Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

CheersJA is a marketplace where independent professionals in Jamaica publish services and customers find, message and book them. The company that operates CheersJA is the data controller for the information described here under the Data Protection Act, 2020. Our registered legal name, company number and registered office are published in section 24 of the Terms of Service. Write to us about anything in this policy at support@cheersja.com.

2. What we collect

Account information

• Your name, email address and phone number, and whether the number has been confirmed.
• How you sign in — an emailed magic link or Google — and, if you use Google, the basic profile details Google returns (name, email address, profile picture).
• Your role on the platform, whether your account is suspended, when you finished onboarding, and the date and version string of the legal documents you accepted.

Professional profiles

• Your public display name, headline, description, skills, years of experience, languages, service area, photos and listings, and your published availability.
• Your legal name, which is private. It is never shown to customers or on any public page; it is used for identity review and administration only.
• The payment instructions you write — a bank account, a Lynk number and the like. CheersJA never uses them to send you money, because we never hold any: we show them to the customer of a confirmed booking so they can pay you directly. Do not write anything there you are not willing to give a customer.

Bookings

• The service booked, the date, time and duration, the service address and its coordinates, and any instructions you write.
• The meeting PIN, the booking status history, cancellation reasons, reschedules and reassignments.
• Quote requests, job requests and the offers made on them. A public job board entry shows the parish and general area only — never the street address and never your identity.

Payments

• We do not process the payment for a booking and never receive the money for one. You pay your professional directly. What we hold is the record they and you enter: the amount, any tip, the commission we will charge the professional, the method (cash, bank transfer, Lynk or other), the status, and any short reference or note either of you adds.
• Our own charges.For the two things we do charge a card for — a customer's membership and a professional's monthly commission — we keep the outcome, the amount, the date and our payment gateway's transaction reference, plus a gateway token for the card so it can be charged again, and the card brand, last four digits and expiry so you can recognise it.
• Membership and commission statement records.
• We never see or store your card number. Card details go straight to our payment gateway, PowerTranz (First Atlantic Commerce).

Messages, reviews and notifications

• Chat messages and any images sent in them. Chat is stored, not end-to-end encrypted, and each conversation keeps a capped number of recent messages.
• Reviews and ratings you write or receive, including reviews you choose to leave anonymously (anonymous means your name is hidden from the public page, not from us).
• The in-app notifications, emails, SMS messages and push messages we have sent you.
• Reports you make about another user, and blocks you set.

Identity documents (optional)

If you choose to apply for the Verified ID badge: the document type, the name as printed on it, the image you upload, and the review decision. See section 6.

Safety information

• Safety sessions, check-in prompts and your responses, heartbeats from the safety screen, alerts (including SOS and duress alerts), and every escalation attempt — who we tried to reach, how, and whether they answered.
• Location breadcrumbs during a monitored booking, with the accuracy, speed, heading, battery level and online state reported by your device.
• Your trusted contacts — their name, phone number and email address, what they asked to be told about, and whether they confirmed the link we sent them.
• Post-visit reports, PIN failures, and the tokens (stored as one-way hashes) behind tracking links.

Rides

If you use the ride marketplace: pickup and drop-off points, the fare offers made, the ride timeline, ride reviews and, for drivers, the documents needed for driver approval.

Technical information

• Server logs, which include your IP address, the pages requested and basic device and browser information.
• Your session record, push-notification subscription (if you turn push on), and counters used to enforce rate limits and stop abuse.
• An audit log of actions taken by platform staff on accounts, listings and bookings.

3. Where the information comes from

• From you — what you type, upload and send.
• From Google, if you choose to sign in with it.
• From our payment gateway — whether one of our own charges (a membership or a commission statement) succeeded or failed, the reference for it, and the masked card details.
• From your device, with your permission — location, battery level and the heartbeat from the safety screen during a monitored booking.
• From other users — a booking someone makes with you, a review, a report, a block, or a job request you are matched to.
• From your trusted contacts, when they confirm the link we email them.

