Privacy

What this covers

This page is about stoop.house, the site: what we hold, what other people can see, and how to get rid of it. The plans themselves are yours, and what happens when you meet somebody in person is between the two of you.

Making an account

There are two ways in. If you continue with Google, we receive the name and email address on that Google account, and we never ask you for a phone number. If you sign in with a phone number instead, we hold that number and send it a code.

Either way the account carries a name, a city, a neighborhood, and an email address we can write to. The address is not optional: email is how you find out that something happened, whether or not you also use the Stoop app.

What you can add, and what we never ask for

A profile photo and a one-line description of yourself are optional, and the site works without either. We do not ask for your home address, your date of birth, your contacts, or your device location. The city and neighborhood on your account are ones you picked from a list, not read from the device you are using.

A photo you upload is redrawn before it is saved and the hidden information a camera writes into a file, including any position it recorded, is dropped in the process. The photo is then served from a plain web address, so anyone who has that address can load it without signing in, the same as a picture on any public page.

What you do here

We keep the plans you post (the activity in your own words, the day, the exact time, the public meeting point, how many spots, and what it costs), the messages you send, the requests you make to join, and whether each one is pending, confirmed, declined or withdrawn. For safety we also keep who you have blocked and any report you file: the reason you picked, anything you added, and the conversation it was about. If we ask how a confirmed plan went, we keep the answer you choose: great, fine, or no-show.

What is public

A plan you post is public and can be read without an account, including by a search engine. On it, other people see your first name, your profile photo, your neighborhood, your line about yourself, and how many plans you have hosted. Open plans are also listed on the city and neighborhood pages. Your surname is never shown.

What is private

Your phone number and the email address we write to are never shown on the site. Neither are your messages, the fact that you asked to join something, a request that was declined, or one you withdrew. The group on a confirmed plan is visible only to the host and to the people they confirmed, and there is no public list of who is going. Reports are private, and the person you report is not told who reported them. Blocking is silent and mutual.

When you block someone, the two of you disappear from each other everywhere you are both signed in: the feed, plan pages, profiles, conversations, message delivery and notifications, in both directions, and neither of you can start a conversation with the other. What a block cannot do is hide a plan page from somebody who is not signed in, because those pages are public to everyone. If that matters, delete the plan.

We cannot promise that any system is perfectly secure, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Signing in proves control of the account or number used, not who somebody is.

Why we use it

To run the thing: show plans to neighbors, open a private conversation when you message a host, let that host decide who joins, keep a group inside its size, write to you when something happens, and act on reports. There is no advertising anywhere on the site, and none of this is used to aim advertising at you.

Who else is involved

Stoop uses other companies for hosting and storage, sign-in, email and phone verification delivery, delivering notifications to the Stoop app, and the limited analytics below. Those companies process information for those functions. Contact us if you want the current provider list.

Analytics and cookies

We count visits to a short, fixed list of public pages. Signed-in pages are excluded. Plan pages are counted without the plan text in their web addresses, and referral data is reduced to the referring site. If that privacy filter fails, the visit is not counted.

Signing in uses a cookie so that you stay signed in. Stoop does not use advertising cookies.

Email

An email address is part of making an account, because it is the one way we can reach you that does not depend on which device you are holding. We write to you when somebody asks to join your plan, when they reply, when a host confirms you, when somebody leaves a plan, and once to welcome you. If we send you a summary of open plans in your city, that email carries a link that turns those off. If we ask how a confirmed plan went, the email offers the three answers described above. You are not put on a marketing list.

Moderation

Plans, messages, and the name and line about yourself are checked against a list of slurs, explicit solicitation and direct threats before they are saved, whichever way they were sent. It is a list, not a judgment: it will not catch everything, and it is deliberately narrow so ordinary posts are not refused. Reporting is what catches the rest, and every report is read by the person running Stoop.

What is in a photo is not checked automatically. A photo that should not be on Stoop is handled through reporting, like anything else.

The Stoop app and notifications

If you use the Stoop app and allow notifications, we keep one delivery code for that install, so a notification can be routed to it. It is not shown to anyone and it is not used to recognise you anywhere else. Turning notifications off, signing out of that install, or deleting your account removes it.

A notification says only that something happened: that somebody wants to join, that there is a reply, or that a plan is confirmed. It never carries message text, plan text, somebody's name, a phone number or an email address, so none of that appears on a locked screen. Opening the app loads the real content over your own signed-in session.

The app asks for nothing the site does not. It does not read your device location, your contacts, or an advertising identifier, and it carries no advertising or analytics kit of its own.

Deleting your account

You can do it yourself, from your profile page, under Delete account. It asks you to type DELETE so it cannot happen by accident. Your profile photo is removed and the account is deleted, and your profile, your plans, your conversations, your messages, your reports and any app delivery codes go with it.

That deletes it from the live service. Three things are honestly outside our reach. An email we already sent is in somebody else's inbox and cannot be recalled. A public plan somebody already read may sit in their browser, or in a search engine's cache, for a while afterwards. And the companies described above keep routine backups and operational logs of their own, so deleted data can persist in those until those systems rotate them on their own schedule, which is not a schedule we set or can promise you.

If you want something dealt with sooner, or you would rather we did the deletion for you, write to hi@stoop.house.

Age

Stoop is for people 18 or older. If you are under 18, please do not make an account. If we find out an account belongs to someone under 18 we remove it.

Changes and contact

We may update this page as Stoop changes, and we will change the date above when we do. Questions about any of it, or something you want removed? Email hi@stoop.house. The Terms and Community Standard cover how Stoop is used and what gets an account removed.