Privacy Policy

The short version

Villages is an app for a small group of neighbours who share one village. It deliberately sends you to a real place — your village's Town Hall — to do certain things, so it needs to know that you are standing there at that moment. It does not need to know where you live, and it does not ask.

Three things are worth knowing up front.

1. We never ask where you live. There is no home address, no home location, no home verification anywhere in the product.
2. Location is only ever read in the foreground, at the moment you act at the Town Hall, and your coordinates are not kept.
3. A letter's words are held back until you collect it in person. That is enforced by the database itself, not by the app being polite about it.

The rest of this document explains all of that properly.

Who we are

Villages Ltd (registration in progress), operated by founder Ibrahim Chaudry, provides the Villages app and is responsible for the personal information described here. You can reach us at support@villages.mobile about anything in this document.

The company is being registered. Until the company number exists, that is the controller identity we publish. When registration completes, the registration number and registered office will be published here.

What we collect

Your account and profile

Your name, your handle, your email address, the drawn house you choose to stand for you (one of twelve — or, if you leave the choice to the village, one picked for you from your account), and — if you choose to add them — a profile photograph and answers to three short questions asked when you arrive (“What brought you here?”, “What would you bring to a gathering?”, “What are you hoping to find?”). Those answers are chosen from a fixed list, never written: there is no free-text box anywhere on that step, and every answer is one of five options or nothing at all. Any of the three may be left unanswered, and any of them may be changed or cleared afterwards from your profile.

Your house and your answers are shown to the neighbours who can already see your name. A profile photograph, if you add one, appears only on your profile page, never beside your name in lists.

Authentication is handled for us by Supabase; the password itself is not visible to us.

Sign-up also asks for your date of birth, to check that you meet our 16+ floor. The date itself is not sent to us and is not stored. What is stored is the declaration you made — see Age below for exactly what that is.

Your village

Which village you belong to and what role you hold in it. A Village Chief is the person who founded or now stewards the village; everyone else is a member.

Your house

A house in a village is a symbolic plot with a house number. It has no geographic meaning at all — it is not tied to a real address or to any coordinates, and nothing in the app is unlocked by being at it.

The things you post

Posts, comments and likes in your village's Town Hall feed. Gatherings you host — including the venue details and time you type in — and your RSVPs to other people's gatherings. Rituals you create or complete. Images you attach to any of that.

Letters

A letter is a private typed page between two members of the same village. It is typed, not photographed — there is no camera scan and no text recognition anywhere in the product. We store the sender, the recipient, the village, the state the letter is in, the times it moved between those states, and the text of the letter itself so that it can be handed over.

Your Story

During onboarding you are asked a series of questions. Your answers are stored, and they are sent to OpenAI to generate the short poem that appears on your profile. The generated poem is stored with your profile.

Notifications

If you allow push notifications, we store the push token your device gives us and your per-notice preferences, so we can send the notice and so we can stop sending it when you turn it off.

An in-app event log

We record a small set of named product events — for example that a Town Hall was opened, a letter was sent, a ritual was completed — with the village they happened in and a few plain properties. This log lives in our own database. It is not sent to a third-party analytics company. By design it does not carry coordinates, letter text, or your onboarding answers.

Subscription state

If you are a Village Chief who pays for village stewardship, we store the state of that subscription — whether it is active, in a grace period, expired, when it renews, and which product it is. Payment itself happens through Apple; we never see your card details.

What we do not collect

This list is deliberate, and it is enforced in the schema rather than left to good intentions.

• No home address. We do not ask for one, store one, verify one or infer one.
• No home location. There are no home coordinates and no home verification. Nothing is unlocked by "being at home", because the app has no idea where home is.
• No doorstep or hand delivery. Letters do not go to houses. They go to the Town Hall.
• No background location. The app does not track you while it is closed or in the background, and there is no movement history.
• No camera-scanned letters. The scan-and-recognise pipeline was retired, and the private storage bucket it used is gone.

Living near your village's Town Hall is a suggestion we make in the copy. It is never a fact we check.

How location actually works

Town Hall presence is the single location primitive in the whole product. There is no other place where the app reads where you are.

When it is read. Only in the foreground, and only at the moment you take one of these actions at your village's Town Hall:

• checking in at the Hall,
• posting to the Town Hall feed,
• dropping a letter off,
• collecting a letter.

Nothing is captured between those moments.

What happens to the reading. Your coordinates are sent to the server, compared against the Hall's position, and not stored. What is kept alongside the action is the resulting distance from the Hall and the accuracy figure your device reported — nothing that could place you anywhere else.

What gets rejected. A location fix whose reported accuracy is worse than 150 metres, or which is more than about two minutes old, is refused. You will be asked to try again rather than quietly let through.

How long a check-in lasts. A Town Hall check-in expires 30 minutes after you make it.

How letters handle your words

The mechanic and the privacy protection are the same thing here, so it is worth being precise.

When you write a letter, it sits with you until you physically go to your village's Town Hall and drop it off. Your presence at the Hall is verified at that moment. From then, the letter waits at the Hall until the recipient physically goes there and collects it — their presence is verified too.

The text is released only on collection. Until then, an ordinary client cannot read the letter's text at all. This is not a matter of the app hiding a field: the database does not grant read access to that column to any ordinary account. The text comes back from exactly one operation — collecting the letter, standing at the Hall.

