What we know about you, and why

You give us a name, an email and a phone number so you can have an account and we can reach you about gatherings. That data stays inside the tribe. We do not sell it.

One thing does leave: if you tick the box on your account page, we share your email and phone with Meta so we can show the tribe to you and to people like you on Instagram and Facebook. That box is off unless you turn it on, and you can turn it off again whenever you like.

One thing is public by design: we photograph our gatherings, and sometimes film a short clip of one, and publish them in the gallery. Ask us and any photo or clip comes down.

And some of our online sessions are recorded and kept in the library for members to watch back. You are told at the start of a session if it is being recorded, and nothing is published that was not announced that way.

If you offer a place to stay on the Homes board, everything you write there is visible to every other signed-in member for as long as you leave it up — and only for that long. Take it down and it is gone from the board the same second.

To give you an account and let you sign in. To tell you about gatherings and answer you when you write. To run the members side of the site, which is what your tier and your role are for.

That is the whole list. We do not profile you, we do not score you, and no decision about you is made automatically.

Membership is for adults: you have to be 18 or older to have an account here, and we ask you to confirm it when you join.

That is about accounts, not about gatherings. Children are welcome at our gatherings alongside a parent — what they do not get is an account, a phone number on our list, or anything we would share with an advertising platform.

If you tell us an account belongs to someone under that age, we delete it and everything on it.

We photograph our gatherings, and sometimes film a short clip of one, and publish them in the gallery. It is how a tribe that meets in person shows visitors it is alive, and it is a standing part of how our events run rather than something we ask about batch by batch: coming to a gathering means you may end up in a picture, or in a minute of video, from it.

A clip carries sound as well as movement, so it may catch your voice along with your face. A gallery clip is a moment of the room, never a recording of a circle, a sharing or anything said in confidence. Recordings of our online sessions are a separate thing, and the next section is about them.

Nobody is named or tagged. We do not run face recognition and there is no way to search the gallery for a particular person, which cuts both ways — it also means we cannot find everything you appear in without your help.

If there is a photo or a clip you would rather was not up there, write to contact@therootedtribe.org and point us at it. We take it down within seven days, usually the same day, and you never have to give a reason. If you would rather not be photographed or filmed at all, tell whoever is holding the space and that is the end of it.

Some of our online sessions are recorded and kept in the library, where members can listen to them again. What we publish today is sound rather than video. What gets recorded is not fixed and will change as our formats do — a talk, a guided practice, a whole session — so rather than promise a rule we cannot keep, we hold to two things you can rely on.

First: you are told at the start of a session whether it is being recorded, and by whom, before anything is captured. If you would rather not be in it, say so or keep your camera and microphone off, and that is the end of it. Second: nothing is published in the library that was not announced as being recorded when it happened. There is no case where a recording appears later from a session where nobody mentioned one.

A recording carries your voice and whatever you said while it was running — and, if we ever publish video of a session, your image with it. Most library items are behind a membership tier, so they are not public in the way the gallery is — but a recording is still a copy of a room you were in, which is why we would rather over-explain it than not.

If you are in a recording and would rather not be, write to contact@therootedtribe.org. We take the item down, or cut you out of it, within seven days and you never have to give a reason.

The recordings live in our own storage, not on a public video or audio site, in a place that has no public address at all. They are private in a real sense rather than merely unlisted: a recording will not play unless this site first checks your membership and then signs a link for you that stops working after a couple of hours. There is nothing anyone can share and nothing findable from outside. Playing one means Supabase, who hold the file, sees your IP address and browser, as any host must; they are told nothing about who you are.

Members can offer a room, an apartment or a whole house to each other on the Homes board. Everything on a listing is something you typed or uploaded: the neighbourhood, photographs of the place, the dates it is free, a price if you set one, and how you would like to be reached. All of it is visible to every signed-in member, and to nobody else — the board is not public and search engines are told not to index it. Each listing also has a web address of its own, so a member can send someone straight to it, and anyone opening that link who is not signed in as a member is shown nothing about the place at all: not the photographs, not the neighbourhood, not even its title. That includes the little preview a chat app draws when the link is pasted.

We do not ask for the street address and there is nowhere to put one. Where exactly the place is, is something you tell someone once you are talking to them, not something we publish to a few hundred people.

You decide how long it is up. There is a switch on your own page that takes a listing off the board, and a delete that removes it and its photographs for good. A listing also comes down by itself once the dates you gave have passed, so a place you offered last season does not quietly stay up. One of the named people who run this site can also take a listing off the board — hidden, never deleted — if it turns out to be a problem.

