Privacy Policy

1. Information you give us

• Account. Your email address and name (first, middle, last). If you register with a password we store it only as a salted hash, never in readable form, and we check it against public breach data using a partial hash (see Section 6). If you sign in with Google we receive your Google profile, including your profile photo. We record an 18+ attestation and your acceptance of the Terms, with the date and time of each — we do not collect your date of birth. If you set up two-factor authentication we store the secret and your backup codes; these are never returned to your browser.
• Profile. Bio, profile and cover images, social links (Bluesky, X/ Twitter, TikTok, SoundCloud), instruments and skill levels, genres, gig and lesson rates, availability flags, travel distance, theme and avatar-effect preferences, and a vanity URL if you choose one.
• Location. Your city and state, and — if you provide one — a street address, which we convert to precise coordinates. If you use the “use my location” button, your browser asks your permission and sends us your device coordinates for that one lookup. We also derive an offset (“fuzzed”) pair of coordinates from your precise ones. See Section 4 for which of these ever leaves our server.
• Content. Events you create and their images, band pages and band media, questions and answers, reviews and star ratings you write, songs and setlists, and media you embed from YouTube or SoundCloud.
• Messages. Direct messages, group chats, band chats, and event chats you send — their content, participants, and timestamps. These are private to the participants of the conversation, not published publicly. See Section 7.
• Safety reports. Reports you file about a user, event, or message, including any details you write, and the identity of the person reporting.
• Listing check-ins. If you RSVP to a community listing (a jam or open mic we added from public sources), we may ask afterwards whether it ran, and keep your answer with the date. Others see only that “a musician” confirmed it ran — never who. Answering that it didn’t run files a report in your name, handled like any other report.
• Product feedback. Bug reports and ideas you submit. The dialog also captures the page you were on, your browser user-agent, your window size, and the app version, so we can reproduce the problem.
• Listing tips. If you tell us about a jam or open mic, we keep what you wrote (the venue, when it runs, any link), the area the map was showing, and your email if you chose to give one, so we can check it and ask a question. Tips are never shown publicly; what reaches the map is our own listing, written after we check it.
• Saved searches. The filters you save for alerts, including any location or distance in them.
• No payment information. Riff Circle is free during its preview and sells nothing, so we do not collect card numbers, bank details, or any other payment information. If that changes, we will update this policy first.

People who aren’t users. To keep community listings accurate we contact venues and hosts, and keep a record of it: the business’s public contact details, the name of the person we spoke to, and notes of what they told us. That record is visible only to Riff Circle’s administrators and moderators. A listing’s public description may name its host or house band where the venue’s own announcement does. If you are one of these people and want your details corrected or removed, email privacy@riffcircle.com.

2. Information we collect automatically

• Session data. Your IP address and user-agent, stored with your login sessions so we can keep you signed in and investigate suspicious access.
• Page analytics. Aggregated, cookieless page-view and performance (Web Vitals) measurements via Vercel, used to understand which pages are used and which are slow. These are not tied to your account and are not used to build a profile of you.
• Profile-view counts. When someone opens your profile or your band page, or it appears in a search result, we increment a daily counter — including a coarse breakdown of where the view came from (search, an event, another profile, or a direct link) and whether the viewer was signed out, a musician, or a band member. We use these totals to understand how the Service is used, and may show them to the profile or band owner as analytics. We do not store who viewed you. There is no list of viewer identities, and we could not show you one.
• Push subscriptions. If you enable push notifications, your browser gives us a device endpoint and encryption keys so we can deliver them. You can revoke this in the app or in your browser at any time.
• Error diagnostics. Crash and error reports via Sentry, which may include your IP address and limited personal data that happened to be part of the error.
• Abuse-prevention signals. Your IP address is used as a short-lived rate-limit counter key, and a Cloudflare Turnstile bot check runs on sign-up and on listing tips.
• Referral attribution. If you arrive on an invite link shared by another member, we note who shared it and which page you landed on. If you arrive on a link we posted ourselves (for example in a city forum), we note which post it was. See Section 10.

