool, to measure how fast pages load for real visitors so we can keep the site fast. It measures aggregate page-performance metrics and does not use advertising cookies, does not build cross-site profiles of you, and is not shared with or sold to advertisers. We don't run any advertising trackers, social-media pixels, or third-party marketing analytics on OnlyPet.

• To operate the core service: showing you animals, letting you contact shelters, and letting shelters manage their listings.
• To maintain your account, if you have one, and the favorites/saved searches attached to it.
• To process your adoption application: sharing it with the shelter whose animal you applied for, and sending status notices about it (for example, a decision, or that the animal has found a home) to the contact email you provided.
• To send you a small number of emails after an adoption — a check-in around 30 days and around 90 days asking, on behalf of the shelter you adopted from, how the animal is settling in, and a one-time greeting on the first anniversary of the adoption with a link to your adoption certificate. These go to your account email and never contain advertising. Every one includes a link to stop these emails for that adoption instantly, and you can also turn them off at any time on your adoptions page.
• To send you a daily email digest of newly listed animals matching your saved searches — only if you turned that on for a search, never by default. Every digest includes our mailing address and links to stop these emails for one search or for all of them, instantly and without signing in.
• To keep the platform secure, prevent abuse of the inquiry form, and enforce our Terms of Service.
• To help shelters meet their own recordkeeping obligations under California law for the animals they list.
• To measure and improve site performance (see Analytics above).

We do not sell your personal information, and we never have.

• An adoption inquiry (your name, email, and message) is visible only to the shelter that posted the animal you asked about, and to OnlyPet admin staff for safety and moderation purposes.
• Adoption conversation messages you exchange with a shelter are visible to that shelter and to OnlyPet admin staff, who may review conversation content for safety and moderation. They are never public and are never shown to other adopters or to other shelters.
• An adoption application (your name, contact details, and answers) is visible only to you and to the shelter whose animal you applied for. OnlyPet staff can read applications only under an explicitly granted, audited permission — it is not part of general admin access.
• Your check-in answers (your one-tap answer and any note) are visible to you and to the shelter you adopted from. A shelter's own private aftercare notes about an adoption are not shown to adopters, and adoption outcomes are never shown publicly.
• A verified shelter's organization information (name, city, description, verification status) is public, because that's how adopters find and evaluate shelters — this is organizational, not personal, information.
• We may disclose information if required by law, such as in response to a valid subpoena or court order.

OnlyPet's locked retention policy (see our internal Data Retention Policy) does not use hard deletion for business records — records are archived, not destroyed, except where you have a direct right to delete your own data (favorites and saved searches) or where we anonymize personal fields after the periods below.

If you are a California resident, you have the following rights over the personal information we hold about you:

• Right to know / access — you can ask us what personal information we have collected about you and why.
• Right to delete — you can ask us to delete your personal information. We will honor this request except where the law requires us to keep certain records (for example, California shelter recordkeeping law can require a shelter to retain adoption-related records for a set period). Where we can't fully delete a record for that reason, we anonymize the personal fields (your name and email are replaced with an irreversible placeholder) instead of deleting the whole record, and we'll tell you which legal basis applies. Note: today this anonymization is a manual process on our end rather than a fully automated one — we'll still honor your request, it just may take us a little longer than an instant self-service delete button would. Favorites and saved searches are the one exception where you can delete your own data yourself, instantly, at any time, with no request needed.
• Right to correct — you can ask us to correct inaccurate personal information we hold about you (for example, a misspelled name or an out-of-date email address on an inquiry or account). Email us as described below and we'll fix it.
• Right to non-discrimination — we will not deny you service, charge you a different amount, or provide a different level of service because you exercised any of these rights. (OnlyPet doesn't charge adopters at all, so this mostly means: your account keeps working the same either way.)
• We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

Email us at support@onlypet.app from the address associated with your inquiry or account (or tell us which one it is) and let us know whether you'd like to know what we have, or have it deleted/anonymized. We may need to verify it's really you asking before we act on the request.

• A language-preference cookie (NEXT_LOCALE) remembers whether you last viewed the site in English or Spanish.
• If you sign in, secure, httpOnly session cookies (set by our authentication provider, Supabase) keep you signed in between page loads. These aren't readable by page scripts and aren't used for tracking.
• We don't use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

OnlyPet is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone we know to be under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us at support@onlypet.app and we'll remove it.

We use industry-standard safeguards appropriate to the limited data we hold: encrypted connections (HTTPS) everywhere, database-level row security so an account can only see the data it's authorized to see, and least-privilege access for our own staff. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, but we design the system to collect and expose as little as reasonably possible in the first place.

For support, safety, or moderation purposes, an authorized administrator may occasionally and temporarily sign in to your account to act on your behalf. Every such access is recorded in an audit log.

If we make material changes to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page and, where appropriate, post a notice on the site. We encourage you to review this page periodically.