Privacy Policy

What you give us

• Account details: your name, email address and password (handled by Google Firebase Authentication; we never see or store your password in readable form), your campus, and a username if you are a student.
• Optional profile details: photo, major, graduation year, bio and the interests you pick.
• Organizations and chapters: the organization's name, description, address, links, logo and photos, Greek-life chapter details, and any evidence you submit to be verified.
• Things you post: events, open invites, comments, host updates, chapter updates and ratings.
• Chapter chat: if you are a member or officer of a chapter, the messages you post in that chapter's private chat, and your membership in it (asking to join, being approved, muted or removed).
• Your plans and activity: events you mark Interested or Going, saved events, who you follow, group plans and invitations, reminders you set, and the Circles you create (private lists of people you follow).
• Chapter interest: if you choose to tell a chapter you are interested, we share your name, and the year, major and note you add, with that chapter's recruitment officers only.
• Safety: reports you file and people you block.
• The waitlist on our website: your name, email address, school, whether you are a student or an organization, and (for organizations) the organization's name. We send you one email confirming you joined, and otherwise use it only to tell you when GoingOut opens at your school and to decide which campuses come next. Only GoingOut admins can see it, and we will remove you if you ask.

What we collect automatically

• Anonymous usage statistics: which screens and actions are used, event categories and counts, your campus, your platform, and a random identifier that changes every time the app launches. These do not include your name, email, user id, search text or location.
• “I'm here” check-ins at events are private to you. Only an anonymous total is shown, and only labeled as community-reported once enough people have checked in.
• If you turn on push notifications: a device token and your notification choices, so we can send the alerts you asked for.

Your location

GoingOut only uses your location if you allow it, to show what is near you and sort things by distance. Your location stays on your device: it is not saved on our servers, not shown to other people, and nobody can see you moving on the map.

When you enter an address or venue for an event, that text may be sent to a mapping service to find its place on the map (your phone's built-in geocoder on mobile, OpenStreetMap on the web).

How we use information

• To run GoingOut: show events, feeds, calendars, maps, plans and notifications.
• To personalize: for example ordering your feed by your interests, the organizations you follow and what friends are doing. Your viewing history used for this stays on your device.
• To keep people safe: reviewing reports, removing content that breaks the rules, and preventing spam and abuse.
• To improve the app, using the anonymous statistics above.

Who can see what

• Events, organizations and chapter profiles you publish are visible to people on your campus.
• You choose who can see the events you are going to: everyone, only followers, or only you. Counts always include you without showing your name when you choose private.
• If you make your account private, people have to ask to follow you and you approve or decline each request. Only your followers can then see your plans, who follows you and who you follow. Your name, photo and @username stay visible on campus so people can find you and ask. People who already followed you when you switch stay your followers.
• Circles are visible only to you. People in them are not told.
• Blocks are private. The person you block is not notified.
• Reports are visible only to GoingOut's moderators.
• Recruitment interest and a chapter's recruitment data are visible only to that chapter's authorized officers.
• A chapter's chat is visible only to that chapter's officers and the members they approve. Officers can see who asked to join and can remove messages. GoingOut's moderators do not read chats; when someone reports a message, the moderators see a copy of that message only.
• GoingOut never shows anyone's live or precise location.

Who we share it with

We do not sell your personal information. We use service providers that process data for us: Google Firebase (sign-in, database, file storage and server functions), Expo (delivering push notifications and building the app), Resend (sending our emails, like account confirmations and password resets), and mapping providers for maps and address lookup. We may also disclose information when the law requires it or to protect people's safety.

Keeping and deleting your data

You can delete your account at any time in the app: Profile, Edit profile, Delete account. This permanently removes your profile, the events and open invites you host, your plans, follows, Circles, invitations, drafts, saved items, chapter interest, chapter chat membership and the chat messages you posted, push settings, and the files you uploaded. Organizations that delete their account also lose the organization page, its events and its chapter data.

A few things remain after deletion: your comments on other people's events stay as “This comment was deleted” placeholders so conversations still make sense, and reports you filed are kept without your name because they are safety records. Copies may remain briefly in backups.

Your choices

• Edit or delete what you post, and change who can see your plans, any time.
• Turn notifications on or off by type in Notification settings.
• Allow or deny location and notifications in your phone's settings.
• Block or report people and content from the menu next to them.

Age

GoingOut is meant for college students. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has an account, tell us and we will remove it.

Security

We protect data with access rules so people can only read and change what they are allowed to, and we encrypt data in transit. No system is perfectly secure, so please choose a strong, unique password.

Changes and contact

We will update this policy when GoingOut changes how it handles information, and show the new date at the top. You can contact us at goingoutbusiness@gmail.com.