Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

This Privacy Policy describes how Towne, operated by Axiomic, LLC(“we,” “us,” or “our”), collects, uses, and protects information when you use our free, ad-free neighborhood social platform (“Service”). This Service is operated by Axiomic, LLC, based in California.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information to third parties. We never have, and we never will.

This Privacy Policy should be read in conjunction with our Terms of Service, which governs your use of the platform.

2. Definitions

• “Personal Information” means any information that identifies, relates to, or could reasonably be linked to you.
• “Service” refers to the Towne mobile application, the website at towneapp.com, and all related features.
• “Neighborhood” refers to the geographic community, based on your ZIP code, within which you participate.
• “Member” refers to a registered user of the Service. “Visitor” refers to anyone accessing the public website without an account.

3. What Personal Information Is Collected

3.1 Information You Provide Directly

Account and profile information. Email address, display name, profile photo, hometown, bio, optional links to your other profiles (such as LinkedIn, X, TikTok, or a personal website), and any other details you choose to add to your profile.

Invitation and vouch information. Membership is invite-only. If you join using an invitation code from an existing Member, we record which Member vouched you in. We use this link internally to keep the community accountable and to address abuse, and to credit the inviting Member (for example, toward the Mayor badge). If you are a Member, we also store the invitation codes you create and how many neighbors have joined using them.

Neighborhood information. The ZIP code used to place you in your neighborhood. For invited Members, this ZIP comes from your invitation code. We do not currently collect a street address or block.

Content.Posts, comments, direct messages, photos, poll responses, RSVP responses, bookmarks, and flags. Content you post is visible to other members of your neighborhood according to the channel’s visibility rules (see Section 5).

Invitation requests and waitlist signups. If you request an invitation or join our waitlist without becoming a Member, we collect your name, email address, ZIP code, and any optional message you provide, and we retain this information to contact you about access and to manage invitations. This includes people whose neighborhood is already active but who do not yet have an invitation code.

Requests that come through a shared link.If you request an invitation after following a link a Member shared, we also record which Member’s link referred you, so we can notify that Member and let them welcome you in. To make that decision, the referring Member can see your name, your neighborhood, and any optional message you include with your request. They do not see your email address, which we keep and use only to send you an invitation if you are approved.

Support and feedback. When you contact support, we collect your email, the content of your message, and any attachments.

3.2 How You Sign In

Your email address, and nothing else. On the web we send you a one-time link, and clicking it signs you in. In the iOS app we email you a one-time code, which you enter in the app. We use your email to send these sign-in links and codes and the notifications you opt into; we do not require or store a password.

There is no third-party sign-in. Towne does not offer Sign in with Apple, Google, or Facebook, and does not receive any information about you from those companies. Signing in requires only an email address you can read.

3.3 Information Collected Automatically

Device data. Device type, operating system version, app version, screen resolution, IP address, device identifiers used to deliver push notifications, and approximate region derived from your IP address.

Device integrity checks (iOS app only).When the iOS app asks to join a neighborhood, it uses Apple’s App Attest to prove the request came from a genuine, unmodified copy of the app on real Apple hardware, rather than from a script. We verify that proof and discard it. No device identifier from this check is ever stored, and it is not linked to you or used to recognize your device again.

Usage data. Features you access, posts you view (anonymized view counts are used for community moderation scoring such as the political-flag ratio), RSVP responses, and votes.

Push notification tokens. For delivering the notifications you opt into.

3.4 Location Data

Towne does not currently collect location data. We do not track your location and use no background or continuous location collection.

We reserve the right to introduce optional neighborhood-verification features in the future that may use location (for example, a one-time or time-limited residence check). If we do, we will update this Policy to describe what is collected and how long it is kept, request any permission your device requires, and provide notice as appropriate before any such collection begins.

We do not continuously track your location, and we do not use location for advertising or analytics. If we introduce optional location pins on posts in the future (for example, for Safety & Alerts or Lost & Found), any such pin would be information you choose to share with your post, not data we collect automatically.

3.5 Image Metadata (EXIF)

Photos from your device camera often contain embedded metadata such as GPS coordinates, device model, and timestamps. When you upload photos to Towne, we automatically strip EXIF metadata before storing the image. This protects against accidental disclosure of your home address or device details to other members. We recommend you also strip metadata from any images you share elsewhere online.

