Localsville Privacy Policy
1. Who we are
Localsville is an app for finding the people and places in your own town — neighbours who offer things, local businesses, and the occasional hand with a pickup or delivery. Localsville LLC operates it.
Localsville is a place to find each other. What happens next — a haircut, a jar of honey, a lift for a parcel — happens between real people in the real world.
2. What we collect
You give us
| Data | When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Phone number | Sign-in | The only identifier we require. Verified by SMS through Firebase. |
| Profile details | If you create a profile | Display name, tagline, story, the collections you pick, your community. |
| Photos | If you add them | Profile and offering photos, stored in our Supabase storage. |
| Offerings | If you list them | Titles, descriptions, prices, availability. |
| Place address | If you publish a Place | Street address for a Place you run, and its coordinates. |
| Messages | When you message someone | Conversation content between you and another person. |
| Requests and commitments | When you use them | Quotes, appointments, pickups and deliveries, including any note you write. |
| Delivery destination | For a courier delivery | Stored encrypted, and revealed to the assigned courier only when the delivery is live. |
| What you type into search | When you search | Used to answer that search. We do not build a search history — Localsville has no record of your past searches to show you or us. If you have turned on Search with AI, the words you typed are also sent to OpenAI to interpret them (section 5). |
| Support and reports | When you contact us or report something | What you tell us, and what our team records while reviewing it. |
We do not collect an email address. The app has no field for one.
Your device gives us
| Data | When | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Approximate location | Only if you turn it on | Used to suggest your community and show how far away things are. Coarsened on our servers before it is stored — see below. You can browse by town instead and never share location. |
| Voice, if you dictate a search | Only while you dictate | Speech recognition is performed by your device's operating system, which may send the audio to its own servers (for example Apple's) to transcribe it. Localsville does not receive or store audio — we receive only the resulting text, as if you had typed it. |
| Push notification token | If you allow notifications | Identifies your device so we can send you an update. Not an advertising identifier. |
| Basic device/app info | Ordinary app operation | The technical information any app exchanges with its servers. |
| How you use the payment screens | When you pay or get set up to be paid | Stripe's payment components record limited information about how their own screens are used, along with basic device and app details. Stripe uses it to complete the payment, prevent fraud, and for its own analytics. It is not used for tracking. |
| Diagnostic information | Ordinary app operation | The Firebase and Google components we use for sign-in and notifications collect limited diagnostic information about their own operation — enough to tell whether they are working — and use it to run those services and for their own analytics. Those providers state this diagnostic information is not linked to your identity. |
| Server logs | Every request | Our hosting keeps operational logs of requests to our servers. Our provider documents that these can include the client IP address, the request method and URL, the user agent, and coarse geographic metadata. They are used to run and secure the service, not to profile you. |
About location, specifically
We should be precise about this, because there is a difference between what we store and what we ever show.
- The address you publish for a Place — stored precisely, because you chose to publish it. A Place shows an exact address only when its owner turned that on.
- The location you set for discovery — snapped to a grid of roughly a quarter of a kilometre on our servers before it is stored. The precise fix from your device is validated and then discarded; we never keep it.
- What anyone else can derive from it — every distance anyone sees is calculated from that snapped grid cell, never from a precise point. Nothing un-snapped exists to reach another user or another device. That is what stops someone reading several distances and triangulating where you live.
- A delivery drop-off address is stored encrypted, and revealed only to the assigned courier while the delivery is live. Courier deliveries also record pickup and drop-off coordinates to price and run the delivery.
Your discovery coordinates are cleared when your account is anonymised.
We do not track you in the background. Location is read when you ask for something that needs it.
Payments
Card details never reach our servers. Payment is handled inside Stripe's own payment sheet; Stripe collects and processes the card. What we store is the record of the transaction — amounts, status, timestamps, and Stripe's identifiers for it. If you get paid through Localsville, Stripe Connect collects the identity and bank details it needs to pay you, and we store the resulting Stripe account identifier and payout ledger entries.
