Gatherings privacy policy

01.What we collect

We collect only what the app needs to work:

• Account: your email address, display name, and stated date of birth. These sign you in, identify you to other players, and apply the age-appropriate safety rules.
• Invite emails: when an adult account asks us to email an invite, we use and retain the recipient address, linked to the inviter, to deliver the invite and enforce the weekly and daily send limits.
• Profile and photos: optional pronouns, an optional short bio, an optional profile photo, and photos you choose to attach to chats. All of these are up to you.
• Games and availability: which games you play, your formats and skill level, and the general time blocks when you are free, plus your travel radius. This powers matching and discovery.
• Location: a when-in-use position used to find nearby results and a deliberately imprecise version retained for distance and discovery. See section 03 for exactly how this works. If you deny location access, you can enter a city or ZIP instead and the app still works.
• Chat messages: messages you send in gathering group chats and direct messages, so we can deliver them and so recipients can read them.
• RSVPs and attendance: which gatherings you join, host, and attend. This feeds the attendance stats shown on your profile.
• App activity and preferences: favorites, venue votes, waitlist state, notification preferences, and whether notifications have been read. These records make the corresponding app features work; we do not use them for advertising or cross-app tracking.
• Operational request data: service providers process details such as IP address, request time, and error information for authentication, abuse prevention, rate limits, security, and reliability. We do not use this data for advertising or cross-app tracking.
• Gathering and venue submissions: the titles, descriptions, polls, hours, and other details you submit. If you add a venue, its public business or place address is stored with the venue and linked to your submission. Build 20 does not ask for a new private home address. Existing legacy home gatherings and host-created duplicates can retain a sealed home address and arrival notes, disclosed only to approved adult attendees.
• Reports and blocks: reports you file and blocks you set, so we can act on them and keep blocked users apart.
• Feedback and support: the text you send through the in-app feedback form or in a support request. In-app feedback also includes the app version and operating system so we can investigate the issue, respond, and improve the service.
• Push token: after onboarding, iOS may grant quiet provisional notification access without showing an interrupting prompt. When notification access is granted or provisional, we store a device token so we can deliver notifications.

02.What we do not collect

• No precise background location. The app reads your location only while you are using it, and never tracks you in the background.
• No contacts. We never read or upload your address book.
• No advertising identifiers. There are no ads in Gatherings, no ad networks, and no third-party tracking SDKs.

03.How location privacy works

Location is the most sensitive thing an app like this touches, so it is handled with hard rules:

• No other user, and no app screen, ever receives your exact coordinates.
• The profile position we retain is snapped to a grid roughly a kilometre across and then offset by a few hundred meters, so it does not correspond to a real address. That snapped position is what player and venue distances are computed from.
• If your area needs a first-time venue lookup, we also retain the center of a quarter-degree area cell in a protected back-end cache and usage ledger, not the device coordinate submitted for the lookup. It is never shown to other users. It remains linked to your account until you delete the account, when that link is removed.
• Your device does send the coordinates it reports to Google Maps Platform, through us, for one purpose: finding the venues near you and working out the local time zone for their opening hours. Google processes that request under its own privacy policy. We do not send Google your name, your email, or your account id.
• Other players only ever see distance buckets such as "about 3 mi" or "about 15 mi", never a number precise enough to locate you and never a pin on a map.
• Your profile shows your home area as a city name only.
• Appearing in player discovery at all is opt-in and off by default.
• Check-in beacons attach to a public venue you choose, never to your own coordinates.
• Push notifications never contain coordinates.

04.Data sharing

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. Data leaves our systems in only three cases:

• Service providers: our database, authentication, storage, and backend functions run on Supabase. The invite-email API runs on Vercel, and transactional emails are delivered by Resend. Push notifications pass through Expo's push service and the Apple or Google notification service for the device. Google Maps Platform processes location requests used to find nearby venues and determine local time zones. The device's Apple or Android geocoding service processes a city, ZIP, or public venue address when you ask the app to resolve it to a map point. These providers process data on our behalf only to operate the features described in this policy.
• Other users, as designed: the profile fields, gathering and venue submissions, messages, RSVPs, and distance buckets described above are shown to other users because that is what the app does. Nothing is shown beyond what those features require.
• Legal requirements: if we are legally compelled to disclose data, we disclose the minimum required.

05.Retention and deletion

We keep your data while your account is active. You can delete your account from inside the app at any time, under Settings, Account, Delete account. Deletion removes your profile, snapped profile location, availability, discovery presence, the gatherings you hosted, the messages you sent, and any photos you uploaded. It also removes the account link from operational area-lookup records. If you signed in with Apple, we also revoke your Apple token with Apple at the same time. Records of reports filed about other people may be retained where needed for safety and legal reasons.

You can also request deletion by email at rob@contriboot.dev and we will process it promptly.

06.Age requirement

You must be 13 or older to use Gatherings. Immediately after sign-in, signup asks for your date of birth before profile or discovery setup. An account that states an age under 13 is refused and deleted, and an accepted date of birth cannot be changed afterwards.

If you are 13 to 17, your account runs in a restricted teen mode. These limits are enforced on our servers, not just hidden in the app: you cannot use chat or direct messages, post a beacon, host a gathering, send an in-app gathering invitation, or upload a profile photo, and you do not appear in player discovery or in any public profile listing. Teen accounts can share and redeem personal friend invite codes. A teen's name and photo are withheld from that invite's web page and redemption response, and the connection does not open any chat or contact path. Other users cannot contact you through Gatherings at all.

Your date of birth is used only to determine which of these rules apply to your account. It is never shown to other users.

07.Children's privacy

We do not permit accounts for anyone under 13 and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we delete the account and its data.

From a teen account aged 13 to 17 we collect the functional account, game, availability, when-in-use location, RSVP, favorites, venue-contribution, report, and preference data described above. The device position is used to find nearby places as described in section 03, while only the coarsened profile point and, when an area lookup is needed, a quarter-degree area-cell center are retained. Teen accounts can also share or redeem a personal friend invite code, so we retain the resulting inviter and invitee link and notify the inviter without exposing a teen's name. Because teen accounts cannot chat, message, host, send in-app gathering invitations, post beacons, or upload a profile photo, we do not collect those content types from teen accounts.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not use it for targeted advertising, at any age. If you are a parent or guardian and want to review or delete your teen's account, or if you believe someone under 13 is using Gatherings, email rob@contriboot.dev.

08.Your rights

Wherever you live, you can:

• Ask for a copy of the personal data we hold about you
• Ask us to correct data that is wrong
• Delete your account and data, in-app or by email, without needing to justify it

California residents: under the CCPA you have the right to know what personal information we collect (this policy is that disclosure), the right to delete it, and the right to non-discrimination for exercising those rights. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined in the CCPA, so there is nothing to opt out of.

EU and UK residents: we process your data to provide the service you signed up for (contract) and to keep the community safe (legitimate interest). Optional items like your photo and visibility are processed with your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. You have rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, and objection, and the right to complain to your local supervisory authority. Contact for all of these: rob@contriboot.dev.

09.Changes to this policy

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the effective date at the top and notify you in the app before the change takes effect. We will never quietly weaken the location privacy rules in section 03.

10.Contact

Gatherings is operated by Contriboot. For anything about this policy or your data, email rob@contriboot.dev.