Privacy Policy

1. Information we collect

1.1 Account information

When you create an account, we collect:

• Name and email address.
• Password: if you sign up with email and password. We store only a salted, irreversible hash; we never store your password itself.
• Sign-in method: whether your account is linked to a Google or Apple identity.
• Email verification status and the one-time tokens behind the links we email you to verify your email address or reset your password. A verification link is valid for 24 hours (7 days for the link that finishes setting up an account created from a review you submitted without signing in), and a password-reset link is valid for 1 hour. Using a link deletes its token. A token that is never used stops working when it expires, but it stays on your account record until a newer one replaces it or your account is erased (Section 8).
• Account role: student or landlord.
• Your school: derived from the domain of your email address (for example, wustl.edu identifies a Washington University in St. Louis account). We record it when you submit a review; only students at a school we serve are eligible to leave reviews.

1.2 Profile information

When you complete or edit your profile, you may also provide:

• Date of birth: used to confirm eligibility for properties that require residents to be 21 or older.
• Phone number
• Gender: see Section 2.1 for how this is used.
• A short "about you" description
• Profile photo
• Expected graduation month and year
• How you heard about Proximity

1.3 Information from Google or Apple

If you choose "Continue with Google," Google provides us with your email address, name, and Google profile picture URL. We never receive your Google password. On the mobile apps, Google sign-in happens in a system browser window and we receive only the resulting identity token, which we verify with Google. If an account already exists with that email address, signing in with Google links to that same account. We do not read from, or post to, any other Google service on your behalf.

If you sign in with Apple, Apple provides your name and an email address, which may be a private relay address that forwards to your real one. We never receive your Apple password, and we record only that your account is linked to an Apple identity. Sign in with Apple is offered on the Proximity mobile apps; the website offers email and password or Google.

