What we collect, why, and your rights
Last updated: August 17, 2026
The COBA app and the coba-app.com website are published by Steve Cohen, sole proprietor (micro-entreprise), 10 rue du Gypse, 11100 Narbonne, France, data controller for your personal data, hereinafter “COBA”. For any question about your data, write to us at support@coba-app.com.
We only collect what is necessary for COBA to work:
Each processing relies on a GDPR legal basis:
Location is at the heart of COBA: it powers the map of travelers around you, nearby Apero and Help requests, and attaches your profile to a country room. It is collected while the app is open, and in the background only if you explicitly allowed it at system level. You stay in control at all times: ghost mode removes you from the map without disabling the rest of the app, and location permission can be changed in your phone settings. Your position is never sold or used for advertising.
Any message, profile or conversation can be reported from the app. When content is reported by a participant, our moderation team may review the conversation concerned — limited to recent messages, including photos, videos and voice messages — for the sole purpose of investigating the report. A copy of the reported content is kept securely at the time of the report, even if messages are later edited or deleted, in order to handle the report, prevent repeated abuse and comply with our legal obligations (for example a judicial request). This evidence is only accessible to the moderation team and every decision is logged. Your conversations are not subject to any generalized human monitoring: outside of reports, only an automated tool may analyze conversations to detect behavior that breaks the rules (solicitation, harassment, scams…). This tool only assigns a risk level for our moderation team; no decision is ever made automatically — any measure is reviewed and decided by a human.
Your data is only shared with the providers strictly necessary to run the service, acting on our instructions:
Transfers outside the European Union are covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses. We never sell your data and never share it for advertising. It may finally be disclosed to authorities where the law requires it.
Your data is encrypted in transit (TLS), protected by strict database access rules, and administrator access is limited, authenticated and logged. No system is infallible: should a data breach likely to affect you occur, we would notify you in accordance with GDPR.
Under GDPR, you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction of processing and portability of your data. You can exercise them from the “Data deletion” page of this website or by writing to us — we reply within one month. You may also lodge a complaint with the French supervisory authority, the CNIL (cnil.fr). Contact: support@coba-app.com.
COBA can transcribe a voice message into text, and translate a message. Neither is EVER automatic: they only happen if you tap "Transcribe" or "Translate" yourself, and only for that message. The content of that one message is then sent to a processor based in the United States — OpenAI (Whisper service) to transcribe audio, Anthropic (Claude service) to translate text — for the sole purpose of producing that result; it is not used to train any model. Because voice is sensitive data, we limit transcription to voice messages of 3 minutes at most. The result is stored on the message and becomes visible to the members of the conversation, so that it is computed and paid for only once. You may stop using these features at any time, and request deletion of a transcription or a translation by writing to support@coba-app.com.
COBA is restricted to people aged 15 or older. We do not knowingly collect data about children under 15; if such an account were brought to our attention, it would be deleted.
This policy may evolve with the app. The applicable version is always the one published on this page, with its update date; any substantial change will be announced in the app.
