Privacy Policy

Owleh Ltd ("Owleh", "we", "us") is a company registered in England and Wales (company number 17141373) with its registered office at 124 City Rd, London, EC1V 2NX. We are the data controller for the personal data described here.

This policy covers the Owleh website (owleh.com), the sender web app and the Owleh Courier mobile app for Android and iOS (together, the "Services"). It explains what we collect, why, who can see it, which third parties we send it to, how long we keep it and what your rights are. It is written to match how the Services actually work; where a section only applies to senders, couriers or parcel recipients, it says so.

• Senders — businesses that book deliveries through the web app.
• Couriers — self-employed drivers who use the Owleh Courier app to accept and complete deliveries.
• Recipients — people a parcel is addressed to. Recipients do not have an account; a sender gives us their details so we can deliver to them and, where the sender has opted in, tell them a parcel is on its way.
• Visitors — anyone browsing owleh.com, using the contact form, or opening a tracking, invite or transfer link.

• Account: your email address and a password (we store only a bcrypt hash of it).
• Profile: your name, business name, phone number, address and postcode, which you add on your profile page.
• Bookings: pickup address and instructions; the pickup contact’s name, phone number and email; parcel dimensions, weight and any declared value for insurance; the chosen pickup and arrival windows; any promo code; and, for deliveries you settle directly with a courier, the price you set.
• Payment: which payment method you use and the identifiers our payment providers give us (Stripe customer and payment-method IDs plus the card brand and last four digits; PayPal order IDs; GoCardless customer, mandate and billing-request IDs). We never receive your full card number or bank details — those are entered directly with the provider (see section 9). Every delivery also has a payment record (amount, status, provider reference).
• Courier groups: the names of groups you create and which couriers are in them.
• Support: problem reports you file about a delivery, and anything you send through the contact form.

To work through Owleh you go through an onboarding process, and while you work the app collects location data. In detail:

• Identity and contact: name, surname, email (or your Google account email if you sign in with Google), phone number, address and postcode, and an optional profile photo. Your profile photo is served from a public web address so it can appear on the tracking page recipients see (section 8).
• Right-to-work and vetting documents: a passport or ID document, driving licence, vehicle insurance certificate, a UK right-to-work share code document and a DBS (criminal records) check certificate. These are stored in our private file storage and are visible only to Owleh administrators who approve courier accounts. The DBS certificate is criminal-offence data under UK data protection law; we process it only to decide whether to onboard you, under the conditions in Schedule 1 of the Data Protection Act 2018.
• Bank details: bank name, sort code and account number, so we can pay your earnings by bank transfer.
• Agreements: the independent contractor and self-billing agreements you accept in the app. The generated PDFs contain your name and address.
• Location: see the next section.
• Proof of delivery: the photos you take of delivered parcels, together with the GPS position and time they were taken.
• Work records: the deliveries you accept, transfer or cancel, when you accept them, your earnings, payout status and self-billed earnings statements.
• Device: a push-notification token for your phone, registered only while you are On Duty so we can alert you to new jobs.

The courier app collects your precise GPS location whenever you are signed in and set to On Duty. This is continuous — roughly every 10 seconds or every 10 metres — and continues in the background, when the app is closed, and after your phone restarts, until you switch to Off Duty or sign out. Opening the app while signed in sets you On Duty; accepting a job also sets you On Duty. Location is not tied to a single delivery: it is collected for as long as you are On Duty, including when you have no job assigned.

We use it to show senders where their delivery is, to check you are near the drop-off before you confirm a delivery or upload a proof photo, to plan multi-stop routes, and to resolve disputes. The app also uses your position when you tap through to Google Maps or Waze for navigation — that hand-off is made by you and is governed by those apps’ policies.

Location history is stored on our servers for as long as your courier account exists (section 11). Who can see it is described in section 8.

If a parcel is addressed to you, the sender gave us your full name, phone number, email address (optional), delivery address and any drop-off instructions. We use these to deliver the parcel, to let the courier contact you if needed, and — only if the sender’s business has enabled recipient notifications — to send you one email and/or one SMS when the delivery is booked, containing the sender’s business name, the delivery number, your postcode, the expected delivery window and a link to a live-tracking page.

The tracking link is public: anyone who has it can open it. It shows the delivery status, parcel count, journey distance, booking time, the expected delivery window, and — while the courier is on the way — the courier’s first name, profile photo and live position on a map. It does not show your name, address, or the sender’s details. Please don’t forward it to people who shouldn’t see it.

The sender is responsible for having a lawful basis to give us your details. Our own basis is our legitimate interest, and the sender’s, in delivering the parcel and keeping you informed. If you don’t want us to hold your details, contact us (section 17) and we will remove them once the delivery is complete.

• Contact form: your name, email, phone number and message. We store them and email them to the Owleh staff who handle enquiries.
• Server logs: for every request to our servers we log the IP address, browser or app identifier, the URL requested, the response and timing. Logs are kept for 7 days for security and troubleshooting, then deleted. Because tracking, invite and transfer links contain their access token in the URL, those tokens appear in the logs for that period.
• We use no analytics, advertising or tracking tools on the website or in the apps, and we do not build profiles of visitors.