1.4 Content you create

• Reports and blocks: if you report a review, we record which review you reported, who wrote it, and when. If you block a user, we record that you blocked them and when, and hide that user's reviews from you. Neither is shown to the person reported or blocked. To remove a block, email info@useproximity.org.
• Listings (landlords and subletters): property title, street address, city, state, ZIP code, coordinates, description, rent, bedrooms, bathrooms, area, unit and lease details, amenities, utilities, move-in dates, lease terms, and whether the property is restricted to residents 21 or older.
• Listing contact details: the name, email address, and phone number you give so students can reach you. The contact name is displayed publicly on the listing. The email address and phone number are not. We use them to route inquiries to you, and they are not included in the listing page or in the data our website and apps receive.
• What you write in a listing: the title, the description, and any other free text you enter are published exactly as you write them. We never rewrite your words. We do refuse to save a description that contains an email address, a phone number, a link, or a social handle, and ask you to edit it, because those belong in the contact fields above. Anything that does save is public, and search engines may index it.
• Photos and floor plans you upload for a listing.
• Reviews of off-campus listings and on-campus dorms: star ratings, category ratings, written text, and the display name shown with the review. You may post a review anonymously; when you do, we do not store a display name against it.
• Review replies (landlords) and helpful / not-helpful votes on reviews.
• Information you provide about a landlord when leaving a review: in the referral review flow we ask for the landlord's name, email address, and phone number, and the unit number you lived in. This is used internally to identify and contact the property owner; it is not displayed on the Services.
• Matchmaking conversations: the full transcript of your conversation with our matchmaking assistant, the housing preferences derived from it (first name, budget, move-in and move-out dates, lease term, group size, neighborhood, furnishing, openness to roommates, priorities, and free-text notes), and the recommendations generated for you. We keep these as a record of what you asked for and why we showed you the properties we did, including for three years after you delete your account (Section 8).
• Inquiries to landlords: the first name, last name, email address, phone number, and message you submit through a listing's contact form. We deliver this by email to the landlord, with your email address as the reply-to, and send a confirmation copy to you. Both emails are sent from our own account, so a copy of each stays in that account, as it would in any mailbox you send from. In our database we record only that you contacted a listing, not the message text. We keep that record, with your name and email address, for three years after you delete your account (Section 8).
• Messages sent through Proximity: where the Services let you message another user about a listing, we store the conversation. That means the text of each message, every listing it concerns, any file or photo attached to it, who sent it and when, and whether it has been read. These messages are kept in our database so both of you can come back to the conversation. They are visible to the other participant, and to Proximity staff who need to investigate a report of abuse or a dispute, or to confirm that a lease was signed. We also email new messages to the other participant (Section 6.2). A landlord may have chosen to receive these at a business address, such as a leasing office, instead of their account email, so anyone with access to that inbox can read your messages. Copies in email inboxes are outside our control and are not removed when we erase a conversation. If one of you deletes their account, we keep the conversation for three years afterwards, with the sender's name and email address on it. Section 8 explains why.
• Messages we refuse to send, and ones we flag: messages are checked before they are delivered, to protect you from fraud and abuse and to keep conversations on the platform where we can help you (Terms §12). A message that threatens or abuses someone, asks for login details, or asks for payment through a method we cannot protect (such as gift cards, wire transfers, or cryptocurrency) is refused. A message that shares an email address, phone number, outside link, or social handle, or asks to continue the conversation elsewhere, is not refused: in the app we ask you to confirm before it is sent, and it is then delivered and flagged for review. When a message is refused, or is delivered but flagged, we record the first 500 characters of what you typed, which rule it matched, the time, and your account. For a refused message that is the only copy we keep, because the message itself is never created. Only Proximity staff can see these records, and we use them to find patterns of fraud or abuse rather than to read ordinary conversations. They are kept for two years, then deleted. A message that passes the check is not recorded here at all.
• Replies by email: when we email you a new message, you can answer by replying to that email, and your reply is posted to the conversation. We remove quoted text and your signature before posting it. A reply is checked like any other message: sentences that threaten or abuse someone, ask for login details, or ask for payment through a method we cannot protect are removed and marked as removed, and the rest of your reply is delivered. Contact details in a reply are delivered as you wrote them. In either case the reply is flagged, we record it as described above (including any part we removed), and we email you a short note explaining why.
• Feedback and bug reports: the message you send, the page you sent it from, and, if you are signed in, your name, email address, and role, so we can follow up. Submitting the form emails it straight to the Proximity team; the message is not stored in our database, and it stays in our email inboxes rather than in the product. Your IP address is used momentarily to rate-limit submissions and is not stored.
• Waitlist requests: when you join the waitlist for a listing that is not currently available, we record the listing, the time, the page you came from, and your name, email address, and phone number, so we can let you know if it frees up. We keep this ourselves and do not pass it to the owner. If you want to reach the owner, we direct you to the listing's contact form, which works as described above.
• Lease Check uploads: see Section 1.7.

1.5 Usage and technical information

• Interaction history: which listings you save and which you contact, with timestamps. We do not record which listings you merely view against your account.
• Legacy viewing history: an earlier version of the Services did record page and listing views against signed-in accounts. We stopped collecting this in June 2026. The records already gathered are retained but no longer added to, and are not used to build a profile of you or shown to anyone else.
• Aggregate listing metrics: daily counts of views, saves, and contacts per listing. Views are counted in the aggregate only, not against your account. Landlords see these as totals in their dashboard, never as identified visitors.
• Server logs: our hosting provider records standard request information (IP address, timestamp, request path, user agent) for operating, debugging, and securing the Services.
• Internal change history: an internal log records changes to records in our database, including who made the change and the values before and after, so we can investigate errors, disputes, and abuse.
• Website analytics: see Section 5.1.

1.6 Information we do not collect

• Your device's location. Neither app requests location permission, and neither uses it. Map features use property coordinates, which are attributes of a listing, not of you.
• Your contacts, calendar, or microphone. Camera and microphone access are explicitly disabled in the mobile apps. The apps request photo-library access only when a landlord adds listing photos, and read only the images you select.
• Advertising identifiers. The mobile apps contain no advertising, attribution, or crash-reporting code, and no third-party analytics beyond what is described in Section 5.
• Payment card or bank details. Proximity does not process payments.
• Government ID, income, credit, or background-check information.
• Biometric data.

1.7 Lease Check (optional website feature)

Lease Check is currently available on the website only. If you use it, you upload a copy of your lease as a PDF or photographs. What happens:

1. The file is uploaded directly to our object storage provider.
2. It is sent to Anthropic's Claude API for analysis.
3. The file is deleted from our storage as soon as the analysis completes.
4. We keep only the output: the file name, file type, page count, which public listing it appeared to match, our confidence in that match, the flags raised, the plain-language summary, and which pages could not be read. We do not store the lease document itself, nor the address, rent amount, or landlord name extracted from it.