3.6 Contacts and Address Books

We do not sync, upload, or collect your contacts or address book. Ever. Towne never requests access to your phone contacts and never asks you to “find friends” by importing everyone you know. If you want to invite one specific person, you can type in their email address or phone number yourself. We never reach into your device’s contacts to do it for you. When you enter an email address to invite someone, Towne sends that single message on your behalf; when you enter a phone number, the message is composed in your own texting app and the number is never sent to Towne. This is a deliberate design choice: your relationships are your own, and using contact sync to accelerate growth is exactly the kind of practice we’re building Towne to avoid.

3.7 Information About Non-Members

If a member posts or comments mentioning a non-member (for example, naming a neighbor who is not on Towne), that content may reference the non-member. Members are responsible for only sharing information about others with consent. Non-members may contact [email protected] to request that content about them be removed.

If a member invites a non-member by entering their email address, we use that address only to deliver that one invitation through our email provider. We do not store it in the neighborhood’s records, sell or share it, or add it to any marketing list, and we send no follow-up.

3.8 Information About Local Businesses

Members can create listings for local businesses and write recommendations about them. A listing may include the business name, category, town, and optionally a phone number, website, and photograph. All of it is supplied by members, not by the business.

Many of the businesses neighbors recommend are run by one person, so this can be personal information about an individual who is not a Towne member. We publish it because a neighbor has affirmatively vouched for that person’s work, and because business contact details are ordinarily shared in order to be contacted.

If you are named in a listing, or your details appear in one, you can ask us to correct or remove it at [email protected] or through our support page. We remove a listing at the request of the business or person it describes.If a member invites someone by text message, the message is composed on the member’s own device and the recipient’s phone number is never transmitted to or stored by Towne.

Visitors to towneapp.com have basic request data collected as described in Section 3.3.

4. How Your Personal Information Is Used

• To provide the Service: displaying your posts to neighbors, delivering direct messages, processing votes and notifications.
• To place you in your neighborhood: using the ZIP code you provide. If we introduce neighborhood verification in the future, we will use information as described in this Policy for that purpose and update it accordingly.
• For community moderation: anonymized view counts and vote tallies power the community-driven moderation system (political-flag scoring, post ranking). We may use automated systems to detect spam, abuse, or Code of Conduct violations.
• To communicate with you: sending transactional emails (welcome, account updates, support replies) via Resend.
• To improve the Service: privacy-first analytics to understand aggregate usage and retention. The iOS app bundles no third-party analytics software of any kind . No analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, and no session recording are present in it. Towne itself records the same limited in-product actions from both the website and the app, described in Usage Data above, such as that a post was created or viewed. We record the action, never its content, and we do not build behavioral profiles of individual Members. On the web we additionally use Vercel Web Analytics (cookie-free, hashed IPs, no individual profiling, no advertising cookies) and PostHog for product analytics such as funnels and retention. PostHog is configured conservatively: cookie-free (no cookies or local storage), no session recording, and no automatic click capture. PostHog runs on the website only.
• To detect and prevent abuse: identifying spam, fraud, and bot activity; enforcing our Terms of Service and Code of Conduct.
• For legal and safety reasons: see Section 6.
• Anonymized aggregate research.We may generate aggregated, de-identified data from personal information and use or share this anonymized data for research, Service improvement, and public communication about Towne (for example, “93% of our members report better neighborhood connection”). Such data no longer identifies you.

5. Content Visibility and Public Content

Posts, comments, and direct messages are visible to other members of your neighborhood, subject to the visibility rules of each channel. Direct messages are not visible to other members: only the sender and the recipient can read them in the Service.

Direct messages are private from other members, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. They are stored in our database in a readable form (encrypted in transit and at rest, as described in Section 7, but decryptable by us). This means Towne personnel are technically able to access direct message content. In practice we access it only when we have a specific reason to: to investigate a report or a safety concern, to resolve a technical fault you have asked us to fix, to prevent fraud or abuse, or where we are legally required to. We do not read direct messages for advertising, profiling, or model training, and we never sell them.

Legal process. Because direct messages are not end-to-end encrypted, we are technically capable of producing them in response to a valid subpoena, court order, warrant, or other lawful demand, and we may be legally obliged to do so. Where we are permitted by law to notify you of such a demand before responding, our practice is to do so. A service that used end-to-end encryption could not produce message content in this way; Towne can. You should factor this into what you choose to send.

Why we do not use end-to-end encryption. Towne is a neighborhood service whose members live near one another, so the ability to review a reported message is central to keeping members safe. Without end-to-end encryption we can review a reported conversation in context, recognize a pattern of behavior across several reports, and respond to lawful demands and to safety emergencies. An end-to-end encrypted service can generally act only on what a reporter chooses to hand over. We consider that trade-off the right one for a neighborhood network, and we would rather state it plainly than imply a protection we do not provide.