• Couriers see senders’ details: approved couriers signed in to the app can see open deliveries on the job board — pickup address, instructions and contact details, and each recipient’s name, phone number, address and instructions — so they can decide whether to accept a job. The courier assigned to your delivery also sees your business name, contact name, phone number and address.
• Senders see couriers’ details: once a courier accepts your delivery you can see their name, surname, phone number and profile photo, their live location and route while they hold the job (from accepting it until it is delivered or cancelled), and the proof-of-delivery photos with where and when they were taken. Couriers’ email addresses, documents and bank details are never shown to senders.
• Recipients see: the courier’s first name, profile photo and live position while the delivery is in progress, via the tracking link (section 6).
• Anyone with a link: the tracking link (above) and a courier’s invite link — which shows the courier’s name, or their email address if they haven’t set a name — work without signing in. A delivery transfer link shows the full delivery, including recipient details, to any signed-in courier who opens it.
• Owleh staff: a small number of named administrators can access all of the above, including couriers’ documents and bank details, every courier’s current location and any delivery’s full route, to run the service, approve couriers, pay out earnings, handle refunds and resolve problems.
• We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with anyone else except the providers in section 9, or where the law requires it.

These are the companies that receive personal data from the Services, what they receive and why. Each is a separate controller or our processor under its own terms.

Two things we deliberately don’t send anywhere: the background-location library in the courier app (Transistor Software) runs on your phone and sends locations only to Owleh — no licence key or cloud account is used — and proof-of-delivery photos, documents and agreements are kept in our own file storage, not a third-party service.

Some actions you take open other apps or sites: “Message on WhatsApp” opens WhatsApp with the courier’s (or our support) number, navigation buttons open Google Maps or Waze with the pickup and drop-off locations, and the share button on the earnings statement uses your phone’s share sheet. Those services receive that data from you, not from us.

Our own servers are in Europe. Stripe, PayPal, Twilio, Resend and Google process data in the USA and elsewhere. Where personal data leaves the UK we rely on the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the EU Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum, and on the UK adequacy regulations for the EU, as offered in each provider’s data processing terms.

• Accounts: for as long as your account is open. When you close your account in the app or on the site we disable it immediately (you can no longer sign in and we stop using your data) and delete the personal data on request — see section 14. Records we must keep for tax, accounting or dispute purposes (delivery, payment and payout records, self-billing invoices) are kept for 6 years after the end of the financial year they relate to.
• Courier location history and proof-of-delivery photos: kept while the courier account and the delivery record exist, and deleted with them.
• Recipient details: kept with the delivery record, and removed on request once the delivery is complete.
• Vetting documents: kept while the courier account is open, and deleted with it.
• Sign-in sessions: access tokens are valid for 30 days; refresh tokens for 90 days from last use, or until you sign out. Password-reset links expire after 15 minutes.
• Contact-form messages and problem reports: until resolved and no longer needed, and at most 2 years.
• Server logs: 7 days.

The website sets no cookies of its own and shows no cookie banner. It uses your browser’s local storage instead, which stays until you clear your browser data:

• Your sign-in tokens (removed when you sign out).
• To speed up your next booking: your last pickup address and pickup contact (name, phone, email), up to 20 recent drop-off addresses, and the recipients you have booked to before (name, phone, email and instructions, keyed by address), plus your last “send to” group and whether you’ve seen the welcome tour. These are not removed when you sign out — clear your browser’s site data for owleh.com if you share the computer.
• Third-party scripts we load may set their own cookies: Stripe.js on your profile page, the PayPal SDK when you choose PayPal at checkout, and Google Maps on pages with a map. They are governed by those companies’ policies.

The courier app keeps your sign-in tokens in the phone’s secure storage (cleared on sign-out), and keeps proof-of-delivery photos, the GPS position they were taken at, the times you accepted jobs, cached postcode coordinates, the agreement PDFs and any earnings statements you download in the app’s private storage until you uninstall the app.

All traffic between your browser or phone and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, sign-in uses short-lived signed tokens with revocable refresh tokens, and documents and photos are stored in private storage that is only reachable through our API with a valid sign-in. Access to production systems is limited to named administrators.

No system is perfectly secure. If you think your account has been compromised, email support@owleh.com straight away. If we discover a breach that is likely to put you at risk, we will tell you and the ICO as the law requires.

Under the UK GDPR you can ask us for a copy of your personal data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive the data you gave us in a machine-readable form. You can withdraw any consent you have given at any time. Write to privacy@owleh.com; we will reply within one month and may ask you to confirm your identity first. You can update most of your own details yourself on your profile page or in the app.

We do not make automated decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you. Prices and routes are calculated automatically from distances and stop counts, not from anything about you as a person.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

The Services are for businesses and self-employed adults. You must be 18 or over to hold an account, and we do not knowingly collect data from children. Parcels may of course be addressed to anyone; recipients’ details are handled as described in section 6.

We will update this page when the Services change, and update the “Last updated” date above. If a change materially affects you — for example a new category of data or a new recipient of it — we will email account holders before it takes effect.

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@owleh.com

General support: support@owleh.com

Post: Owleh Ltd, 124 City Rd, London, EC1V 2NX