Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

Townwell ("we", "us", "our") is a community platform that helps neighborhoods, clubs, and local organizations stay connected and manage their members, events, and shared resources. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, and protect your personal information.

This service is an invite-only proof of concept (POC) release, provided free to invited testers while we build and test Townwell with early communities. Features may still change, and this policy may be updated as the service evolves.

2. Information We Collect

We collect the following information when you use Townwell:

• Account information: your username, your first and last name (encrypted), and a securely stored password credential when you register.
• Age attestation: at registration we ask you to confirm that you are 18 years old or older. This self-attestation is checked and then discarded — it is not stored (see our Terms of Service).
• Content you create: organization details, feed posts, events, documents, shared resources, and uploaded files. Your content is end-to-end encrypted in your browser before it is uploaded, and our servers store only the encrypted result (see section 4).
• Membership data: which organizations you belong to and your roles within them.
• Technical data: we do not log your IP address. For abuse protection we rate-limit requests, which briefly tracks request volume per IP address in memory (this is not stored or logged), and we use Cloudflare Turnstile at registration and sign-in to check for automated traffic — as part of a challenge, Cloudflare processes your IP address and limited device/browser signals (see section 5). Our server logs record timestamps for operational events but do not include IP addresses.

3. How We Use Your Information

• To provide and operate the Townwell platform.
• To authenticate your identity and manage your account.
• To deliver your community's content to its authorized members.
• To prevent abuse through rate limiting and CAPTCHA verification.
• To communicate with you about your account or the service.

4. End-to-End Encryption & Data Storage

Your content — organization posts, events, documents, direct messages, and your personal feed, events, documents and files — is encrypted in your browser before it is sent to our servers. We store only ciphertext, which means we cannot read the content you create. Passwords and account credentials are stored securely and never in plain text. All connections are encrypted via HTTPS.

5. Third-Party Services

We use Cloudflare Turnstile for CAPTCHA verification during registration and sign-in, to protect Townwell from bots and automated abuse. Turnstile is Cloudflare's bot-detection service: when you complete a challenge, Cloudflare processes your IP address and a limited set of device and browser signals to determine whether the request comes from a real person. This is how Turnstile works — Cloudflare sees your IP address; we do not receive or store it. Cloudflare's handling of that data is governed by its own privacy policy. We do not sell, rent, or share your personal information with any other third parties.

6. Content Sharing

Content you create or share is visible only to the members of the communities you share it with — your community's content stays within your community.

7. Data Retention & Deletion

Your data is retained while your account is active. You can delete your own account in your account settings (Settings → Danger zone) — no need to contact us. Deleting is a two-step process so a misclick or a compromised session can be undone:

1. Request (with a grace window). When you request deletion, your account is immediately locked and scheduled for deletion. You can cancel the request any time during a 30-day grace period; cancelling restores your account exactly as it was. After the grace period the request cannot be undone.
2. Purge. When deletion completes, we permanently remove your personal layer, your end-to-end-encryption key material, passkeys, push subscriptions, your memberships, and the files stored under your account. Your user record is scrubbed of personally identifying information.

Content you contributed to a community stays. Posts, events, documents, and messages you authored in an organization (or a direct message) belong to the community (or the people you messaged), and are kept — with your name replaced by a “Deleted member” label — because we cannot (and should not) silently erase other people’s records.

Please export what you want before you delete. Deletion is irreversible, and it does not “take back” copies of your messages that others have already received — encrypted content on someone else’s device is theirs, not something deletion can reach. Because your content is end-to-end encrypted, neither we nor you can recover it after deletion; the only copy is the one you keep.

8. Your Rights

Data export is available. You can export your own data at any time from your account — Settings → “Your data” — and an organization’s owner or administrator can export the organization’s collective content from the org’s members page.

• Personal export. Your account, your personal calendar, documents and feed, your memberships and the content you contributed to organizations, and your direct-message threads — downloaded as a single archive.
• Organization export (owner/admin). A snapshot of the org’s collective content — sites, posts, events, documents and reservations — plus a member directory. The directory includes names and roles only, never other members’ private data, keys or passwords.

Because your content is end-to-end encrypted, we cannot read it, and we cannot assemble an export for you. The archive is decrypted and assembled on your device in your browser using the key we never hold. An export is a point-in-time snapshot — it captures your data as of the moment you download it, not a live backup or a history of your account. If anything could not be decrypted because you no longer hold the relevant key (for example, after leaving an organization whose key has rotated), the export tells you exactly how many such items there were rather than silently omitting them.

You also have the right to access and correct your personal information, and to delete your account (see the two-step process above). We will honour these requests promptly.

9. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as the service evolves. We will notify registered users of significant changes via email or an in-app notice.

10. Contact

Townwell is operated by App Brats (entity formation in progress). If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please use our contact form.