You should have no expectation of privacy in Content you post publicly within the Service. Other members can view, screenshot, copy, or describe your public posts and comments, and we cannot prevent that. Content shared only in direct messages is visible to the intended recipient, who can similarly screenshot or share it. Do not post anything to Towne that you would not want preserved, shared, or resurfaced later.

Deleting a conversation clears it for you only.When you delete a direct message conversation, it is removed from your messages and you no longer see the earlier exchange. The other person keeps their copy, including anything you sent. This is deliberate: a delete that reached into someone else’s inbox would let a Member send an abusive message and then erase the evidence of it. If the other person writes to you again, the conversation reappears showing only what arrives after you deleted it. Deleting a conversation does not delete the underlying messages from our systems; to remove your messages entirely, delete your account (see Data Retention).

We strip location data from every photo you upload. Photos taken on a phone normally carry hidden EXIF metadata, which can include the exact GPS coordinates where the picture was taken, the time, and the device used. On a neighborhood platform that is a home address. Every photo you add to a post, a direct message, or your profile is re-encoded in your own browser or app before it is uploaded, and only the visible image survives that step. The coordinates never reach our servers, so there is nothing for us to store, leak, or hand over. This applies to both the website and the iOS app.

You can unsend anything you sent, at any time.Any message you have sent in a direct message can be deleted by you, with no time limit, and it is removed from the recipient’s view as well as your own. A marker remains showing that a message was deleted, so the conversation does not silently change shape. Most messaging services allow this only for a few minutes or a couple of days; we think your words should stay yours indefinitely. You can only ever delete your own messages, never the other person’s.

Reported content is preserved. When a Member reports a post, comment, or direct message, we capture the content as it existed at the moment of the report, so that we can review it. For a reported direct message conversation this includes recent messages from bothparticipants, not only the reported Member. A conversation cannot be fairly judged from one side of it. This captured copy is held separately, is visible only to Towne’s administrators, and is not removed when either Member later deletes the underlying messages or conversation. Without this, anyone could erase the evidence of their own abuse, and reports would be impossible to act on. Captured content is retained on the same schedule as other moderation records (see Data Retention).

Photos are served from public web addresses. Photos you attach to posts, and your profile photo, are delivered through public, hard-to-guess URLs rather than being gated behind a login. Anyone who has the link, including someone who is not a Towne member, can open that image, and copies shared or cached elsewhere are outside our control. We strip location and device metadata from photos before storing them (see Section 3.5), but the image file itself is not access-restricted. (Photos sent in direct messages are stored privately.)

Posts in the Recommendations, Events, and Safety & Alerts channels are visible on the public web at towneapp.com in anonymized form. Your display name is replaced with “A neighbor in [Neighborhood].” The post body, location (if provided), and channel-specific structured fields (business name, event date, etc.) are visible. You are informed of this during post composition.

Members can share individual posts as public links. Any Member can generate a shareable web link to a specific post, for example to show it to a neighbor or to post it on another platform. Anyone who opens that link, including non-Members, can view that single post in anonymized form: your display name is replaced with “A neighbor in [Neighborhood],” and the post body, any attached photo, and any link preview are shown. The link exposes only that one post, never the rest of your neighborhood’s feed. We record internally which Member generated a given link, which we use to route join requests and to credit the sharer, and which is never shown to the public. Once shared, the anonymized post may be viewed, copied, cached, or re-shared by others in ways we cannot control or retrieve. Do not post anything you would not want shown outside your neighborhood in this anonymized form.

Your photo album is private to you. Every photo you share on Towne, whether in a post, a comment, or a direct message, also appears in your personal photo album, shown in the Service as Shared Photos. Only you can see that album. Other Members cannot view it, and there is no setting that makes it visible to anyone else.

Deleting a photo from your album removes it everywhere you shared it. The post, comment, or message itself remains and keeps its text, but the photo is removed for everyone who could previously see it, including the recipient of a direct message. Removal from those places is permanent: restoring a photo returns it to your album only and does not put it back into the post, comment, or message it came from.

Deleted photos are held for 30 days.A photo you delete moves to a private “Recently Deleted” area, where only you can restore it. After 30 days the file is permanently destroyed. During that window the file continues to exist on our systems even though it is no longer visible to anyone, including you, anywhere on Towne. If you want a photo destroyed immediately, Recently Deleted offers a permanent delete that skips the 30 days.