3. How we use it

We use the information above to:

• operate the Service, authenticate you, and keep your account secure;
• show you and others relevant musicians, bands, and events near a location, and place them on the map;
• deliver messages, invitations, RSVPs, and notifications between users;
• send email — account and transactional mail (verification, invitations, event reminders), and the optional digests and alerts you can turn off in your settings;
• maintain safety and moderation: reports, blocks, bans, and enforcing our Terms;
• produce aggregate profile-view analytics for profile and band owners;
• diagnose errors, prevent abuse, and improve the Service.

We do not read your messages routinely. We access message content only when you or another participant reports a message or conversation, or where access is necessary to investigate abuse, enforce our Terms, resolve a dispute between users, or comply with law. Admin access to reported message content is logged.

We do not sell or share your personal information for money or for cross-context behavioural advertising, we do not run ad networks or cross-site trackers, and we do not use your content or messages to train AI models.

4. Location, in detail

Precise coordinates are treated as sensitive. They are used on our servers to compute distance for discovery and matching, and they are never sent to anyone but you.

• If your profile is discoverable and your address is not marked private: other people see your city and state and an offset approximate point on the map — never your exact coordinates or street address.
• If you mark your address private: we publish no location at all for you — no city, no state, no map point. You still appear in distance-based search results, because the distance is computed server-side.
• Events are different. An event you post is a place other people are being invited to, so the address you give an event is shown to people who can see that event. Do not put your home address on a public event unless you intend strangers to have it.
• Address lookup. Address autocomplete and map tiles are proxied through our servers, so the mapping provider receives the search text and tile requests but not your IP address.

5. What other people can see

New profiles are private by default. At onboarding you choose whether to be discoverable, and you can change it at any time in your profile settings.

• A private profile is absent from the musician directory, the map, search, and matching, and its page is not readable by anyone you have no established tie with. The ties that grant access are narrow: an accepted friendship, a shared band, a shared event, or an open conversation.
• A discoverable profile — your name, photo, cover image, bio, social links, instruments and genres, rates, availability, and your approximate location — is visible to anyone on the internet, including people without an account, and can be reached by direct link. Rates are hidden from signed-out visitors.
• Search engines. We ask search engines not to index individual profile, band, and press-kit pages, and we do not submit them for indexing. Public event pages are indexable and are submitted to search engines — an event page shows the event, its location, and its organizer. Private events are not indexed. We cannot guarantee that a third party never caches content that was public.
• Images are stored at public URLs. Anyone holding the link to a profile, cover, or event image can open it, whether or not the page it sits on is private. Treat an uploaded image as public.
• Bands and events have their own private/public setting, chosen by whoever created them. Joining a public event makes your participation visible to others who can see that event.
• Calendar feed. If you subscribe to your events calendar, the feed URL contains a signed token and works without logging in. Anyone you give that URL to can read your upcoming events — treat it like a password.

6. Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it with service providers who process it on our behalf, under contract and only for the purposes below:

We may also disclose information to comply with law or valid legal process, to enforce our Terms, to investigate fraud or abuse, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of our users, the public, or Riff Circle. If Riff Circle is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may transfer to the successor, which will remain bound by this policy or give you notice of any change.

7. Messages: privacy and retention

A conversation is shared content belonging to everyone in it, so we treat it differently from data that is solely yours.

• Quiet conversations are automatically deleted. We keep a conversation's messages while it is in use. Once a conversation has had no new message for 2 years, its message bodies are erased. The same rule applies to every account. Keep your own copy of anything you need.
• Deleting a message — one message, your whole history, or by deleting your account — hides it from the other participants immediately. We keep the underlying record in a restricted, non-public state for up to 30 days so we can still handle safety reports and disputes, then the content is permanently erased.
• Reported messages may be retained longer where necessary to resolve the report, enforce our Terms, or comply with law.
• Deleting your account removes your messages’ content from other participants’ threads, but the thread structure remains for them, attributed to a removed user.