A lease may contain your full legal name, signature, home address, and financial terms. Please do not upload a document you are not comfortable sending to an AI provider for analysis. See Section 4.

If you upload a file and the analysis never runs (for example, you leave before it starts), the file is removed by a scheduled cleanup job instead. That job runs every hour and deletes any upload more than an hour old, so a lease file is never kept for more than 24 hours.

1.8 If you do not have a Proximity account

We hold a limited amount of information about some people who have never signed up. This section explains what, why, and how to have it removed.

• Landlord and property contact details. Where we set a listing up at an owner's request before they have an account, or where a student names their landlord while leaving a review, we hold the contact details for that owner or manager so we can reach them and so we can identify the property. The contact name on a live listing is public; the email address and phone number are used to route inquiries and are not displayed, and details given to us in a review are used internally and are not displayed.
• Students we invite to leave a review. We email students at the universities we serve to invite them to review a place they have lived. For this we hold the student's university email address and a record of the invitation, which includes a single-use link for submitting the review. We use it only to send that invitation and to recognize the review when it comes back. It is never published, never sold, never used for advertising, and is not visible to landlords or to other students.
• Addresses of properties students have reviewed. When a student reviews a building that is not on Proximity, we create an unavailable page for it that holds the property's address, a Street View image, and its reviews. The page offers nothing for rent. The owner can email info@useproximity.org to have it removed or to claim it (Terms §7).

How long we keep it. Landlord and property contact details are kept while the property is part of the marketplace. Review invitation records are kept as a record of who we have already asked, and deleted on request.

1.9 Information landlords give us

A landlord may tell us when a student who contacted them through Proximity signs a lease. We record that a lease was signed, the listing it was for, and when. We use this to keep an accurate record of the introductions we make and, once commissions take effect (Terms §1), to bill landlords who pay one.

How to have it removed. Email info@useproximity.org and ask us to delete your information. You do not need an account, and you do not need to explain why. We will confirm when it is done. If you receive an invitation email from us and do not want another, replying to say so is enough.

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2. How we use your information

We do not use your personal information to build advertising profiles, and we do not use it to train artificial-intelligence models (see Section 4).

2.1 How we use gender

If you have recorded a gender on your profile, the matchmaking assistant uses it in one narrow way. Some listings, typically subleases, explicitly ask for tenants of a certain gender in their description (for example, "looking for a female roommate"). The matchmaking assistant will sometimes not suggest those listings to students of another gender.

This affects only which listings the matchmaking assistant surfaces. It never restricts what you can search, browse, view, or contact directly, and it is not used for any other purpose.

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3. Age requirement

The Services are intended for people 18 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have collected personal information from someone under 18, we will delete that account and its data.

If you believe a minor has created an account, contact us at info@useproximity.org.

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4. Artificial intelligence

Four Proximity features send information to Anthropic PBC (the Claude API), a service provider located in the United States:

• Matchmaking. Each conversation sends its transcript, the housing preferences derived from it, and a catalog of listings that fit your filters. The listings are public marketplace data. Your first name is included in this payload so the assistant can address you naturally, and your recorded gender is included where you have one, because it determines which listings the assistant may recommend to you (Section 2.1). Nothing else identifying is sent: not your email address, phone number, date of birth, or account ID.
• Lease Check (website only). The lease document you upload is sent to Anthropic for analysis, as described in Section 1.7.
• Listing drafts (landlords). A property website URL you supply and the public content of that page are sent to Anthropic to pre-fill a listing draft.
• Message attachment screening. When you attach a photo or document to a message, the file is sent to Anthropic before the message is delivered, to check whether it is being used to pass on contact details or to ask for payment off the platform (Section 1.4). Only the file is sent, with no name, email address, or account ID attached to it. The result we keep is a yes or no decision and a short reason, not a copy of the file at Anthropic. Files that pass are delivered normally; a file that is refused is never shown to the other person.

Anthropic processes this data solely to return a response to us. We do not use your personal information to train our own models, and we do not sell or license your conversations or lease documents.

