Privacy Policy

Company: Vicinity Social, LLC Effective date: September 21, 2026 Last updated: October 8, 2026 Address: 25852 McBean Parkway #831, Valencia, CA 91355 Privacy contact: privacy@vicinity-social.com Support: support@vicinity-social.com

1. Who this applies to

Vicinity is a proximity-based social app for adults 18 and older. The app is offered to people in the United States, and new accounts can only be created from the United States. This policy explains what we collect, why, who we share it with, and the choices you have.

We never store your exact location. Everything we keep about where you are is an approximate point, deliberately moved away from your real position before it is saved. Section 4 explains how.

2. What we collect

You give us:

Account: first and last name, email address, password (stored only as a secure hash), and date of birth, which we use to confirm you are 18 or older. Your first and last name are private. Other members never see them; they see only the display name you choose.
Profile: display name, headline, about text, what you are here for, your gender and the genders you want to meet, interests, and optional details such as height, body type, relationship status and languages.
Photos and video: up to five profile photos, and photos or short videos you send in chat.
Messages: the messages you send and receive in the app.
Events: events you create or respond to, including the place and address you enter for an event you host. An event address is the venue you chose to share, not a record of where you are.
Support: anything you write to us in a support request.

Before you have an account:

The waitlist. If you join the waitlist on our website, we store your email address, the page you came from, and the date. Our server also works out the approximate area your IP address belongs to, usually a city and state, so we know which parts of the country people are asking for Vicinity in. This happens on our own servers; your IP address is not sent to anyone else for this, and the IP address itself is not stored on the waitlist record. The area is approximate, not a precise location, and is typically accurate only to a city. We use your email address to tell you when accounts open, and for nothing else. You can ask us to remove you at any time by emailing privacy@vicinity-social.com.

Other members give us:

Invite emails: when a member emails someone an invitation to join Vicinity, we store that email address and when it was sent, so we do not send repeats and can show the host who has joined. We send nothing else to that address unless its owner creates an account.

Your device gives us:

Approximate location: with your permission, so we can show you people nearby. Your exact position is never stored. See section 4.
Sign-up and sign-in details: the IP address you sign up from and the IP address of each sign-in, the country that IP address belongs to, and information about your device: browser, operating system, device type or model, app version, time zone, screen size and language.
Technical data: the pages you open on our website, the IP address the visit arrived on, and the country and approximate area — a city at best — that it came from. We use this for basic traffic counts. Section 9 explains how the counter works.
Notifications: a push notification token, if you turn notifications on.

Payment processors give us:

Membership status and billing records such as amount, date and plan. We never see or store your full card number.

Your gender and the genders you want to meet, and your location, are treated as sensitive information. We collect them only with your consent, use them only to run the app, and never sell them.

3. Why we use it

To create your account and confirm you are an adult.
To decide who you can see and who can see you, which depends on gender and preference matching both ways.
To show approximate distance between you and other members.
To deliver messages, likes and notifications.
To screen photos and videos for illegal and prohibited content, and to review reports.
To take payment for a membership, where you buy one.
To confirm that new accounts are created from the United States, by checking the country of the IP address used to sign up.
To keep the service secure, prevent fraud and abuse, investigate reports, and enforce our Terms.
To answer your support requests.
To count visits and understand which pages people use, in a form that does not identify you.
To tell people on the waitlist when accounts open, and to see which parts of the country are asking for Vicinity so we know where to open next.

4. Location, and how we protect it

We do not store your exact location. We only store an approximate one.

How your position is made approximate. When your device sends your position, our server first snaps it to a grid of squares about 150 meters (roughly 500 feet) across, then moves it by a fixed offset unique to your account, of up to about 120 meters (roughly 400 feet). Only that adjusted point is saved. Your real coordinates are discarded at that moment and are never written to our database, our logs or our backups.
What that means in practice. The saved point can be a few hundred feet from where you actually were. Nobody at Vicinity, including our staff, can look up your exact location, because we do not have it. It also means we cannot give your exact location to anyone else, including law enforcement.
Other members never see a distance in exact terms. They see a range, such as "1–5 mi", and only if you allow it.
History of approximate locations. To protect members and investigate misuse, we keep a record of the approximate points described above, each with the time, the IP address and the device it came from. A new entry is added when you move a meaningful distance, when your IP address changes, or when 15 minutes have passed. These records are approximate in exactly the same way as your current location, are visible only to a small number of senior staff for safety and legal purposes, and are deleted after 12 months.
You control it. You can turn off "Show my distance", turn on incognito so you are hidden from browsing, turn off location in your device settings, or delete your account, which removes your stored location and location history, except where section 7 says we must keep a record.
Map feature: when you use the map, the area you are looking at and anything you type into the map's search box are sent to our map provider so it can draw the map and find places.

5. Automatic content screening

Every photo, and several frames from every video, are checked automatically before other members can see them:

Prohibited content check. An image analysis service scores the image for nudity, violence and similar categories. High scores are rejected. Middle scores are held for a person on our team to review.
Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) check. Images are compared against databases of known illegal material. A match is reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as US federal law requires, along with the information the law requires us to include, and the content is preserved for authorities.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We have never done so, and that includes the categories of sensitive information listed above.

