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Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 12, 2026

This Privacy Policy explains how OneBlock ("OneBlock," "we," "us") handles information in the OneBlock mobile app and on joinoneblock.com (together, the "Service"). The short version: OneBlock knows where you live and who your household is, so we collect as little else as possible, nothing you post is public on the web, our analytics are anonymous and are never linked to you, we never sell your information, and we never ask for your device's location.

1. Information We Collect

Account information. When you create an account we collect your email address and how you signed in (email and password, Google, or Apple). If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive only basic profile information (name, email) from that provider, and nothing else from your Google or Apple account. Passwords are handled by our authentication provider and stored only in hashed form; we never see them.

Your signup code and your home. Joining requires a code issued for one specific address in your community. When you use it, we record that your account is the resident of that home, and we copy that home's street address onto your profile. You never type your own address: it comes from the code. Your community's roster of homes, with street addresses and map coordinates, is loaded into OneBlock by us from the list your community or its board gives us, before anyone signs up. Codes live in a table that no resident account can read at any depth.

Your profile. What you enter during signup and can edit any time: your first and last name and your birthday, which are required; at least five interests from a fixed list; and, optionally, what you do and a short bio. Your birthday is stored as month and day only, with no year, so the app can say happy birthday without knowing your age. Your street address is on your profile too, copied from the home your code opened rather than typed by you. We also store a private-profile setting. See section 3 for exactly what it does and does not do.

Your household. If you choose to add household members, we store a name, a relation (spouse, kid, or pet), an age if you give one, and for a pet its type. The whole step is optional and skippable, you enter it yourself, you can delete any member at any time, and every verified resident of your community can see all of it, including a child's name and age. Please read section 3 before adding anyone.

What you post and send. Posts, asks and their replies, chat messages, events and RSVPs, clubs and memberships, announcements, polls and votes, alerts, business listings and ratings, and waves. Chat messages are stored on our servers so they can be delivered, and they are not end-to-end encrypted.

Push notification tokens. If you allow notifications, we store the push token for each device, whether it is iOS or Android, and when it was last seen, along with your four category preferences. A token is a delivery address for a device, not an advertising identifier, and we store no device model, OS version, or IP address alongside it.

Usage analytics and crash data. We use PostHog to understand how the app is used and to catch crashes. This data is anonymous: we never link analytics to your account, your household, or your address, we create no person profiles, and a filter in the app strips names, addresses, house and profile identifiers, signup codes, coordinates, and the text of anything anyone wrote from every event before it is sent. Events record which community they came from, so we can see which neighborhoods use which features, but never which resident. We also turn off the analytics provider's IP-based location lookup. Collected data includes which screens and tabs are used, feature interactions, app version, device model, and crash diagnostics. Once a day, our server records how many homes in each community have been claimed, attributed to the community and to no person.

Support and email. If you email us, we have your email and what you wrote. If you join the waitlist on joinoneblock.com, we collect the email address you submit. The website is otherwise a static page with no analytics and no advertising cookies.

2. What We Do Not Collect

We do not ask for or collect your device's location. The app requests no location permission at all, and the map is drawn from the community's own address list, not from where your phone is.

We also do not collect photos or a profile picture, your phone number, your age or year of birth, your contacts, advertising identifiers, or any data used for tracking across apps or websites. We do not show ads.

Two things happen only on your device and never reach us. If you add an event you are attending to your calendar, the app asks your permission, checks which calendars on your phone it is allowed to write to, and adds that one event. It does not read your existing events, and nothing about your calendar reaches us. And your appearance and accessibility settings, whether you have seen the welcome tour, and the state behind the occasional "rate OneBlock" prompt are all kept in your phone's own app storage rather than on our servers, per device rather than per account.

3. Who Can See What

Your neighbors. Everything in your profile and household, and everything you post to your community, is visible to the other verified residents of that community. Your name, your street, your bio, your interests, your birthday's month and day, your household members including any children you list, and your posts are all neighbor-visible by design: that is what the app is for. Treat anything you enter as something the people on your street will read. Two specifics worth knowing: how you voted in a board poll is visible to your community, not secret, and a wave is visible only to the two people involved.

The private-profile setting, stated precisely. Turning it on tells the app to show other residents only your name and your shared interests, and to keep your street, bio, birthday, and household off their screens. Today it is a display setting rather than a server-side restriction: your profile row is still delivered to other residents' devices by our database, and the app is what declines to draw it. It reduces what a neighbor sees in OneBlock. It is not a guarantee against someone determined to read the underlying data, and it does not unsend anything you posted before you turned it on. We would rather tell you that than let the switch imply more than it does, and we are working on making it enforced at the database.