One exception, for safety. If a photo has been reported by another Member, a copy is retained under our moderation log schedule (see Data Retention below) even if you delete it and even if you use permanent delete. The photo still leaves your album and every place you shared it; the retained copy exists only so that a Member cannot erase the evidence of what they sent. Ordinary deletion is never retained this way.

You can control the visibility of your profile information in your account settings.

6. When We Share Personal Information

6.1 We Do Not Sell Your Data

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We do not use advertising cookies or cross-site tracking.

6.2 Service Providers

We share data with service providers who help us operate the Service. These providers are contractually bound to use your information only to provide their service to us:

Sub-processor changes. If we add, remove, or materially change the sub-processors listed above, we will update this Privacy Policy and notify active Members in advance of the change via email and in-app notification. You have the right to object to new sub-processors by terminating your account.

6.3 Law Enforcement and Legal Requests

We may retain, preserve, or share your Personal Information with law enforcement, government authorities, or private parties if we have a good-faith belief it is reasonably necessary to:

• Respond to a valid, binding legal request (subpoena, search warrant, court order, or other legal process);
• Detect, investigate, prevent, or address fraud, unauthorized access, abuse, or security issues;
• Enforce our Terms of Service or Code of Conduct;
• Protect the rights, property, or safety of Towne, our members, or the public.

6.4 Emergency Response

For posts in the Safety & Alerts channel that indicate an imminent threat to life or public safety, we may share relevant information with emergency responders or first responders to facilitate emergency response.

6.5 Business Reorganization

If Axiomic, LLC is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your Personal Information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your Personal Information becomes subject to a different privacy policy.

7. Data Storage and Security

Data is stored on Supabase (PostgreSQL), with uploaded photos held in Supabase Storage; all data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256). On the web, your session is held in a secure, HTTP-only cookie; in the iOS app, authentication tokens are stored in the iOS Keychain. We do not store passwords, payment card numbers, government identification documents, or biometric data.

Content we send to you by email leaves our systems. Notification emails include a preview of the content they are about. A new-direct-message notification contains an excerpt of that message, and comment, mention and tag notifications contain an excerpt of the post or comment. Those excerpts are handled by our email provider (Resend, listed in Section 6.2) and then stored in your mailbox by your own email provider, where they remain subject to that provider’s policies rather than ours, and where they persist even if the message is later deleted in Towne. Photographs sent in a direct message are never embedded in an email for this reason. You can turn these emails off in Settings.

No system is perfectly secure. If we become aware of a breach affecting your Personal Information, we will notify affected users within 72 hours of discovery via email and in-app notification, as required by applicable law.

8. Data Retention

Account data is retained while your account is active. When you delete your account, your personal data is erased from our primary production systems immediately and permanently; there is no reactivation window, so deletion cannot be undone (see Backups below for the one narrow exception).

Specific retention periods:

• Account & profile data: while your account is active; deleted immediately upon your deletion request.
• Posts, comments, and direct messages:deleted immediately upon your deletion request. Content that has been reshared or screenshotted by other Members is outside our control. Note that deleting an individual conversation from your messages hides it from you but does not erase it from our systems or from the other participant’s messages (see Content Visibility above).
• Deleted photos: removed from your album and from every post, comment, or message they appeared in immediately. The underlying file is then held for 30 days in Recently Deleted so that you can restore it, after which it is permanently destroyed. You may delete a photo permanently at any point during that window. A photo that has been reported is retained under Moderation logs below regardless.
• Location data: not collected at this time. If introduced for optional verification in the future, any location data will be deleted within 14 days of that check.
• Moderation logs (reports, violations): retained up to 2 years to identify repeat violators and respond to legal process. This includes the copy of reported content captured when a report is filed, which is retained for that period even if you later delete the original post, comment, message, conversation, or photograph. Content is captured only when something is reported; ordinary deletion is not retained this way.
• Anonymized vote tallies and aggregate statistics: retained indefinitely but no longer linked to you.
• Waitlist signups: retained until you unsubscribe or we delete the waitlist (typically after launch in your neighborhood).

Backups. Our database provider (Supabase) maintains encrypted point-in-time backups for disaster recovery. Deleted data may persist in those backups for up to 30 days before being fully overwritten. We do not restore or query backups to recover deleted personal data except as required to respond to legal process or to recover from a disaster affecting all users.

Content that you have shared publicly and that has been cached or indexed by third parties (for example, search engines or archive services) is outside our control.

