Privacy at Gather

What we collect

Your account. Your email address, the name you choose to display, and a profile photo if you add one. That's what makes you findable to friends and nothing more: you control whether people can find you by search in Settings.

Your places. Your home location if you set one, and any places you save, so meets can be planned from them. You can change or remove these any time in the app.

Your location. This one gets its own section below, because it matters most.

Your meets. Who you invited, who accepted, the activity, the venues Gather suggested and the one you chose, and when people set off and arrived. Completed meets are deleted around 60 days after they end.

Ratings and photos. If you rate a spot or add photos after a meet, we keep those to make your group's future recommendations better. Photos are re-encoded on upload and location data embedded by your camera is stripped before anything is stored.

Notifications. If you turn on notifications we store the token your device gives us so we can send them. Read notifications are deleted after 30 days.

How the app is used. We collect analytics events, for example that a meet was created or a search was run, to understand what is working. Analytics are stored in the EU, your email is never stored in them in readable form, and events are deleted after 180 days. Error reports help us fix crashes and are configured to exclude personal information.

Your location

Gather is built around one idea: finding somewhere fair for everyone to meet. That needs your starting point. Here is exactly what we use, when, and what we keep.

Your starting point. When you create or join a meet, you choose a starting location: your current location, your home, or a saved place. That point is sent to our servers to work out a fair meeting spot for your group, and people in your meet can see it on the meet's map. It is stored with the meet and deleted when old completed meets are cleaned up, around 60 days after they end.

Your home and saved places. If you set a home location or save places like work, we store those so meets can be planned from them. You can change or remove them any time in the app.

While you're on your way (iOS app). During a live meet, the app works out how far along your route you are, on your phone. Only that progress figure is shared with people in your meet. Your live location itself never leaves your phone, and sharing stops the moment you arrive or the meet ends. Progress is held only in short-lived server memory, never written to our database, and is deleted when the meet ends. You can turn this off any time in Settings under Location and travel.

While you're on your way (web app). If you use Gather in a browser during a live meet, your position can be shared live with the people in that meet, and only them. We keep only your most recent position, which is overwritten each time it updates, and nothing is shared outside a live meet.

Who else processes it. To find venues and work out journey times, your starting point is sent to Google's Places and Directions services. The map itself is drawn by Mapbox, which receives the map area your app displays. We don't send your name with your location to either. Each has its own privacy policy covering data they receive directly.

What we never do. No background tracking outside a live meet. No location history. No sharing beyond the people in your meet.

Who we work with

Gather runs on a small set of services, each doing one job:

• Supabase (EU hosted) handles sign in and stores photos.
• Railway and Vercel host our servers and the web app.
• Google Places and Directions find venues and journey times, as described above.
• Mapbox draws the maps.
• Anthropic's Claude writes the short venue descriptions you see. It receives venue details, never your name or location history.
• Postmark sends account emails like confirmation codes.
• Sentry collects error reports, configured to exclude personal information.
• PostHog (EU region) stores our analytics.

We do not sell your data. We do not share it with anyone for advertising. Nobody outside this list receives it.

This website

letsgather.social itself is a simple static site. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics. The pages load the Figtree font from Google Fonts, so Google receives your device's IP address when a page loads, and the site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which keeps standard server logs. If you join the beta on the homepage, the email you enter is sent to Formspree, which passes it to us and nothing more.

Deleting your account

Settings, Account, Delete account. It's a real deletion: your account, your sign in record, your locations, your photos and your notification tokens are removed in one go. Meets you were part of survive for the other people in them, with your name replaced by "Deleted user". There is no soft delete and no waiting period.

Your rights

You're in control of your data. You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it (the in-app deletion above is usually the fastest way). Email support@letsgather.social and we'll sort it. If you're in the UK or EU you also have the right to complain to your data protection authority, which in the UK is the ICO.

Age

Gather is not intended for children under 16, and we don't knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If we change how Gather handles your data, we'll update this page and change the date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll tell you in the app before it applies.