Privacy Policy
The short version. Avail collects what it needs to work and nothing else: your phone number, name, username, and birth date; the availability posts and messages you write; your location while you choose to share it; an optional current city; and, if you use the contact features, scrambled versions of your contacts' phone numbers — plus the number and saved name of any contact you personally invite. Your information goes only to the services that run Avail (named below) — it is never sold, never shared for advertising, and never used to track you. What you post is shown only to the friends you select, and the people you share with never see each other. No ads, no trackers, no email collection.
The main thing to understand about risk: Avail is a social app. What you write is visible to the friends you chose to share it with, on their devices — treat it like any message you send someone.
Who we are
Avail is operated by Dylan O'Carroll (the "operator"), who is responsible for how Avail handles personal information. For anything in this policy — questions, access or correction requests, complaints — email support@avail-broadcaster.com.
What we collect, why, and for how long
This is the complete list. If something isn't here, we don't collect it.
| Information | How we get it | What it's for | How long we keep it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone number | You enter it at sign-up; verified by a text-message code | Your account identity and how friends find you. Your accepted friends' devices receive your number so the app can show you under the name and photo they saved for you in their own contacts | Until you delete your account |
| Display name | You enter it | Shown to your friends, and on your public profile page (see "Your public profile page" below) | Until you delete your account |
| Username | You choose it | A handle people can find you by; it is also the address of your public profile page (see below) | Until you change it or delete your account |
| Date of birth | You enter it at sign-up | Age eligibility only (Avail is 13+); never shown to anyone, never used for anything else | Until you delete your account |
| Availability posts ("avails") | You write them | Shown to the friends you choose until the post expires; we also keep an internal history of your own posts (including edits) that no other user can see | Until you delete your account |
| Messages | You write them | Delivered privately, one-to-one | Until you delete your account (see "Deleting your account" for what your friends keep) |
| Location (precise) | From your device, only while the app is open, and only if you turn location sharing on | Showing distance between friends (only when both of you share), map pins, distance-limited avails, and nearby notifications | We store only your most recent location and overwrite it each time; there is no location history. Turn sharing off and it stops being used |
| Current city (optional) | You pick it yourself, and can change it at any time | Stands in for device location so distance-limited avails can still notify you; helps center your map. Never shown to other users | Until you clear it or delete your account |
| Contact matching (optional) | If you allow contacts access, your contacts' names and photos stay on your phone. To show which contacts are already on Avail, the app uploads scrambled (SHA-256-hashed) versions of their phone numbers — never names, photos, or anything else | Matching only — showing you which of your contacts use Avail, and letting you know when one joins | Hashes are deleted after 90 days without a re-sync, or immediately via Settings → "Remove uploaded contact data." Apple treats hashed phone numbers as phone-number data, and so do we |
| Invites you send (optional) | You pick a contact to invite; the invite text itself goes out from your own Messages app | We keep that contact's phone number and the name you have saved for them so the app can show the invite's status ("sent"/"joined") and connect the two of you when they join | Until you delete your account; if the person you invited joins and later deletes their account, the invite record with their number is deleted too |
| Passkeys (optional) | You create one on your device for faster sign-in | Signing you in without a text-message code. Only the public half of the key reaches us — it cannot be used to sign in as you anywhere else | Until you remove that passkey or delete your account |
| Push notification tokens | Your device provides one when you allow notifications | Delivering notifications | Until you sign out on that device or delete your account |
| Crash & performance data | Collected automatically when something breaks; scrubbed of phone numbers and codes, not linked to your identity | Fixing bugs | Up to 90 days |
| Sign-in session records (IP address, device/browser info) | Created automatically when you sign in | Keeping your session working and your account secure | Sessions expire after 30 days of inactivity; signing out removes them |
Sign-in codes expire within minutes and are never kept; short-lived security logs of sign-in attempts (phone number, IP address) last up to 7 days. Encrypted database backups rotate on a rolling window of up to 30 days, so deleted data also leaves the backups as they rotate.
Your public profile page
Every account has a public profile page at avail-broadcaster.com/your username. It shows your name, your username, and a button for sending you a friend request, and it exists so you can share your handle with people you meet ("add me on Avail"): anyone with the link can see it, whether or not they use Avail. It shows nothing else (no photo, no location, no posts, no friends), and it is the same information a signed-in Avail user who is not your friend could already see by searching your handle. We ask search engines not to index these pages. Changing your username changes the address, and the old one stops pointing to you.
When someone visits a public profile page, we log the visitor's IP address and the requested username for up to 7 days, for rate limiting and abuse prevention. This log is about the visitor, is not linked to any Avail account, and is deleted automatically.
What we never do
- No advertising, and no data ever sold or shared for anyone else's purposes.
- No tracking across other apps or websites, and no third-party analytics. Because we don't track, there is nothing for a browser "Do Not Track" signal to turn off — the answer is already no.
- No email collection — Avail doesn't ask for or store user email addresses.
- No background location — your location is read only while the app is open, never continuously.
Who helps us run Avail
These companies process data solely to provide their service to Avail. None of them use your data for their own purposes, and each is bound by its own terms to protect your data with the same or equal protection as this policy describes:
| Service | What it does | What reaches it |
|---|---|---|
| Twilio | Sends sign-in text messages | Your phone number |
| Expo | Delivers push notifications | Push tokens and notification content |
| Railway | Hosts our server and database | The data in the table above |
| Cloudflare | Serves this website and the web app, and stores our encrypted database backups | Standard web-request data; backup copies of the database (30-day rotation, see above) |
| Resend | Emails abuse-report alerts to the operator (no user ever receives email) | Reported-content details |
| Sentry | Collects crash reports | Scrubbed crash and performance data |
One feature is backed by a general-purpose platform rather than a pure processor: place and city search suggestions come from Google's Places service. As you type in a place or current-city field, your device sends Google the text you typed and, when you pick a suggestion, its place identifier — never your name, phone number, Avail account, or your device's GPS location — and Google handles those requests under its own privacy policy. Nothing else in Avail talks to Google.
Where your information lives
Avail's servers are in the United States. If you use Avail from Canada, your information is processed and stored in the US, and while it is there it may be accessible to US courts, law enforcement, and national-security authorities under US law.
Deleting your account
Settings → Delete account, right in the app. This is a real, permanent deletion — your profile, phone number, birth date, avails and their history, friendships, uploaded contact hashes, passkeys, push tokens, and sessions are erased, not hidden. Two honest exceptions:
- Messages you already sent stay in your friends' conversation history, no longer connected to your deleted identity — like letters you've already mailed.
- Reported content: if something you posted was reported, a snapshot of that specific content is retained as moderation evidence, to meet safety and legal obligations.
Your choices
- Location: the in-app "Share my location" toggle, or iOS Settings. Off means off.
- Contacts: "Remove uploaded contact data" in Settings deletes the hashes from our servers; iOS Settings revokes the permission itself.
- Notifications: per-type controls in Settings, and per-friend controls on each friend's profile.
- Your details: edit your name and username in the app anytime. For anything you can't change in-app, or to ask what we hold about you, email support@avail-broadcaster.com.
Children
Avail is for people 13 and older. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 13, and if we learn we have, we delete the account.
Changes to this policy
Changes are posted here with a new effective date; material changes are also flagged in the app. We keep this policy, the App Store privacy details, and what the app actually does in sync — if you ever spot a mismatch, tell us and we'll fix it.
Contact
support@avail-broadcaster.com · avail-broadcaster.com/support