Privacy Policy

HiNeighbor LLC ("HiNeighbor", "we", "us") is a limited liability company formed in the State of Wyoming, United States, and is the data controller for the information described here. We operate hineighbor.ai, a platform where verified neighbors post home and yard projects, lend tools, and offer each other help. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have. It applies to the website, the app, and any email we send you. You can reach us at support@hineighbor.ai or by writing to HiNeighbor LLC, care of our registered agent in Wyoming.

• Account details: name or display name, email address, password (stored only as a salted hash), and profile photo if you add one.
• Where you live: a ZIP code and the neighborhood name you select at signup. We use these to place you on the neighborhood map and to show projects near you. A precise street address is optional and only used when you attach it to a project you posted or a project you joined.
• Skills, tools, and credentials: anything you add to your profile so neighbors can find the right help.
• Project content: project descriptions, photos, to-do lists, questions and answers, tools you offer or need, and the barter, food, or payment terms you set.
• Messages: direct messages and project threads you send through HiNeighbor.

• Device and log data: IP address, browser and device type, pages viewed, and error reports, used for security, abuse prevention, and debugging.
• Approximate location from your ZIP or neighborhood: we geocode the area you chose. We do not track your device's continuous GPS location, and we never run background location tracking.
• Essential cookies and local storage: to keep you signed in and to cache map results so pages load faster.

• Show you projects, neighbors, and tools near where you live.
• Let you post projects, join projects, claim tasks, and message neighbors.
• Power Hank, our assistant, which can draft plans, to-do lists, cost comparisons, and weather-aware scheduling for your project. Content you send to Hank is processed by an AI provider on our behalf and is not used to train third-party models.
• Send you service email - verification, password resets, project notifications.
• Keep the community safe: verify accounts, investigate reports, and enforce our Terms.
• Understand aggregate, de-identified usage so we can improve the product.

• Contract: creating your account, showing you nearby projects, running messages, tasks, and project pages you asked for.
• Legitimate interests: keeping the community safe, preventing abuse and fraud, and improving the product using aggregate, de-identified usage.
• Consent: optional analytics cookies, marketing email, and any extra detail you choose to publish such as your last name, address, or photo. You can withdraw consent at any time in your profile privacy settings.
• Legal obligation: responding to valid legal requests and keeping records we are required to keep.

So that nothing is lost when you change phone or browser, your settings and project records are stored against your account on our servers rather than only in your browser. That includes:

• Projects you saved or bookmarked.
• Your privacy and visibility choices, including what neighbors can see about you.
• Your voice and language preferences for Hank.
• Project settings you authored as a creator: barter and payment terms, tool lists, research visibility, section order, and the neighbors you invited.
• Neighbor contacts you saved for yourself, which stay private to you.
• Reviews and star ratings you wrote, which are visible to other neighbors.
• Agreement and payment records for work arranged through a project, shared with the other neighbor on that agreement.
• A map correction or extra ZIP code you added, used only to place you and the neighborhoods you follow. A correction never changes the neighborhood on your profile.
• Which reminders you have already read, and how you arranged page sections.

Each of these is readable only by you, except where noted above, and access is enforced by the database itself rather than by the app alone.

Visibility is a setting, not a guess. For every project you can choose your immediate neighbors, surrounding neighborhoods, specific neighborhoods, or everyone on HiNeighbor. For your home pin you can choose hidden, your neighborhood, adjacent neighborhoods, or open. You can also turn off your profile photo, your name, your project history, and whether the tools you own appear on the map.

Assume anything you post to a project or public thread can be seen, screenshotted, and shared by the neighbors who have access to it. Do not post information you would not want a neighbor to repeat.

We share personal information only in these cases:

• With neighbors, according to the visibility settings you chose.
• With service providers who run parts of HiNeighbor for us: cloud hosting and database, authentication, transactional email, mapping and geocoding, AI model providers, and - if you use them - payment processing. They may only use the data to provide their service to us.
• For safety and legal reasons: to respond to a valid legal request, to investigate fraud, threats, or harm, or to enforce our Terms.
• In a business transfer: if HiNeighbor is acquired, we will tell you before your information becomes subject to a different policy.

We do not sell or "share" your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we do not sell it to data brokers.

Essential cookies and local storage keep you signed in, remember your consent choice, and cache map results. These cannot be turned off without breaking the site.

Product analytics are optional and only run after you accept them in the cookie banner. When enabled, we use privacy-focused product analytics and website analytics to count page views and feature use so we can see what needs work. We do not use advertising cookies, we do not build advertising profiles, and we do not allow these providers to use your data for their own purposes. You can change or withdraw your choice at any time from the cookie link in the footer, and we honor Global Privacy Control signals sent by your browser.