We share only what each of these needs to do its job for us, under contract:

Who	What they get	Why
Hosting and database provider	Everything stored by the app	Runs our servers and database
Image and video screening service	The photos and video frames you upload	Safety screening
CSAM detection service and NCMEC	Image fingerprints; reported material and related account information when there is a match	Legal requirement
Payment processors	Email and payment details you enter with them	Taking payment
Email provider	Your email address and the message	Sending account and support email
Push notification provider	Your device token and the alert	Sending notifications
Map provider	The map area you view and what you type in map search	Drawing maps and finding places
Cloudflare	Your IP address and browser signals when a form shows its anti-bot check	Blocking automated abuse

IP address lookups happen on our own servers. We use databases from DB-IP that we keep on our own servers to work out the country an IP address belongs to, and, for waitlist entries and website visits, the approximate area as well. Your IP address is not sent to anyone else for this. IP geolocation by DB-IP (https://db-ip.com), licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Law enforcement. We cooperate with active criminal investigations involving activity on Vicinity. We disclose information when required by valid legal process such as a subpoena, court order or warrant, when we believe in good faith that disclosure will assist an active criminal investigation, and in emergencies involving a risk of death or serious injury.

We do not notify you before making a disclosure to law enforcement. Advance notice can compromise an active investigation and put people at risk, so we do not give it, and we will not confirm whether a request about you exists. By using Vicinity you consent to this, as described in section 8 of the Terms of Service.

Business transfer. If the company is sold or merges, member information may transfer to the new owner, who would have to honor this policy or give you notice before changing it.

7. How long we keep it

While your account is open, we keep your account, profile, photos, messages and approximate location.
Approximate location history is kept for 12 months, then deleted.
Sign-up and sign-in records (IP address, country and device details) are kept while your account is open.
Waitlist entries (email address, approximate area, source page) are kept until accounts open in that area and we have invited you, or until you ask us to remove you, whichever comes first.
Website traffic records are kept for 24 months, including the IP address each visit arrived on. We do not link them to an account.
When you delete your account, we remove your profile, photos, approximate location, location history, likes, blocks and messages. Deletion is available in Settings.
Reported content. When a member reports a conversation, profile or event, we save a copy of it at that time so we can review the report even if the content is later deleted. These copies are kept after an account is deleted, for as long as needed to handle the report, protect members, and respond to legal process.
Records we must keep: payment records for tax and accounting, limited safety records such as bans used to keep removed members from returning, and any material we are legally required to preserve for a CSAM report or an investigation.
Backups are overwritten on a rolling basis, so deleted data can persist in backups for a short period.

8. Your choices

In the app: edit or delete your profile and photos, hide your distance, turn on incognito, block or report members, and delete your account.
Get a copy of your data: open Settings → Your data → Export my data. The download starts immediately. The file contains your account details including your name, your profile, links to your photos, your conversations and messages, likes you have received, your blocked list, your consents and your membership status. You do not need to email us and you do not need to wait for us to act on a request.
Notifications and location: turn both off in your device settings at any time.
Email us at privacy@vicinity-social.com for anything you cannot do in the app.

California residents. Under California law you may request access to the personal information we hold about you, a copy of it, correction of it, and deletion of it, and you may limit the use of sensitive personal information. You may also ask which categories we collected, used and disclosed. We will not treat you differently for exercising these rights. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, including the personal information of anyone under 16. For access and a copy of your information, the fastest route is Settings → Your data → Export my data, which is immediate and requires no request. For correction, deletion, or anything the export does not cover, email privacy@vicinity-social.com from the address on your account, or write to us at the address above. We will confirm your identity through your account before acting.

9. Cookies, tracking and browser signals

We do not use advertising cookies, advertising pixels or third-party trackers. There is no Meta pixel, no Google Ads tag, no TikTok pixel and no advertising SDK on our website or in our apps.

Our website sets no cookies. The app and the staff admin set cookies only to keep you signed in and to keep your session secure. These are necessary for the service to work and cannot be turned off separately from signing in.

How we count visits. We run our own traffic counter on our own servers, and it covers our website only — not the app. It records the page, the referring website, the browser, the operating system, the device type, the country and approximate area the visit came from, and the IP address the visit arrived on. The area is worked out on our own servers from that address, using the DB-IP databases described in section 6, and is accurate only to a city; what we store for it is the city's name and a point rounded to about seven miles, which is not your position. It does not use cookies. Instead of identifying you, it labels each visit with a one-way scrambled code made from your IP address and browser details combined with a secret value, and that code changes every day, so visits are not followed from one day to the next. We keep the IP address alongside it so that our own staff can recognise and remove their own test visits from the figures, and so we can identify and block automated traffic. Nothing from it is sent to any other company, and we do not use it to work out who you are.

No other party collects information about you across other websites through our site. Because we run no advertising or third-party analytics tags, nobody is building a picture of your activity on other sites through Vicinity.

Do Not Track and opt-out preference signals. Some browsers can send a "Do Not Track" signal or a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal, which tells a website not to sell or share your personal information. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising, so there is nothing for these signals to stop, and we do not change our behavior when we receive one. We do not respond to Do Not Track signals in any other way. If that ever changes, we will update this policy before it does.

Sensitive information. We use the sensitive information described in section 2 — the genders you want to meet, and your approximate location — only to provide the service you asked us for and to keep members safe. We do not use it to infer things about you, we do not use it for advertising, and we do not disclose it for any other purpose. Because of that, we are not required to offer a "Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information" option, and we do not offer one.

10. How we protect it

Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes; we cannot read them.
Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted (HTTPS).
Sign-in sessions are stored as hashes and can be revoked.
Staff accounts are separate from member accounts, require two-step verification, and their actions are recorded in an audit log.
Your exact location is never written to our database, logs or backups. Only the approximate point described in section 4 is stored.

No service can promise perfect security. If a breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by law.

11. Adults only

Vicinity is for people 18 and older. We ask for your date of birth at sign-up and remove accounts we believe belong to minors. If you believe a minor is using Vicinity, email support@vicinity-social.com immediately.

12. Changes

If we make a material change, we will notify you in the app or by email before it takes effect, and update the date at the top.

13. Contact

Vicinity Social, LLC 25852 McBean Parkway #831 Valencia, CA 91355 privacy@vicinity-social.com