Your board. Residents marked as board members in your community can post announcements and polls, which only they can post; can pin something so it stops expiring; and can delete any content in that community, including yours. They cannot edit what you wrote, which is deliberate: removing a post is moderation, rewriting the words above your name is not. The exception is events and clubs, which a board member can edit, because a block party with the wrong date is everyone's problem. When a board member deletes someone else's content, the text that was removed is copied into an internal moderation log that the board members of that community can read.

What neighbors never see. Your email address and your password are held by our authentication system and are not on the profile your neighbors can read. There is no phone number field anywhere in the app, and no profile photo.

People outside your community. Nothing. Residents of one community cannot see another community's homes, residents, or content, and nothing posted in the app is published on the web or indexed by search engines.

Us. A small number of people working on OneBlock can reach records through an internal admin dashboard that sits behind Cloudflare Access and requires an approved identity to open. Through it we can see each community and its homes, each resident's name, street and board status, the signup code of any home nobody has claimed, and the moderation log, and we can reach account email addresses through our authentication provider's admin interface. We use it to set up communities, issue and reset codes, set board status, fix problems, and answer support and legal requests, not to read your conversations for any other reason.

4. How We Use Information

We use information to: run the Service (accounts, sign-in, your community's map, profiles, matches, chat, events, the board, and alerts); deliver notifications you have turned on; send service emails such as email confirmation and password reset, and product updates if you joined the waitlist; keep the Service secure and enforce our Terms; understand usage and fix crashes through anonymous analytics; and comply with legal obligations.

We do not use your posts, messages, or household information to train AI models, and we do not sell or rent your personal information or share it for advertising.

5. How Information Is Shared

Information is shared only with the service providers that make the app work, each processing data on our behalf:

  • Supabase: authentication, database, and the server functions the app calls. This is where your account, profile, household, and content live.
  • Expo's push notification service, and through it Apple's and Google's notification systems: they receive the notification and the device token it is going to. A notification can contain what a neighbor wrote. A direct message arrives titled with the sender's name and carrying the first 140 characters of the message; an alert carries its title and the first 140 characters of its body; a board announcement carries its title and the first 80 characters. Those words pass through Expo, then Apple or Google, and land on a lock screen.
  • Apple and Google: if you sign in with them. Signing in with Apple also means we hold a token from Apple, kept where the app itself cannot read it, for the single purpose of revoking OneBlock's access at Apple when you delete your account. Google's Firebase handles Android notification delivery.
  • PostHog: anonymous analytics and crash reporting, as described above, never linked to your account.
  • Cloudflare: website hosting, the internal admin dashboard, and the access control in front of it.
  • Loops: email delivery for the website waitlist, for product updates if you asked for them, and, where our sign-in provider is configured to use it, for service email such as email confirmation and password reset.
  • OpenFreeMap: the map tiles the app draws. Opening the map requests tiles for the area on screen, so that provider receives the approximate area being looked at and your device's IP address, the same as any map. Because the map opens framed on your own neighborhood, that first request effectively discloses roughly which neighborhood the device is looking at. No resident's address, name, or account reaches the map provider: your community's homes are drawn on your device from data already there, and we call no geocoding service at all.

We may also disclose information if required by law, or to protect the rights, safety, or security of OneBlock, our residents, or others. If OneBlock is ever transferred to another owner, account information would transfer with it, and we would say so before that happened.

6. Notifications

Nothing is sent until you grant your phone's notification permission, and you can change everything at any time in the app (Settings, then Notifications) or in your phone's own settings. There are four categories: emergency alerts, chat, board, and neighborly activity. All four start switched on, so the permission itself is the real gate.

Emergency alerts are deliberately hard to miss: they go out at high priority, marked time-sensitive, which lets them break through Focus and Do Not Disturb on iOS. An alert reaches every resident of your community except the person who sent it. Notifications are still not a reliable delivery mechanism, and OneBlock is not an emergency service; see the Terms.

7. Retention and Expiry

Most of what happens in OneBlock deletes itself:

  • Chat messages delete themselves fourteen days after they are sent. A thread disappears once its last message is gone.
  • Posts, asks, announcements, and polls clear on the same fourteen-day clock unless they are pinned. Only board members can pin, and pinning is all they can do to a resident's post: the same design deliberately denies them the ability to edit your words.
  • Alerts drop off the Today feed after a day and are deleted after fourteen, and unlike everything else they cannot be pinned, so no emergency stays up forever.
  • Events delete themselves, with their RSVPs and their chat, once the event is over and the conversation about it has aged out, which is at least fourteen days after the event date.
  • Notifications are deleted after thirty days.
  • Unfinished signups are deleted: after one week if the email address was never confirmed, and after thirty days if the address was confirmed but no profile was ever created.