Many neighbors trade help, food, or favors - no money moves through HiNeighbor for those. When a project uses card payment, a third-party payment processor handles the card details. We never see or store your full card number.

• Access and export: request a copy of your account data.
• Correct: edit your profile, projects, and neighborhood at any time.
• Delete: delete your account, which removes your profile, your posted projects, and your messages. Some records may persist in backups for a limited period or where we must keep them by law.
• Opt out of email: unsubscribe from notification email; we will still send essential account email such as password resets.
• Region-specific rights: if you are in the EEA/UK, you may object to or restrict certain processing and lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority. If you are in California, you may exercise your CCPA/CPRA rights, including the right to know, delete, correct, and to be free from discrimination for exercising them.

We answer requests within 30 days (45 days in California, extendable once where the law allows), and we will never treat you differently for making one. You can also ask us to stop processing while we look into a complaint. To exercise any of these, email support@hineighbor.ai.

We keep account information while your account is active. Project content stays visible to the neighbors who had access until you delete it or delete your account. Log and security data is kept for a limited period for abuse prevention.

In practice: account and profile records are deleted within 30 days of you deleting your account; messages and project content you posted are removed with it, except where a copy must be kept for a legal claim, a safety investigation, or a payment record we are required to retain. Backups roll off within 90 days. Log and security data is kept for up to 12 months. Aggregate, de-identified counts may be kept indefinitely because they can no longer identify you.

HiNeighbor is operated from the United States, and our hosting, database, email, mapping, and AI providers process data in the United States and other countries. If you use HiNeighbor from the EEA or UK, your information is transferred to the United States under Standard Contractual Clauses or another approved transfer mechanism, together with contractual and technical safeguards with each provider.

Access to neighborhood data is enforced at the database level, so a neighbor can only read the projects, tasks, addresses, and photos they were given access to. Passwords are hashed, traffic is encrypted in transit, and project photos are stored in a private bucket served through expiring links. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify affected neighbors and, where required, the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it. No system is perfect - please report anything that looks wrong to support@hineighbor.ai.

HiNeighbor is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13, and we delete it if we learn we have.

We will post any material change on this page and update the date above. If the change meaningfully affects how we use your information, we will also notify you by email.

We use a small set of cookies to keep you signed in, remember your preferences, and, only if you say yes, count how pages are used. There are no advertising cookies here. The full list, how long each one lasts, and how to change your mind live in our Cookie Policy.

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it for cross context behavioral advertising, and we do not let ad networks track you on HiNeighbor. If we ever show something sponsored by a local business, it will be labeled and it will be based on the neighborhood you are already looking at, never on a profile built about you. We honor Global Privacy Control signals as an opt out of optional analytics and any future sharing.

A neighbor may invite you by email or share a card with you, which tells us the email address they used. Someone may mention you in a post or add you as a saved contact. If you sign in with Google or Apple, that provider tells us your name, email, and profile photo, and nothing else. We use this only to make the introduction work, and you can ask us to delete an invite record at any time.

Almost everything on HiNeighbor is visible only to signed in neighbors. The exception is a bulletin board card whose poster turned on public sharing, which can be opened by anyone with the link and can appear in search results. Turning sharing back off removes it from our sitemap, though a search engine may keep a cached copy for a while. Your address, precise pin, phone number, and messages are never public.

We send account email you cannot turn off, such as verification and password resets, and notification email you can turn off in your settings. If you give us a phone number for text alerts, that is opt in, message and data rates may apply, and replying STOP ends them. We do not use your phone number for advertising and we do not pass it to anyone else.

We use automated checks to catch spam, fake accounts, and unsafe content, and Hank uses AI to draft text you asked for. No decision that closes your account or removes your content is made by a machine alone. A person reviews it, we tell you what happened, and you can appeal by replying to that notice or emailing support.

If you live in California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana, or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, you may request access, correction, deletion, a portable copy, and an opt out of sale, sharing, targeted advertising, or profiling. We do not do any of those last three, so that opt out is already the default. You may appoint an authorized agent, and if we deny a request you may appeal by replying to our answer within 30 days. Nevada residents may tell us not to sell covered information, which again we never do.

Sometimes a neighbor links to a store, a city page, or a how to video. Those sites have their own privacy practices and we are not responsible for them, so give the link a look before you hand over any information.

Questions? Email support@hineighbor.ai. See also our Terms & Conditions, our Cookie Policy, and our Community Guidelines.