4. Why we use it

• To run the platform and your account — signing you in, publishing listings, matching customers with professionals, running bookings, quotes and job requests, and keeping your booking history. This is necessary to perform our contract with you.
• To record job payments and to take our own — recording what a customer paid a professional directly, and charging memberships and monthly commission statements to a card.
• To operate the safety system — meeting and duress PINs, check-ins, alerts, tracking links and escalation to your trusted contacts and our staff. Location and trusted-contact processing rely on the permission you give and can be withdrawn.
• To communicate with you — booking updates, safety alerts, payment and billing notices, and service messages about your account, by email, in-app notification and (where enabled) SMS or push.
• To moderate, investigate and keep people safe — reviewing reports, reading messages where moderation, safety or a dispute requires it, taking down content, suspending accounts and preventing fraud and abuse. This is our legitimate interest in running a safe marketplace.
• To meet legal obligations — accounting and tax records, and responding to lawful requests from the authorities.
• To improve the platform — understanding which features are used and fixing faults.

We do not make decisions about you by automated means that produce legal effects for you. Automatic job matching creates a booking without further action by the customer, but only in the mode and within the budget the customer chose.

5. Who we share it with

• Other users.Professional profiles, listings, display names, ratings and reviews are public. When a booking is made, the professional sees the customer's name, phone number, service address, coordinates and instructions (for a job request, only after a match is made). The customer sees the professional's display name and profile, never their legal name. Where a driver is assigned to a booking, the driver sees the address they are asked to go to.
• PowerTranz (First Atlantic Commerce)— our card gateway, used only for memberships and professionals' commission. It handles card details directly; we receive the outcome, a reference and a token. It is never involved in the payment for a booking, because we never take one.
• Our email, SMS and push providers — to deliver magic links, booking updates, safety alerts and notifications. These channels carry your email address, phone number and the content of the message.
• Our hosting and database providers— who store the platform's data on our behalf under contract.
• Your trusted contacts — the contacts you add receive what you asked them to receive: that a session has started, that something is overdue, or that an alert has been raised, together with your name, booking timing and, where you have enabled it, a temporary link showing your location.
• Emergency escalation.When an alert is raised we may share your name, phone number, the booking address and timing, your recent location and the other party's details with your trusted contacts, our on-duty staff and administrators, and — if it is needed to protect someone from serious harm — with the emergency services.
• Platform staff and administrators — who can see accounts, bookings, payments, messages and safety data as their role requires. Staff actions are logged.
• Law enforcement, regulators and legal advisers — where the law requires it, or to establish, exercise or defend a legal claim.
• A buyer of the business — if CheersJA is sold or reorganised, as part of that transaction and on notice to you.

We do not sell personal information, we do not share it with data brokers, and we do not use it for third-party advertising.

6. Identity documents

1. Uploading an identity document is optionalfor customers and professionals. It earns a “Verified ID” badge and is never required to browse, publish, message, book, be booked or be paid. Driver approval is the one exception: it is staff-gated and does require documents.
2. While a review is pending, the document image is stored privately and is served only to the staff member reviewing it. It is never public and is never shown to other users.
3. The document image is deleted from our storage as soon as the review is decided — whether it is approved or rejected — and immediately if you replace it with a new submission.
4. After the review we keep only the record of it: the document type, the name as printed on the document, the decision, the date, the reviewer and any note explaining a rejection.
5. Documents submitted for driver approval are handled under the same rule.

7. How long we keep it

1. We keep your account information for as long as your account is open.
2. Identity document images are deleted as soon as the review is decided (section 6).
3. Booking, payment, commission and billing records are kept after a booking ends and after an account closes, because we need them for accounting and tax, to answer disputes and chargebacks, and to defend legal claims.
4. Safety records — alerts, check-ins, escalations and the location breadcrumbs attached to a session — are kept as the record of what happened on that booking, so that after an incident it can be shown who was told what and when.
5. Chat messages are kept while the conversation is live, subject to a cap on how many messages each conversation holds: once a conversation goes over the cap, the oldest messages are deleted automatically.
6. Audit logs of staff actions are kept as a security record.
7. When you close your account (write to support@cheersja.com) we remove your profile and listings from the platform. We keep the records described above for as long as the law requires and for as long as a claim could reasonably be brought, and then delete or anonymise them. Ask us if you want to know what is held about you after closure.