Some things stay until something removes them: your account, profile, household, and claimed home; clubs and their membership lists; business listings and their ratings; waves; and the board's moderation log. We keep no archive of expired content and no separate historical copy of it.

8. Deleting Your Account

You can delete your account at any time in the app: Settings, then "Delete my account." It asks you to type DELETE, and then it is immediate and permanent.

You can also do it from the web, without the app, at joinoneblock.com/delete-account: we email a link to the address on the account, and deleting happens only after you open that link and confirm.

Deleting your account removes your profile, your household members, and the things that are yours alone: your asks and replies, your posts, your alerts, your waves, your ratings, your votes, your RSVPs, and your notifications. Your home goes back to unclaimed, and the unused code already waiting for it becomes usable again, so your board can hand it to whoever moves in. Some things your community relies on survive with your name removed rather than being destroyed: a club you founded, an event you hosted, an announcement or poll you posted, a business you added, and messages you sent in a shared thread, which keep their history with the sender shown as a neighbor who is no longer there. So deleting your account does not erase every trace of you the same day. Your chat messages stay for up to fourteen more days before their own clock removes them, an event you hosted keeps the host name it was created with, and a club, a business listing, an announcement or a poll stays in place indefinitely with the owner blanked. Anything still inside its fourteen-day window clears on its own schedule.

There is no grace period and no undo: no copy of your account is held back, and we cannot restore it if you change your mind.

If you signed in with Apple, deleting your account also revokes OneBlock's access at Apple, so it stops appearing under your Apple ID settings. Anonymous analytics are not linked to your account and so cannot be identified to delete, but they cannot be traced back to you either. You can leave the email list at any time using the unsubscribe link in any email, or by contacting us.

9. Children, and Household Members

You must be 18 or older to hold a OneBlock account. The Service is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly let anyone under 18 create one.

The one place children's information exists in OneBlock is the household list, and it is there only because an adult resident typed it in: a name, that the person is a kid, and an age if one was given. Adding a household member is entirely optional and the step can be skipped. If you add a child, you are sharing that with every verified resident of your community, and you should add nothing you would not want your street to know. Do not list a child who is not yours. You can remove any household member at any time in the app, and deleting your account removes all of them.

If you believe a child under 18 has created an account, or that information about a child has been added to OneBlock by someone without the right to share it, email hello@joinoneblock.com and we will remove it.

10. Security

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS), and the app refuses unencrypted connections outright. Your sign-in session is stored on your device in the operating system's secure storage, protected by Face ID or your device passcode where you have enabled that, and marked so that it is not synced to iCloud Keychain and not included in encrypted device backups. Our database uses row-level security, so a resident account can only ever read its own community's rows, and the tables holding signup codes have no resident-readable policy at all: a code is unreachable from any resident account, at any depth. The internal admin dashboard is gated at the network edge by Cloudflare Access and verifies a signed identity on every request; the key that can read the whole database never leaves our server. Writes are rate limited per resident, so no one account can flood a community. If we ever discover a breach affecting your information, we will notify you and the authorities as the law requires. No system is perfectly secure, and the biggest realistic risk to your privacy here is not a breach but a shared signup code, so keep yours to yourself.

11. Your Rights

You can see and edit your profile and household in the app at any time, hide your profile from neighbors with the private setting, control every notification category, and delete your account and its data yourself as described above.

Depending on your state (for example, under the California Consumer Privacy Act), you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal information, to obtain a copy of it, and to be free from discrimination for exercising those rights. We honor such requests regardless of which state you live in: email hello@joinoneblock.com and we will respond within 45 days, or tell you why we need longer. We assemble access and copy requests by hand today, so give us a little time. If we refuse a request, you can ask us to look at it again by replying to that answer. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined under California law, so there is nothing to opt out of.

12. Where Data Is Processed

The Service is intended for use in the United States, and data is processed and stored in the United States.

13. Changes to This Policy

If we change this policy, we will update the "Last updated" date above and, for material changes, take reasonable steps to notify you, such as an in-app notice. Continued use of the Service after changes take effect means you accept the updated policy.

14. Contact

Questions or requests about privacy: hello@joinoneblock.com