Privacy Policy

1. The short version

• We collect what we need to run an event: your account details, the photos and videos you upload, and basic technical logs.
• Your Moments are visible to the people in the Gathering you uploaded them to — not to the public internet, and not to other Gatherings.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not use your content for advertising.
• You can ask for a copy of your data or ask us to delete your account.

2. What we collect

You give us:

• Account details: name, email address, optional phone number, optional nickname, username, pronouns, bio, and profile photo.
• Age confirmation (a yes/no, not a birth date).
• Content you upload: photos, videos, audio, captions, comments, reactions.
• Messages you send in a Gathering's Studio Chat (host, co-host, and GJ only).

We collect automatically:

• Technical data from your file: dimensions, duration, file type and size, and the time of upload.
• Service logs: IP address, browser type, and pages/actions, kept for security and debugging.

We do not collect payment information (there is no payment in pilots) or data from third-party trackers or advertising networks.

3. Photo and video metadata

Photos often carry hidden metadata written by the camera, which can include the location where the picture was taken.

• The versions other people see carry no metadata. Thumbnails, previews and screen versions are re-encoded by us, and that process does not copy the original metadata across. Nobody viewing your Moment in a Story or on the venue screen receives your location data.
• Your original file keeps its metadata, exactly as your device wrote it. The original is what a download returns, so anyone entitled to download your Moment receives the file as you uploaded it.
• We do not read, display, or use location data anywhere in the product.

If you would rather not share location data at all, turn off location tagging in your device's camera settings before the event.

4. Why we use it

We rely on your consent (given when you join) and our legitimate interest in operating a service you asked to use.

5. Who can see your content

• Other participants in the same Gathering see Moments shared to that Gathering's Story, and Moments shown on the venue screen.
• The host, co-hosts, and the GJ additionally see Moments awaiting review, and Studio Chat.
• Nobody outside the Gathering. Gatherings are invite-only; there is no public feed, and "shared" in GatherTime means shared with that Gathering, not published to the internet.
• Vault-only uploads are visible to you alone until you choose to share them.

Reports are anonymous to the reporter. If you report a Moment, the host sees the report and the reason; they do not see who reported it.

6. Service providers

We use infrastructure providers to host the service and store files. They process data on our instructions only.

Still being finalized. The specific hosting and email providers used in production will be named here before pilots begin. Ask us at privacy@gathertime.com in the meantime and we will tell you.

7. Retention

• Account data: kept while your account exists.
• Moments: kept while the Gathering exists or until you delete them.

Still being finalized. We have not yet set published retention periods for service logs, for backup copies of deleted content, or for a Gathering's content after the event ends. Rather than state a period we have not committed to, we are naming the gap: these will be published here before pilots, and you can ask privacy@gathertime.com for the current practice at any time.

8. Your choices

You can:

• see and edit your profile in the app;
• delete your own Moments while they are still under review; afterwards ask a host;
• request a copy of your data, or ask us to delete your account, by writing to privacy@gathertime.com. We will respond within 30 days.

If you are a resident of a state with specific privacy rights (for example California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia), you may have additional rights to access, correct, delete, or limit the use of your information. Contact us at the same address and we will honor them.

9. Children

GatherTime is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact privacy@gathertime.com and we will remove it.

10. Security

We use encrypted connections and restrict access to event content by role. No service is perfectly secure; please do not upload anything you could not bear to have exposed.

11. Changes

We will post material changes in the app before they take effect, and move the effective date shown at the top of this page.