8. Location and the safety system

1. We collect location only during a monitored booking, and only if you allow your browser to share it. We do not track you between bookings and we do not run background location tracking.
2. Breadcrumbs are recorded no more often than a fixed minimum interval, and stop when the session ends or you close the safety screen or withdraw the permission.
3. A tracking link sent to a trusted contact is a one-time, unguessable link that expires a short time after the session ends. Do not share it with anyone else.
4. Trusted contacts only receive the events you selected for them, and only after they confirm the link we email them. You can remove a contact at any time.
5. Covert alerts — such as a duress PIN — are deliberately not shown to the other party.
6. You can withdraw location permission at any time in your browser. The rest of the safety system keeps working, but breadcrumbs and tracking links will not.

9. Your rights

Under the Data Protection Act, 2020 you have the right to:

• Be told whether we hold personal data about you and to be given a copy of it, along with why we hold it and who we share it with.
• Have inaccurate data corrected, and incomplete data completed. You can edit most of it yourself in your account.
• Ask us to delete data we no longer have a good reason to keep, or to stop processing that is causing you damage or distress.
• Object to direct marketing at any time, and to withdraw a permission you gave — for example location sharing, push notifications, or a trusted contact.
• Ask about automated decisions taken about you.
• Complain to the Office of the Information Commissioner in Jamaica.

To exercise any of these, email support@cheersja.com. We may need to confirm who you are before we act, and we will reply within the time the Act allows. Some rights have limits: we cannot delete a record we are legally required to keep, and we cannot remove a safety or payment record that another person or a legal claim depends on.

10. Cookies and sessions

1. We use a session cookie to keep you signed in, and security cookies that protect sign-in and form submissions. These are necessary for the platform to work — without them you cannot stay signed in.
2. We may store small preferences in your browser so the interface behaves the way you left it.
3. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party analytics or tracking cookies.
4. Signing out ends your session. We may end all your sessions at any time, and do so automatically if an account is suspended.
5. If you turn on push notifications, your browser gives us a subscription address for your device, which we store so we can send them. Turning push off removes it.

11. How we protect information

• Traffic to the platform is encrypted in transit.
• Sensitive tokens — tracking links and trusted-contact confirmation links — are stored as one-way hashes, not as the value we sent. PINs are generated with a secure random source and compared in a way that does not leak them.
• Access is controlled by role: professionals see their own bookings, customers see theirs, and staff access is limited to what a role needs and is written to an audit log.
• Card numbers never reach our servers. Identity documents are deleted as soon as a review is decided.
• Rate limits and abuse controls protect sign-in, PIN entry, chat, uploads and the safety endpoints.
• No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data we will act on it and notify you and the Information Commissioner where the law requires.

12. Information that leaves Jamaica

Some of the providers we rely on — our card gateway, our email, SMS and push delivery services, and our hosting and database providers — operate outside Jamaica. Using them means your information may be stored or processed abroad. We use established providers, share only what the service needs, and rely on the contractual protections they give us.

13. Under-18s

CheersJA is for adults. You must be 18 or older to hold an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18; if we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we close it and delete the information we do not have to keep. If you believe a child's information is on the platform, tell us at safety@cheersja.com.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The current version and its version string are always on this page. For a material change we bump the version and ask you to accept the updated documents the next time you sign in; for a small change we update the page and its “last updated” date.

15. Contact and complaints

• Privacy questions, access requests, corrections and deletions: support@cheersja.com
• Safety concerns: safety@cheersja.com
• Anything else: hello@cheersja.com

If you are not satisfied with our answer you may complain to the Office of the Information Commissioner in Jamaica.