The matchmaking assistant ranks and explains listings. It does not make any decision that produces a legal or similarly significant effect about you. It does not approve or deny you housing, and every recommendation is a suggestion you are free to ignore. A human is always the one who decides whether to rent to you.

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5. Cookies, local storage, and on-device storage

5.1 Website

Strictly necessary

Your session is kept alive by an authentication cookie that keeps you signed in and protects against cross-site request forgery. It is cleared when you sign out.

Functional: stored in your browser

We also use your browser's local storage to make the site more convenient to use:

Analytics

• Vercel Web Analytics: aggregate, privacy-preserving page analytics provided by our hosting provider. It does not set cookies and does not track you across websites.
• Google Analytics: used on our website, not in the mobile apps. It sets its own cookies and collects an approximate location derived from your IP address, device and browser information, and the pages you view.

You can block or delete cookies through your browser settings, and you can prevent Google Analytics from collecting data by installing Google's opt-out browser add-on. Blocking the strictly necessary cookie will sign you out.

5.2 Mobile apps

The mobile apps do not use cookies. They store the following on your device only, in your device's secure, encrypted storage:

Signing out deletes your credentials and cached profile from the device. The mobile apps do not store your matchmaking conversation on the device. They contain no analytics, advertising, attribution, or crash-reporting code, do not use push notifications, and do not use over-the-air updates.

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6. How we share information

We do not sell your personal information for money.

6.1 Publicly: this is how the marketplace works

• Listings you publish are public, including the contact name you place on them and everything you write in the title and description. The contact email address and phone number you give are not published: they are used to route inquiries to you.
• Reviews you post are public, with your display name unless you post anonymously.
• Landlord replies to reviews are public.

Public content may be indexed by search engines and copied by third parties beyond our control.

6.2 With other users, to connect you

• When you send a message through a listing's contact form, we email your name, email address, phone number (if provided), and message to that landlord and set your email address as the reply-to.
• When you ask the matchmaking assistant to contact an owner for you, we email your first name and email address together with your inquiry.
• When someone messages you on Proximity, or you message them, we email the new messages in full, with the sender's name (and, for landlords, company name) to the other person: to their account email or, for a landlord, to an alert address they have confirmed for that listing or lease, such as a leasing office. Your own email address is not shown: replies go through a private Proximity reply address.

6.3 With service providers

We share personal information with vendors who process it on our behalf, under contract and only for the purposes we specify:

6.4 For legal reasons

We may disclose information where required by law, subpoena, or other legal process, or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, your safety, or the safety of others, or to investigate fraud or abuse.

6.5 Business transfers

If Proximity is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you before your information becomes subject to a materially different privacy policy.

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7. How we protect information

• Passwords are stored only as salted, irreversible hashes; we never store or transmit your password in readable form.
• Traffic to and from the Services is encrypted in transit.
• On mobile, authentication credentials are held in your device's secure, encrypted storage, and the short-lived credential is refreshed automatically.
• On the website, your session is carried in a signed, protected cookie.
• Access to production data is limited to Proximity personnel who need it to operate the Services. Some of those personnel work from outside the United States, including in the European Union, and access personal information remotely from there to build, maintain, and support the Services. The same access restrictions apply wherever they work.
• We keep a separate, non-public copy of our database for development and testing. It is not reachable from the public Services, access is restricted to the same Proximity personnel who can reach production, and outbound messaging is disabled in that environment, so nothing done there can send you email or reach you in any other way.
• We take routine encrypted backups of our database so we can recover from a failure. Backups are retained for a limited period and then expire. Because a backup is a point-in-time snapshot, data you delete can persist in one until it expires, after which it is gone. We do not restore a backup to bring back data someone has deleted.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. If we become aware of a breach affecting your personal information, we will notify you and the relevant authorities as required by applicable law.

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8. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from the website: your dashboard → Delete account. Deleting from the website deletes the account itself, so it also ends access on any other platform you use it on.