What we do NOT do
- No advertising, attribution or dedicated analytics SDK ships in this app. We do not use Google Analytics, Crashlytics, Sentry, or any advertising or attribution SDK. The operational providers we do use — Stripe for payments, Firebase for sign-in and notifications — collect the limited interaction and diagnostic information described above, for running their services and for their own analytics.
- We do not use your data for tracking. Localsville does not track you across other companies' apps or websites, and every provider above declares that what it collects here is not used for tracking either.
- We do not sell your data to advertisers. There is no advertising in Localsville and no advertising relationship to sell into.
- We do not build advertising profiles, and we do not share your data with data brokers.
- AI features are limited, named, and off until you say yes. Three features use an outside AI service (OpenAI): searching with AI, AI-powered discovery of your own profile, and the short summary Localsville can write about your profile. They are three separate choices; each asks your permission first, and each can be turned off on its own. Your private messages, photos, payment details, contact details and precise location are never sent to an AI service. Section 5 explains all three in full.
3. Why we use it
- To sign you in — your phone number, verified by SMS.
- To show you your town — local discovery, search, distance.
- To understand what you asked for — if you turned on Search with AI, the words you typed are interpreted by OpenAI so plain English finds the right neighbour (section 5).
- To let you be found — your public profile and offerings, as you chose to publish them; and, if you turned on AI-powered discovery, matched by what you mean as well as by the words you used (section 5).
- To carry a conversation — messages, quotes, appointments, pickups and deliveries.
- To move money correctly — payments, refunds, and payouts through Stripe.
- To tell you something happened — notifications, if you allow them.
- To keep people safe — reports, moderation review, support, and acting on abuse.
- To prevent fraud and meet our legal obligations — including keeping financial records.
Localsville does not currently use your content to train its own AI models. If an AI feature would ever involve a service provider using your content to improve its models, this policy will say so before that feature is enabled.
4. Who else touches it
| Processor | What for |
|---|---|
| Supabase | Our database, storage and server functions — where your account and content live. |
| Firebase (Google) | Phone-number sign-in and push notification delivery. |
| Stripe | Payments, and payouts via Stripe Connect. Stripe is its own controller for payment data; see Stripe's privacy policy. |
| OpenAI | The three AI features described in section 5 — interpreting the words you type into search, making a profile findable by meaning when its owner turned on AI-powered discovery, and writing the short public summary of a profile whose owner asked for one. Nothing else is sent to OpenAI. |
| Apple / Google | App distribution and platform notification services. |
Each is a service provider handling data on our instructions, except Stripe where noted. We do not sell or rent your data to anyone.
Where your data is held. Localsville's own database and storage are hosted in the United States. If you use Localsville from outside the US, your information is processed there. Our service providers each process data in their own locations, which we do not state here.
5. AI features, and what they send
Three parts of Localsville use an outside artificial-intelligence service. Our AI service provider is OpenAI. OpenAI processes this text on Localsville's behalf to provide the AI features described below. Each of the three asks your permission first, each stays off until you say yes, each can be switched off again afterwards, and Localsville works fully without any of them.
They are three separate choices, not one. Saying yes to any one of them never signs you up for another, and saying no to one never switches another off.
The calls to OpenAI are made by our servers, never by your phone, and our key to their service never leaves our servers.
Search with AI
This one is about finding, and it is your own choice as a searcher. Search normally matches on words, synonyms, the collections a profile appears under, and close spellings. With your permission, Localsville also sends the words you typed into the search box to OpenAI, which turns them into a mathematical representation of their meaning so that search can find someone who does what you described even if they never used your words.
- Only the search text is sent. Not your name, your account, your phone number, your location, your device or its identifiers, and nothing about the profiles that come back.
- We ask once, and no is a real answer. If you decline, search still works — the same word, synonym, collection and spelling matching described above, over the same results. Nothing is withheld from you for declining, and nothing is charged for accepting.
- You can change your mind at any time in Settings. If you are browsing without an account, your choice is kept on your device.
- We do not build a search history. Localsville has no feature that shows you, or us, a list of what you have searched for, and we do not keep your search text against your account in order to build one — your words are used to answer that search. What OpenAI does with its copy is described under "True of all three" below.
