Privacy Policy
Who operates Avail
Avail Broadcaster, Inc., a California corporation, operates Avail. Contact support@avail-broadcaster.com for privacy questions, access, correction, deletion, or a complaint.
Avail lets you tell selected friends when you are available and reply in private one-to-one conversations. We do not sell personal information, run advertising, or use it to track you across other companies' apps and websites. Your profile name and username are public. Friends can keep copies of information you share.
Information we use
| Information | Purpose and retention |
|---|---|
| Birthday, phone number, name, username, Terms acceptance | Age eligibility (13+), sign-in, discovery, public profile, and account administration. Birthday is private. A signup authorization expires after 30 minutes and is bound to the first phone number used. Abandoned new accounts are removed after seven days; historically completed accounts awaiting a username are preserved. Account information otherwise remains until account deletion. |
| Friends, requests, blocks, preferences, and invites | Delivering to the audience you choose and enforcing safety choices. Accepted friends receive your phone number for matching to their own address books. Inviting a contact records their number and your saved name for them. Identifying invite records are removed when either associated account is deleted. |
| Availability, selected meeting places, messages, and copied availability cards | Availability disappears from the active feed at its end time. Internal availability history and conversations remain until deletion. New avails prefill your fresh consented device location, otherwise your saved current city if available. You can change or clear the location before posting. Posted cities and places are visible to the chosen audience. We store only an Apple or independent GeoNames identifier, a reference to consent-gated device location, or text you write yourself, not Apple's returned names, addresses, or coordinates. Device references do not copy precise coordinates into availability history or messages. Deletion behavior is described below. |
| Optional device location | With your explicit sharing consent and OS permission, Avail reads and sends location only while foregrounded. Friends can see your precise position and distance when both of you opt in. The app refreshes approximately every five minutes; positions older than 15 minutes are hidden and excluded from distance and notification-radius calculations. Only the latest position is stored, not a movement history. Turning sharing off clears it; expired positions are also cleared by cleanup. |
| Optional private current city | We store your selected city's identifier, using an Apple place ID or an independent GeoNames city ID, for notification-radius fallback when fresh shared GPS is unavailable. It also centers your map and prefills new avails when shared device location is unavailable. The profile field remains private; posting an avail with that city shares a separate city reference with its audience. Changing your profile city does not change previously posted cities. Change or clear the avail location before posting, or edit an active avail afterward. Clear or change the profile field in Settings. Search failure never prevents signup. |
| Optional contact matching | After you enable matching and authorize contacts access, the app uploads SHA-256 hashes of authorized phone numbers. Hashes are personal information, not anonymous data. Contact names and photos used for matching stay on your device. Each sync replaces the uploaded set; limited access syncs only authorized contacts. “Remove uploaded contact data” deletes hashes and disables matching until you explicitly enable it again. Unsynced hashes expire after 90 days. |
| Sessions, passkeys, and notifications | Sessions include network/device information for sign-in and security, and expire after 30 days of inactivity. We store passkey public credentials, not private keys or biometric templates. Push tokens are bound to a session, removed with it, and used only while that session remains valid. Expo and Apple receive tokens and notification content for delivery. |
| Reports and support correspondence | We keep the selected reported content and the report for safety review. Report evidence is deleted 90 days after resolution unless a documented legal hold applies. An unresolved report remains available for review. If you email support, we receive your email address and what you send. |
| Operational records and diagnostics | Authentication, request, contact-sync, map-quota, and delivery records support security and reliability; rate and delivery records are cleaned after seven days. Public-profile request records contain visitor IP and requested handle. Diagnostics use controlled error/build information and stack frames; application filters exclude request bodies, phone numbers, OTPs, credentials, private messages, SQL parameters, and arbitrary extras. Infrastructure and SDKs can also process network and installation information. We do not describe these records as anonymous. |
Apple Maps and service providers
Apple Maps supplies native and web maps and city/place search. Search text and selected IDs pass through our authenticated server to Apple; browser maps also contact Apple directly. Apple may receive network and device information under Apple's privacy policy. We keep returned place details only briefly in memory for the current operation, and display them with an Apple map. If maps or search are unavailable, you can use the friends list, skip city, or write a meeting place yourself.
When Apple does not supply a reusable city identifier, we match the city to our bundled US/Canada city catalog from GeoNames, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. We filter and reformat this independent catalog and use its city names and coordinates to resolve saved city identifiers. No user searches or account information are sent to GeoNames.
Railway hosts the API and database; Cloudflare serves web content and stores rotating backups; Twilio verifies phone numbers; Expo and Apple deliver notifications; Sentry processes diagnostics; Resend delivers operational emails. Report-alert emails contain an authenticated report link rather than copied private content. Providers process information under their applicable terms and policies. We may disclose information when necessary to comply with law or protect people and the service.
Public profiles and discovery
Your name and username appear at avail-broadcaster.com/username, accessible without an account. The page does not display your location, availability, conversations, or friend list. People may find you by phone number or username in Avail; contact matching can reveal that you use Avail. Search-engine exclusion requests cannot guarantee a page is never indexed or copied.
Device storage and backups
Recent saved reads expire after 24 hours and unsent drafts after seven days, checked when storage is used. Persistent caches exclude precise coordinates and Apple-provided place details; place IDs may be saved. Signing out, changing accounts, or deleting an account clears local account caches and drafts. Drafts are sent only when you choose to send them.
Database backups rotate over 30 days. Deletion IDs are retained for 40 days to suppress restoration of deleted accounts; restore procedures reapply deletion and retention cleanup before serving traffic. Service providers may process information in the United States and other locations under their policies, including requests originating in Canada.
Deleting an account
Use Settings → Delete account. Support, sign-out, and deletion are also available to incomplete or restricted accounts. Deletion removes the account's profile, social graph, availability/history, contact hashes, passkeys, sessions, notification registrations, and identifying invite records. Authored message text and copied availability content are erased, leaving neutral placeholders where a conversation remains. Ordinary messages authored by the other participant remain. Specifically reported evidence follows the 90-day-after-resolution rule above.
Deletion cannot instantly recall information on disconnected devices, screenshots, or system notifications already delivered. Devices reconcile when they reconnect, and backups rotate as described above.
Your choices and children
Location, city, contacts, notifications, and passkeys are optional. Control them in Avail and your device settings. Ask support for information you cannot access or correct in the app. Avail is for people 13 and older. We reject ineligible new signups before phone collection and delete known underage incomplete accounts. Contact support if you believe a child has an account.
Changes
We publish changes with a version and effective date. Material changes are presented in the app with links and an acknowledgment; account deletion and support remain accessible. The current Terms are at Terms of Service.