8. Your choices and rights

• Be invisible. Make your profile private to leave the directory, the map, and search entirely.
• Hide your location. Mark your address private to publish no location at all, or simply give a city instead of a street address.
• Control email. Turn off notification email in your settings, or use the unsubscribe link in any notification email. You can separately turn off social notifications, event reminders, and the weekly events digest. Essential account and security email cannot be turned off while you have an account.
• Control push. Turn push notifications off in the app or in your browser.
• Block and report. Blocking hides you and the blocked user from each other in both directions.
• Delete your messages. Remove individual messages or your whole message history at any time, as described in Section 7.
• Delete your account at any time in your profile settings. This is permanent: it deletes your profile, images, connections, and the events you organize, including events others have joined.
• Access, correct, or export. Most of your data is editable in the app. For a copy of your data, a correction we do not offer in-app, or full erasure of your message content, email privacy@riffcircle.com and we will respond manually, normally within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity through the email address on your account.

State privacy rights. Riff Circle is currently below the thresholds that make the California Consumer Privacy Act and comparable state laws mandatory for us. We honour access, correction, deletion, and portability requests from residents of any state anyway — email privacy@riffcircle.com. We treat precise geolocation as sensitive information, we do not sell or share personal information, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising any privacy right. We do not currently respond to Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signals, because we do not do the cross-site tracking they are designed to stop.

9. How long we keep it

After you delete your account we remove or anonymize your personal data, except where we must retain limited records for legal, tax, security, or abuse-prevention purposes.

10. Cookies and similar technologies

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and there is no third-party ad network on Riff Circle. We use:

• Strictly necessary cookies for login and session security.
• A first-party referral cookie (rc_ref) kept for up to 30 days when you arrive on an invite link, recording who shared the link and which page you landed on. If you then create an account, that is saved to your account so we can credit the person who invited you. It is first-party only, is never shared with advertisers, and is not used to track you across other websites.
• A first-party campaign cookie (rc_utm) kept for up to 30 days when you arrive on a link we posted, recording which post it was. If you then create an account, save a search or send a tip, that post is noted on it, so we can tell which of our posts are useful. Like the referral cookie it is first-party only and never shared.
• A first-party tip cookie (rc_tips) kept for up to 7 days after you send a tip without an account, so an account you create on the same device can be linked to it.
• Local browser storage for display preferences (such as whether a list shows as a grid, and which tips you have dismissed) and for offline support in the installable app. This stays on your device.
• Cookieless analytics. Our page and performance analytics do not set cookies and do not identify you.

Third parties on our pages. Pages with embedded media load content from YouTube or SoundCloud, which may set their own cookies under their own privacy policies; we use YouTube’s privacy-enhanced (no-cookie) embed. Sign-up and the listing tip form run a Cloudflare Turnstile bot check.

11. Security

We protect your information with HTTPS everywhere, hashed passwords, encrypted storage of OAuth tokens, optional two-factor authentication, per-row access controls, rate limiting, a strict content-security policy, admin audit logging, and encrypted database backups. No system is perfectly secure, and you are responsible for keeping your own credentials safe.

In the event of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify affected users and any required regulators within the timeframes set by Florida’s Information Protection Act (generally within 30 days) and any other law that applies to you.

12. Children

Riff Circle is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we will delete it and its data. If you believe a minor has an account, report it in the app or email privacy@riffcircle.com.

13. Changes to this policy

We will post updates here and revise the “last updated” date. For material changes we will notify you in-app or by email before they take effect.

Contact

• Privacy questions and requests: privacy@riffcircle.com
• Everything else: support@riffcircle.com
• Operated by Mitchell Enfield, Florida