GEAR WAVEData Retention & Deletion Policy
Effective June 14, 2026
Gear Wave, LLC ("Gear Wave") retains personal and commercial information only as long as needed for the purposes for which it was collected, to comply with legal, tax, accounting, and chargeback requirements, and to defend against claims. Data past its retention period is securely deleted or anonymized.
1. Retention Schedule
| Data Category | Retention Period |
|---|---|
| Account profile (name, email, phone, avatar) | Life of account + 90 days after closure |
| Booking, payment, and payout records | 7 years (tax + chargeback rebuttal) |
| Dispute records and evidence | 7 years |
| Identity verification result (pass/fail, verified name) | Life of account + 90 days |
| Identity verification raw ID / selfie | Not stored by Gear Wave (held by Stripe Identity) |
| Payment card numbers | Not stored by Gear Wave (held by Stripe) |
| In-app messages between users | 3 years from booking end |
| Listing photos and descriptions | Life of listing + 1 year after deletion (audit/dispute) |
| Reviews | Indefinite (de-identified after account closure) |
| Email send / suppression logs | 3 years |
| Server, auth, and admin audit logs | 2 years |
| Abuse / scraping / rate-limit signals | 1 year |
| Marketing analytics (aggregate) | Indefinite, aggregated only |
| Waitlist signups (if not converted) | 2 years |
| Closed/deleted account residual | Deleted or anonymized within 90 days, except records on the 7-yr legal hold |
2. Deletion Process
- Scheduled purge. A nightly job identifies records past their retention period and deletes them from production storage, search indexes, and analytics caches.
- Backups. Encrypted backups roll over on a 30-day cycle; deleted records age out of backups within 30 days of production deletion.
- Anonymization. Where a record must be retained for analytics or counterparty history (e.g. a review attached to a deleted account), personal identifiers are replaced with a stable hash and the original PII is removed.
- User-initiated deletion (DSAR). Account-deletion requests at support@gearwaveapp.com are honored within 30 days, subject to the 7-year legal hold on booking and payment records.
- Secure destruction. Physical media is decommissioned by our cloud provider under their certified disposal program; Gear Wave does not operate its own on-premise storage.
3. Legal Holds
If Gear Wave receives a subpoena, preservation request, or other legal hold, affected records are exempted from routine deletion until the hold is lifted.
4. Review
This schedule is reviewed at least annually and updated when laws, retention obligations, or platform features materially change.
Questions: support@gearwaveapp.com