9. Your Privacy Rights

9.1 All Users

• Access: Request a copy of your data by emailing [email protected]. We will provide it in a machine-readable format (such as JSON) within 30 days.
• Correction: Update your profile information at any time in Settings.
• Deletion:Delete your account via Settings → Delete Account. Your data is erased immediately and permanently; this cannot be undone.
• Portability: On request (see Access above), we provide your data in a machine-readable format such as JSON.
• Objection and restriction: Contact [email protected] to object to or restrict specific processing.

9.2 California Residents (CCPA/CPRA)

California residents have the right to know what Personal Information we collect, how it is used, and with whom it is shared; request deletion; and opt out of the “sale” or “sharing” of Personal Information. We do not sell or share Personal Information for cross-context behavioral advertising.

We do not use sensitive Personal Information (as defined by CPRA) for purposes other than providing the Service.

To exercise your rights, contact [email protected]. We will respond within 45 days. You may designate an authorized agent to submit requests on your behalf.

9.3 Other U.S. State Privacy Rights

Residents of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia may have rights similar to those described above. Contact [email protected] to exercise your rights.

9.4 EU and UK Residents (GDPR)

The Service is directed only to residents of the United States and is not offered or marketed to residents of the European Union, the European Economic Area, or the United Kingdom, and we do not monitor the behavior of individuals located there (see Section 10). Accordingly, we do not act as a controller subject to the EU or UK General Data Protection Regulations. If you are nonetheless an EU or UK resident and believe you have rights under those laws, you may contact [email protected] and we will consider your request in good faith and respond within 30 days.

10. International Data Transfers

Towne is operated from, and is directed only to residents of, the United States. The Service is not offered or marketed to residents of the European Union, the European Economic Area, or the United Kingdom. If you nonetheless access the Service from outside the United States, you do so on your own initiative; your Personal Information will be transferred to and processed in the United States, which may have data protection laws different from those in your country, and by using the Service you consent to this transfer.

11. Children’s Privacy

Towne is not intended for use by children under 13. We do not knowingly collect Personal Information from children under 13 (“COPPA” applies). In certain U.S. states (Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Maryland, Connecticut, and Nebraska), you must be 18 or older to register.

If you are between 13 and 17 years of age, you may only use the Service with the consent of a parent or legal guardian, and by registering you represent that such consent has been obtained. Some jurisdictions (including California, Colorado, and Connecticut) impose additional protections on the personal information of minors; we do not sell or use minors’ information for targeted advertising under any circumstances.

If we become aware that we have collected Personal Information from a child in violation of these limits, we will delete it immediately. If you believe we may have collected such information, contact [email protected].

12. Use of Artificial Intelligence

Towne does not currently use artificial intelligence (AI) or machine-learning (ML) features to process user content in any user-facing capacity.

• We do not train AI or ML models on your posts, comments, direct messages, photos, or any other Content you submit to the Service.
• We do not share your Content with third-party AI services or large language models for training, fine-tuning, or inference on their behalf.
• Content ranking and moderation on Towne are rule-based, not AI-driven. The political-flag system, post ranking, and auto-hide thresholds use transparent algorithms (time-decay, community voting ratios) that are not generative AI.

Forward-looking disclosure. If we introduce AI-powered features in the future (for example, automated spam detection, content moderation assistance, or recommendation systems), we will:

• Update this Privacy Policy to disclose the specific AI features and their purpose;
• Update the sub-processor table in Section 6.2 if any user Content is processed by a third-party AI vendor;
• Comply with applicable AI transparency obligations under laws such as the EU AI Act, the Colorado AI Act, California AB-2013, and any similar state or federal regulations;
• Where required by law, provide users with the ability to opt out of AI-driven decision-making that materially affects their account, content visibility, or access to the Service;
• Never silently train generative AI models on user Content without clear prior disclosure and, where required by law, affirmative consent.

13. Third-Party Links

The Service may contain links to third-party websites or services that are not operated by Towne. This Privacy Policy does not apply to those third parties, and we are not responsible for their content, practices, or policies. We encourage you to review the privacy policies of any third-party services you visit.

14. Do Not Track

Our systems do not currently respond to “Do Not Track” browser signals, as no industry-wide standard for handling them has been adopted. However, we do not engage in the cross-site tracking that DNT was designed to prevent.

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes at least 30 days before they take effect via email and in-app notification. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance.

16. Contact

For privacy inquiries, data requests, or concerns:
[email protected]
Axiomic, LLC
1 Blackfield Dr PMB 216, Tiburon, CA 94920