Immediately, when you confirm

• Your account stops working. You are signed out and can no longer sign in, by password or by Google, on any device or platform.
• Your profile disappears from the Services.
• Listings you owned alone are withdrawn from the marketplace.
• Listings you co-owned with another landlord remain live under that co-owner. You are removed as an owner, and if the listing's published contact details were yours, they are replaced with the remaining owner's details so your contact information does not stay live on someone else's listing.
• Your email address stays reserved until the erasure below completes, so it cannot be used to create a new account during those 30 days.

30 days later

Thirty days after deletion, an automated job permanently erases your personal data:

Important limits

• The 30-day window is a deletion delay, not a self-service restore period. There is no "undo" in the app. If you delete your account by mistake, email info@useproximity.org within 30 days and we will do what we can, but we cannot promise recovery, and after 30 days it is irreversible.
• Emails already sent cannot be recalled. A message you sent to a landlord is already in that landlord's inbox and is outside our control. This includes the alert emails we send for Proximity messages: the three-year erasure applies to our copy of a conversation, not to alert emails already delivered to the other person's inbox.
• Messages and inquiry records are kept for three years, with your name and email address. These are the parts of your account that deletion does not reach straight away. We keep them, with you named as the sender, as a record of your dealings with the other participant and of the introductions we make, and erase them after three years. If you want a conversation removed sooner, email info@useproximity.org and we will consider it, but we will not normally remove a record the other person is relying on.
• Public content already copied elsewhere cannot be recalled. We cannot remove material that third parties have already saved, cached, or indexed.

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9. How long we keep information

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10. Your choices

• Access and correct. On the website you can view and edit your name, email address, phone number, date of birth, gender, description, photo, and graduation details at any time from your profile. The mobile apps currently let you edit your name, email address, and graduation year; for the remaining fields, use the website or email us.
• Delete. See Section 8.
• Choose what you publish. You decide what goes into your profile, your listings, and your reviews, and you can post reviews anonymously.
• Withdraw device permissions. You can revoke the mobile app's photo-library access in your device settings at any time. This affects only the ability to add listing photos.
• Decline the AI features. Matchmaking and Lease Check are optional. Nothing is sent to Anthropic unless you choose to use them.
• Request a copy of your data. Email info@useproximity.org from the address on your account and we will provide a copy of the personal information we hold about you, in a portable format, within 45 days.
• If you do not have an account. You can still ask us to delete what we hold about you. See Section 1.8.

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11. United States privacy rights

11.1 California residents

If you are a California resident, the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA, gives you the right to know, access, delete, and correct your personal information, to opt out of any sale or sharing of it, to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not offer financial incentives in exchange for personal information.

Categories of personal information we have collected in the preceding 12 months, using the statutory categories:

Sources: you; Google or Apple, if you sign in with one of them; your use of the Services; landlords and property managers, and other users, for the landlord and property contact details described in Section 1.8; landlords, for the lease information described in Section 1.9. Business purposes for collection and disclosure: as described in Sections 2 and 6. Sale or sharing: We do not sell personal information for money. We use Google Analytics on our website, which involves disclosing usage information to Google; you can opt out by blocking analytics cookies in your browser or by installing Google's opt-out browser add-on. Sensitive personal information: We use it only to provide the Services you request and for the purposes permitted by §7027(m) of the CCPA regulations. We do not use or disclose it to infer characteristics about you.

11.2 Other US states

Residents of states with comprehensive privacy laws (including Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, and Montana) may have rights of access, correction, deletion, and portability, the right to opt out of targeted advertising, sale, and certain profiling, and the right to appeal a denied request. We honor these requests regardless of whether a particular statute applies to us by its own thresholds.

11.3 How to exercise US privacy rights

Email info@useproximity.org from the email address on your Proximity account, stating what you are asking for. We verify your identity by confirming that you control the account email address, and we respond within 45 days, extendable by a further 45 days where permitted by law, with notice to you. An authorized agent may submit a request on your behalf with written proof of authorization. If we deny a request, you may appeal by replying to our response; we will respond to the appeal within the period required by your state's law.

Account deletion does not require a request: it is self-service (Section 8).

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12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the "Last updated" date at the top. If the changes are material, we will notify registered users by email and by an in-app notice before they take effect. Continuing to use the Services after an update takes effect means you accept the revised policy.

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13. Contact us

Proximity LLC 117 South Lexington Street, Ste 100, Harrisonville, MO 64701 Privacy and general enquiries: info@useproximity.org