Cookie Policy

1. What Are Cookies

Cookies are small text files stored on your device when you visit a website. Together with similar technologies such as browser local storage, they help the site remember information about your visit, such as your login session, language, or appearance preferences.

2. Strictly Necessary Technologies

These first-party technologies are essential for Kywi to work. They do not track you across other websites and cannot be switched off without breaking core features such as signing in, browsing Activities, Bookings, Requests, Conversations, Offers, and hosting tools.

• Authentication session: A secure session cookie set through WorkOS, our sign-in provider, keeps you signed in to your account and protects it against unauthorized access.
• Language preference: The kywi-locale cookie remembers the language you chose.
• Appearance preference: The fern-theme and fern-resolved-theme cookies remember your light or dark mode choice.
• Cookie choices: The kywi-cookie-consent cookie records the consent decision you make in the cookie banner or preferences dialog.
• Layout preferences: Browser local storage (sidebar_state, sidebar_width) remembers how you arranged the Host dashboard sidebar.
• Payment security: When you add a payment method or pay for a Booking, Stripe, our payment provider, sets cookies (such as __stripe_mid and __stripe_sid) that are required for fraud prevention and secure payment processing. These are only set on pages where payment functionality is loaded.

3. Optional Third-Party Embedded Content

With your consent, we embed content from third parties. When such content loads, the provider may process your IP address and set its own cookies. Kywi currently embeds one such service:

• Google Maps (Google LLC): Used to show Activity meeting-point maps and to power address search when Hosts set up an Activity location. The Google Maps script is enabled by default and stops loading as soon as you decline embedded content.

If you decline, Kywi remains fully usable: you can discover and book Activities, send Requests, use Conversations, and respond to Offers. Where a feature genuinely depends on Google Maps, such as the interactive meeting-point map or address search, we show a notice explaining this and offer a one-click way to allow it.

4. No Advertising or Analytics Cookies

Kywi does not use advertising, analytics, or cross-site tracking cookies, and we do not share cookie data with advertisers or data brokers. If this ever changes, we will update this policy and ask for your consent first.

5. Managing Your Choices

On your first visit, a banner lets you accept all cookies or customize your choices per category. Optional embedded content is enabled by default until you decline it; in the customize dialog the optional category starts switched off, so saving without enabling it declines that content.

You can change or withdraw your decision at any time using the button below, or in your account under Settings → Preferences. Withdrawing consent stops optional third-party content from loading from then on; content already loaded in your current session stops completely after your next page load. Cookies set by third parties on their own domains can be removed through your browser settings.

You can also control cookies through your browser settings. Please note that blocking strictly necessary cookies will prevent you from signing in and using key features of Kywi.

6. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Cookie Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated date. If we introduce new optional cookie categories, we will ask for your consent again before they are used.

7. Contact

If you have any questions about our use of cookies, please contact us at legal@kywi.ch.