Privacy Policy

Hangxiety is a nightlife safety app for college students, operated by Hangxiety App LLC (“Hangxiety,” “we,” “us”). This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and how to get rid of it. It covers the Hangxiety mobile app and hangxietyapp.com.

The short version: we collect the minimum needed to let your friends look out for you, location is shared only while you have an active Safety Group or Safe Walk and is deleted when it ends, and we do not sell your data or use it for advertising.

What we collect

Account information. Your email address and a password (stored only as a cryptographic hash — we never see it). Optionally a username, display name, and profile photo.

Date of birth. Hangxiety is 18+. We ask for your date of birth when you create an account to confirm that, and we store it as your confirmation. It is never shown to other users.

Student verification. If you sign up with a .edu email and confirm it, we store the fact that you are verified and, where we recognize the school, which campus. This gates who can post venue reviews and add venues.

Location. While you have an active Safety Group with sharing on, or an active Safe Walk, the app sends your current coordinates, location accuracy, and battery percentage. We keep one current position per person — a new reading overwrites the last one. We do not build location history.

Friends and emergency contacts. Who you are friends with on Hangxiety, friend requests you send or receive, and which of your friends you have chosen as emergency contacts. Emergency contacts are other Hangxiety users; they are alerted by a notification in the app. Hangxiety does not send text messages and does not ask for your contacts’ phone numbers for this.

SOS alerts. When you send an SOS, we store the time, your location at that moment if available, whether it was a test, how it was resolved, and a record of who the alert was delivered to.

Saved places. Addresses and coordinates you save, such as home, so Safe Walk Home knows where you are heading.

Content you submit. Venue safety ratings, tags, written reviews, venues you add, incident reports, group names, meetup spots you drop on the group map, and the messages you send your group or one member of it — both the one-tap ones and short ones you type.

Night photos. Photos you take with the in-app camera, and any caption you add, are uploaded to private storage. Only you can open them, and not until the next morning. They are never shown to other users.

Tab Cap. The spending limit you set for a night and the amounts you log against it. You type these in yourself; Hangxiety has no connection to your bank or cards. If you choose to, your group can see your total against your limit.

Do Not Text. The names — and phone numbers, if you add them — of people you ask the app to hold your messages to, and the text of messages you seal until morning. These people do not use the app and have not agreed to this policy. Only you can read this information.

App Shield. Which apps you choose to lock for the night stays on your phone, managed by Apple’s Screen Time. We do not receive the list.

Blocks and reports. Who you have blocked, and any reports you file about a person, review, or venue listing.

Safe Walk data. When you start a walk, your starting point, your destination, and the walking route, so your group can be alerted if you go off-route. Deleted within 24 hours.

Identifiers and device data. An account ID and username, and a push notification token for your device so we can send you alerts.

Usage data. Basic product analytics — which features get used, how many people finish setup, how many groups get created. These events are tied to your account ID and the app version, and they contain no name, email, phone number, location, or anything you typed.

Crash reports. If the app crashes or hits an error, a report is sent so we can fix it: what went wrong, which screen you were on, your device model and system version, and your account ID. Before a report leaves your phone we strip coordinates, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, invite codes, and message text from it.

What we do not collect. We do not read your phone’s contact list. We do not collect photos from your library other than a profile picture you choose, your browsing history, your microphone, any advertising identifier, or any bank, card, or payment information. We do not use any advertising or cross-app tracking tools.

Why we collect it, and what we never do with it

• To show your Safety Group where you are while you have chosen to share.
• To notify your emergency contacts and your active group, in the app, when you send an SOS.
• To keep your night photos and held messages sealed until morning.
• To act on blocks and on reports of abuse.
• To find and fix crashes.
• To alert your group if a Safe Walk goes off-route or stalls.
• To show student-reported safety information about venues.
• To keep the service working, secure, and free of abuse.

We do not sell your personal information, share it with data brokers, use it for advertising, or use it to build a profile of your movements. We do not give your location to venues, bars, schools, or police, except as described under “Legal requests” below.

Who sees what

• Your live location is visible only to members of a Safety Group you have joined, while that group is active and while your sharing toggle is on. Turn sharing off at any time and your pin disappears.
• An SOS you send goes, with your location at that moment, to the friends you chose as emergency contacts and to the members of your active Safety Group. Group members can see it while it is active and for up to 24 hours after you send it.
• Your profile — display name, username, and photo — is visible to your friends, to members of a group you are in, and to someone you have a pending friend request with. Someone who knows your exact username can look it up to send you a request. There is no browsable directory.
• Your saved places, home address, night photos, held messages, and Do Not Text list are visible only to you. Your friends can see that they are your emergency contact because they receive your alerts; nobody else can see who your contacts are.
• Someone you block can no longer see your location or profile, message you, add you, or be alerted by you — and you can no longer see theirs. They are not told.
• Your venue reviews appear publicly in the app without your name attached, and only after moderation.
• Incident reports are never shown to other users. They only ever contribute to an anonymous, aggregated caution indicator on a venue once enough separate reports exist.

Service providers

We use a small number of vendors to run the app. They process data on our behalf under their own terms:

• Supabase — database, authentication, and file storage.
• Expo — delivers push notifications.
• PostHog — product analytics, as described above.
• Sentry — crash reports, as described above.
• Resend — delivers the emails with your sign-in and password-reset codes.
• Apple — app distribution and Apple Maps.
• Google — walking directions for Safe Walk Home routes.

How long we keep things

• Live location: one current row, deleted when your group expires or your walk ends.
• Safety Groups: expire automatically, normally by the following morning and never later than 24 hours after they start. The group record is deleted a week after that.
• Group messages: deleted after 48 hours.
• Held messages and Tab Cap logs: deleted after 7 days.
• Night photos: kept until you delete them or your account.
• SOS records: kept in your account until you delete it.
• Safe Walk records: deleted within 24 hours.
• Account, friends, reviews, and incident reports: kept until you delete your account, which removes them.

Security, stated plainly

Data is encrypted in transit (TLS) and encrypted at rest by our hosting provider. Access to your private information is restricted at the database level, so other users cannot read your saved places, home address, night photos, held messages, or incident reports.

We want to be straightforward about the limits of that: this is not end-to-end encryption. Our servers must be able to read who your emergency contacts are to alert them, and your coordinates to monitor a walk. A small number of authorized people at Hangxiety can therefore access account data when operationally necessary. Any company that tells you otherwise while offering these features is not being accurate.

Your choices and rights

• Stop sharing location at any time with the sharing toggle, or by leaving a group. You can also revoke location permission entirely in your device settings.
• Block or report someone from Friends or from a group, and report a review or venue listing from its page.
• Turn off notifications in your device settings. If you do, you will not be told when a friend sends an SOS.
• Delete your account from within the app (Profile → Privacy & data). This removes your profile, friends, contacts, saved places, groups, live location, SOS records, night photos, reviews, and reports.
• Access or correct your data by emailing us.

Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA, including access, correction, deletion, and portability. Email us and we will honor them. We do not sell personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.

Age

Hangxiety is for adults. You must be 18 or older to create an account, and we ask for your date of birth to confirm it. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe someone under 18 has given us information, email us and we will delete it.

Legal requests

We may disclose information if we are legally required to — for example a valid subpoena or court order — or where we believe in good faith that it is necessary to prevent imminent serious harm. Because location data is deleted when groups and walks end, there is usually very little to produce.

Changes

If we change this policy materially we will update the date at the top and notify you in the app. Continuing to use Hangxiety after a change means you accept it.

One thing worth repeating