AI-powered discovery
This one is about being found, and it is the profile owner's choice. With your permission, Localsville sends the public text of your profile to OpenAI, which turns it into a mathematical representation of its meaning. We store that representation and compare it against what searchers describe, so that someone looking for "help pruning a mango tree" can find you even if your profile never used those words.
What we send is your display name, your short description, your story, your neighborhood, the collections you appear under, and the titles and descriptions of your published offerings. Only text that has already passed review and is publicly visible is sent — anything still waiting to be reviewed stays with us.
- What is never sent: your prices, your address or any coordinates, your phone number or other contact details, your photos, your messages, your payment or payout details, and anything else that is not part of your published profile.
- Nothing happens unless you turn it on. Publishing a profile does not require this; it is a separate, optional choice.
- Declining does not hide you. Your profile is still found in the app by name, by the words in it, by synonyms, by the collections you appear under and by close spellings. You are simply not matched by meaning.
- It keeps itself current. When you meaningfully change the public text of your profile, the representation made from the old text stops being used, and a new one is made from what your profile says now.
- You can withdraw at any time. Turn it off and the stored representation is deleted, no new one is made, and your profile stops being matched by meaning.
Localsville's summary of your profile
This one is about what is said about you, and it is also the profile owner's choice. If you have a profile, you can ask Localsville to write a short public summary of it — two or three sentences, in Localsville's words, shown on your profile in the app and on your public page on this website. To write it, we send OpenAI the public text of your profile: your display name, your short description, your story, the collections you appear under, the titles and descriptions of your offerings, your neighborhood and your community.
- What is never sent: your prices, your address or any coordinates, your phone number or other contact details, your photos, your messages, your payment or payout details, and anything else that is not part of your published profile.
- Nothing happens unless you turn it on. Publishing a profile does not require this; it is a separate, optional choice.
- It keeps itself current. When you meaningfully change the public text of your profile, the summary is written again from your new text.
- You can withdraw at any time. Turn it off and the stored summary is deleted, stops appearing on your profile and your public page immediately, and no new one is written.
- It is written only from what you published. It is instructed to invent nothing — no prices, no qualifications, no ratings, no claims about how good you are — and when there is not enough in your profile to say something specific, Localsville publishes no summary rather than a vague one.
Three choices, not one
The two profile-owner choices above are independent of each other, and both are independent of Search with AI. In plain terms:
- Turning on AI-powered discovery does not let Localsville write a summary about you. Nothing is written about you unless you separately turn the summary on.
- Turning on Localsville's summary does not put your profile into meaning-based matching. Your profile text is not sent for discovery unless you separately turn discovery on.
- Turning either of them off leaves the other exactly as it was.
- Search with AI affects only your own searches. It does nothing to your profile, and you do not need a profile to use it.
- None of the three is required to publish a profile, to be found, to message anyone, to buy, to sell, to be paid, or to use any other part of Localsville. You may say yes to all three, to some of them, or to none.
True of all three
- Private messages are never sent to an AI service. Neither are photos, payment or payout details, contact details, delivery destinations, precise location, or anything from support and safety reports.
- Localsville does not use your content to train its own AI models, and does not sell it.
- OpenAI is our processor, not a partner we hand you to. Under our data processing agreement with OpenAI, OpenAI processes this information on Localsville's behalf to provide the AI services we request, subject to its contractual security, abuse-prevention and legal obligations.
- Your content is not used to train AI models. OpenAI does not use what is sent through its API to train or improve its models unless the customer explicitly opts in. Localsville has not opted in, and we have turned off every data-sharing and model-improvement setting on our account.
- How long OpenAI keeps it. For the OpenAI API endpoints Localsville uses, information we send may be included in abuse-monitoring logs that are normally retained for up to 30 days. OpenAI may retain it longer where required by law or where reasonably necessary to protect its services or others from harm.
- These features do not moderate anything. None of the three decides what gets published, who gets approved, or what happens to a report. Public content review and reports are handled by a person on our team (sections 6 and 8).