We are a noticeboard here and nothing more. We do not check anyone, we take no part in what you agree, and no money moves through us. If something goes wrong between you and another member we will listen, and we can take a listing down, but the arrangement itself was never ours. Write to contact@therootedtribe.org.

The map shows members roughly where other members are, so the tribe can find each other in a city rather than only in a calendar. Nothing goes on it unless you put it there. There is no tracking of any kind: your location is recorded at the moment you press share, and never again on its own.

What we store is deliberately blunt. Before anything is sent, the point is rounded to about a kilometre — so the map shows your neighbourhood and never your address, and the exact position your browser or your finger gave is discarded in your browser rather than kept by us. Beside it we keep the note you wrote — what you are up to, how long you are around, whether you would like to meet. It is free text and entirely up to you: write nothing and your pin says nothing. Whatever you put there is read by every member who can see the map, so treat it as public to the tribe. We keep one point per member: sharing again replaces the last one, so there is no trail of where you have been.

Only members who have shared their own location can see the map at all. That is enforced in the database, not merely in the page, so there is no back door to a version of it that shows you other people without showing you. It is never public, never indexed and never sold.

A shared location expires after thirty days and is then deleted. You can take your pin down at any time and it is gone the same second, along with your view of the map. You can also follow other members, which is a private list only you can see — nobody is ever told that you follow them.

If you ask us to, we will email you when another member comes within fifty kilometres of where you last said you were. That is off unless you switch it on, you choose whether it covers everyone, only people you have been at a gathering with, or only people you follow, and it is at most one email a day. To work out who to tell, the nightly job compares the rounded points of members who have opted in. Everything about your place on the map goes when your account does.

Members ask each other questions on the Questions board — filed under one of the places the tribe is in, or under “wherever you are” when the question is about the tribe rather than a place — and answer the ones they know. A question and an answer carry your name and your profile photo, the place you asked about, and the time you wrote it — that is the point of the board, and it is why nothing on it is anonymous.

All of it is visible to every signed-in member, and to nobody else. The board is not public and search engines are told not to index it. Nothing is vetted and nothing is moderated in advance: what you write appears straight away.

You can edit or delete anything you wrote, at any time, from the board itself. Deleting a question deletes the answers to it as well, because an answer to a question nobody can read is an answer to nothing. One of the named people who run this site can also delete a question or an answer if it turns out to be a problem. And everything you asked and answered goes when your account does.

This one only happens if you say yes. There is an unticked box when you sign up, and the same box sits on your account page: use my email and phone to show me The Rooted Tribe on social media and advertising platforms, and to help find people like me. It is never required, and saying no changes nothing else about your membership.

Today that means one company: Meta, who run Facebook and Instagram. If you tick the box, your email and phone are included the next time we upload our member list to Meta as a Custom Audience. Meta matches those details against existing accounts so we can show tribe posts to you, and so we can ask Meta to find people who resemble our members. Meta acts as a joint controller for that audience under its own terms. If we ever add another platform we will name it here first.

Untick the box and you are removed from the next upload. If you would rather be pulled out of Meta's side immediately, write to us and we will do it by hand.

We run no advertising pixels on this website and nothing here follows you to other sites. If that ever changes, you will be asked before anything loads. What we do run is a plain visit count, described below.

We use three, none of which track you across other sites, which is why you are not being nagged by a banner.

We use Vercel's built-in analytics to see which pages people actually read and how fast the site loads for them. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device, which is why it is not in the list above and why there is still no banner.

To tell one visit from another it processes your IP address and browser type for a moment and turns them into an anonymous number for the day. The IP is discarded, we never see it, and none of it is joined to your membership. There is no profile of you at the end of it, only a count.

Your account stays for as long as you are a member. Ask us to delete it and we remove your profile, your photo, your hearts, the gatherings you said you were coming to, your skills and your facilitator profile, and the account itself goes with them.

If you have not signed in for two years we take the membership as over and delete it for you. That is a periodic clear-out rather than something that happens to the day, so it may sit a little past the two years before we reach it.

Photographs and clips from gatherings stay in the gallery, and recordings stay in the library, until someone asks us to take one down. Anything deleted may sit in backups for a short while before it ages out.

You can see, correct, export or delete your data, and you can withdraw any consent you have given without it costing you anything else. Most of it you can do yourself on your account page, including a one-click download of everything we hold about you, in a file you can keep or take elsewhere. For deletion, write to us and we will sort it out.

Depending on where you live, these rights come from the GDPR, the UK GDPR, Indonesia's Personal Data Protection Law or your own state's law. We apply the same standard to everyone rather than sorting members by passport. If you are in the EU or the UK and you think we have got something wrong, you are entitled to complain to your local data protection authority.

Questions, corrections, or you want your account gone: contact@therootedtribe.org. A person reads it.