Not even our moderators can read a letter. That is the same restriction, applied to us. It has a consequence for complaints, and the Community Guidelines set it out honestly.

A notice that a letter is waiting carries no letter text. The push notification path is held inside the same restriction, so it is not capable of putting your words into a notification payload even by mistake.

Notices respect a night curfew. A letter dropped between 23:00 and 06:00 in the village's local time surfaces at 06:00. Villages default to Europe/London time. This too is enforced as a database read rule, which means that before that moment the recipient cannot see that the letter exists at all — not merely that they cannot read it.

Who else processes your information

We keep this list short on purpose.

Apple only, for now. Villages launches on iOS. Android and Google Play are out of scope for launch, which is why this list names Apple's push service and no Google service. If that ever changes, this list changes with it.

Information that leaves the UK and the EEA

Our database, file storage and server functions sit in the eu-west-1 region. Two processors sit outside the UK and the EEA: OpenAI, for poem generation and content screening, and RevenueCat, for subscription state.

Both are engaged under their standard data processing agreements, which carry the EU standard contractual clauses and the UK international data transfer addendum. Putting those agreements formally in place is an outstanding task on our side and is being done before launch — we would rather tell you that than imply paperwork exists that does not.

Who can see what

• Your profile is visible to other members of your village.
• Town Hall posts, comments and likes are visible to members of your village who are entitled to read that feed.
• Gatherings and RSVPs are visible to members of the village the gathering belongs to.
• A letter is visible to its sender and its recipient only — and its text only to the recipient, only after collection.
• A limited public directory of Town Halls exists so that people can find a village to join. It carries the Hall's venue information, not member information.
• Blocking someone stops their new Town Hall items appearing in your feed.
• Our moderators can see reported content and the content in the review queue. They cannot see letter text.

How long we keep things

Your content stays until you delete it or delete your account. Beyond that:

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from within the app. Deleting removes the files you own — your avatar and images you posted — and your authentication record, and the rows that depend on your account follow it.

One exception: if you are a Village Chief and your village has other members, you must transfer the Chief role to someone else first. The app will refuse the deletion and tell you so. This is to stop a village being left without a steward.

Getting a copy of your information

There is no self-serve export at launch. If you want to see the information we hold about you, or want a copy of it in a portable form, write to support@villages.mobile and we will put it together by hand and answer within one month. A self-serve export is work we intend to do after beta.

Security

Access to your data is controlled at the database level rather than in the app, so a bug in the interface cannot hand out something it should not. The clearest example is letters: the text is simply not readable by an ordinary account, no matter what the app asks for. Server functions run with narrow, explicitly granted access rather than blanket permissions.

No system is perfect, and we will not claim otherwise.

Your rights

The law we work to. Villages is subject to the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

Your rights. You have rights to see the information we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to some uses of it, and to have it provided in a portable form. To ask about any of this, write to support@villages.mobile.

How quickly we answer. Within one month of your request.

Complaining to a regulator. If you are not happy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK supervisory authority. You can do that at any time, and you do not have to come to us first — though we would like the chance to put it right.

What we rely on to use your information. Our operating assumption is:

• Performance of our contract with you — running the village, the Town Hall, letters, gatherings and your account.
• Our legitimate interests — safety, moderation, preventing abuse, and the small in-app product event log we use to see whether the app works.
• Your consent where the law requires it — push notifications being the obvious example, which you turn on yourself and can turn off.

Age

Villages is for people aged 16 and over. Age is self-declared: sign-up asks for your date of birth and we take your answer at face value. There is no document check and no identity check. Someone under 16 cannot register, and there is no route for a parent or guardian to consent on their behalf.

Sixteen is higher than the age at which UK law lets a child agree to an online service on their own, which is 13. We set it higher on purpose: Villages sends people to physical venues to meet adults they have not met before, and that is not something we are willing to put a 13-year-old into.

How it works, and what is kept. You pick a date of birth from a picker on the sign-up screen. The app works out on your phone whether that date puts you at 16 or over, and then throws the date away. Your date of birth is never sent to us and we do not store it anywhere.

What we store against your account is the declaration: that you were asked to confirm you were 16 or over, that you said you were, and the moment you said it. That is enough to hold the floor and to show that we asked, and it is less about you than a birth date would be, which is why we chose it.

Only you can see that record. It is not visible to anyone else in your village, it is not in the public directory of Town Halls, and it is not part of any profile that another member can look at. Our database enforces that as a read rule, not as a habit.

If you are under 16, sign-up stops. The app says so, plainly, and no account is created. Nothing about the attempt is kept.

Accounts made before the question existed. The 16+ rule applied from the effective date of this policy; the question at sign-up came later. Older accounts therefore carry no declaration, because we will not record one that nobody actually made. The rule still binds them. If you believe someone under 16 has an account, write to support@villages.mobile and we will deal with it.

Changes to this policy

If we change what the app does with your information, we will change this document and update the revision date at the top.

Material changes are announced in advance. We will tell you in the app and by email at least 14 days before a material change takes effect. Continued use after that date is acceptance of the change. We keep an archive of previous versions — ask at support@villages.mobile if you want to see one.

Contact

support@villages.mobile
Villages Ltd (registration in progress), operated by founder Ibrahim Chaudry

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