- No AI system decides anything about you. Nothing about your account, your money or your standing on Localsville is decided by these features.
6. What other people can see
- Your public profile — name, photos, tagline, story, offerings, community, and the location you chose to publish — is visible to anyone browsing Localsville, including people who are not signed in.
- Your public profile and offerings are reviewed by a person on our team before they first publish, and when you edit them — while an edit is being reviewed, the previously approved version stays live. This review is done by people, not by automated scanning.
- Your phone number is never shown to other users.
- Messages are visible to you and the person you are talking with. They are not reviewed before delivery. Localsville personnel can read messages only for handling a report, for moderation and safety, for operating the service, and for legal compliance.
- If you block someone (Settings → Blocked people), neither of you can message the other and you stop appearing to each other. The blocked person is not notified.
- A delivery address is revealed to the assigned courier only, and only while the delivery is active.
- A profile that is deactivated, removed, suspended or closed stops appearing in discovery, search and public pages.
7. Keeping and deleting
You can ask us to delete your account from Settings → Delete account, in the app.
What happens, exactly:
- Immediately — your account is deactivated and your profiles stop appearing publicly.
- For 30 days — nothing is anonymised, and you can cancel and come back. This window exists so a mistaken or angry tap does not destroy your history.
- After 30 days — a nightly process anonymises the account.
Anonymised, not erased — and the difference is deliberate. We do not delete your records. We strip your identity out of them and leave the records themselves in place, because those records are also somebody else's: the other side of a conversation, a payment, a delivery, or a safety report. Concretely, after anonymisation:
- your display name becomes "Former member";
- your phone number is replaced with an unusable placeholder, freeing the real number — it is replaced rather than blanked;
- your profile text and coordinates are cleared, and your photo records are removed (the underlying image files are purged by a cleanup job that runs weekly, so they can persist for up to a week after that point);
- your sign-in link is severed, so the account can never be signed into again;
- your messages, quotes, appointments, deliveries, transactions, payout ledger entries and any support or safety records remain, no longer carrying your name.
Sign-in is provided by Firebase. As part of final deletion, after the grace period, the Firebase authentication identity — the record holding your phone number — is also removed from Firebase's authentication system.
We keep the following on purpose, for as long as the law or safety requires:
- payment and transaction records, and payout ledgers (financial and tax obligations);
- support, safety and moderation records (so a resolved abuse report cannot be erased by the person who caused it);
- your Stripe customer reference, where one exists, for those financial records;
- anything a law or a legal hold requires us to retain.
Deletion also waits if something is unresolved — an active appointment or delivery, a payment in flight, an unfinished refund, money owed or owing, or an open safety review. We tell you in the app when this is why. See Account Deletion & Data Retention for the complete list.
8. Your choices and rights
- Location, notifications, photos — all optional, all controlled by your device's permissions, and all revocable at any time in your system settings. Localsville works without them; discovery falls back to choosing a town by name.
- Notification preferences — in the app, including quiet hours.
- Your profile — edit, pause, deactivate or remove it at any time.
- The three AI features — Search with AI, AI-powered discovery, and Localsville's summary of your profile — are three separate choices, each yours to turn on or off at any time: Search with AI in Settings, the other two on your profile. Turning discovery off deletes the stored representation of your profile; turning the summary off deletes the stored summary. Neither affects the other. See section 5.
- Blocking and reporting — block anyone from their profile or a conversation (managed in Settings → Blocked people), and report a profile or a message from inside the app. Reports are private and are never shown to the person reported.
- Access, correction, deletion — write to privacy@localsville.com and we will respond.
Depending on where you live you may have additional rights (for example under the CCPA/CPRA or the GDPR), including access, correction, deletion, portability, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them.
9. Children
Localsville is for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to use it. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone younger; if we learn that we have, we will delete the account.
10. Security
Access to your data is restricted at the database level, so one account cannot read another's private records. Delivery addresses are stored encrypted. Payment card details never reach our systems. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise.
11. Changes
If we change this policy we will update the effective date above and, for a material change, tell you in the app.