Privacy Policy

Operator: My HOA Circle, a private community portal for homeowners associations, at myhoacircle.com. In this policy, "we" is the operator and "the service" is My HOA Circle. The operator's legal name and mailing address are provided to each association at signup and in its data agreement.

This policy covers the marketing site and the portal. It states what information the service collects, who receives it, how a resident can review and change it, and how long it is kept.

1. What we collect

From your homeowners association, before you join:

• Homes: street address and unit number for each home in the community.
• Roster entries used only to address invitations: first name, last name, email address, and the home each entry belongs to.

We do not receive mailing addresses beyond the home address, phone numbers, legal representative information, or occupancy status through the roster.

From you, when you join and use the service:

• Account: first name, last name, email address, and your home in the community.
• Optional profile items: a phone number and a profile photo, only if you add them.
• Directory choices: your visibility setting and your per-field sharing choices for email, phone, and photo (section 5).
• Consent records: if you share your email address or phone number in the Directory, the service keeps a record of the consent text shown to you, the value you consented to share, your typed name as your signature, the date and time, and the version of the directory policy you accepted (section 5).
• Content you create: posts, comments, event titles and details, RSVPs (a count of guests, never guest names), messages you send to the Admin (section 4), photos you attach, and announcements and resources if you are an Admin.
• Notification choices: three on-off settings for announcement email, reply email, and Admin message email. All three start off.

Automatically, to run and secure the service:

• Sign-in data. Sign-in is by email link. The service keeps no password for you. Our authentication provider holds your email address and an account identifier.
• Security records: IP address and email address counters that limit sign-in links, signups, and invitations, and logs of sharing actions and billing events.
• Moderation records: when you write a post, comment, or Admin message, the text is checked before it appears (section 4). The service keeps the decision, the category scores, and up to 300 characters of the text for 90 days.

From the association's Admin, for billing:

• The Admin's email address and subscription records: plan, status, renewal date, and Stripe customer and subscription identifiers. Card numbers go to Stripe on Stripe pages. The service never receives or stores a card number.

2. How we use information

• To operate the portal for your one community: accounts, the Directory, Feed, Calendar, Admin messages, Announcements, and Resources.
• To send invitations and sign-in links to the email addresses the association provided for that purpose.
• To forward messages addressed to the Admin to the community's designated forwarding address (section 4).
• To send the email you opted into in your notification settings.
• To check written content before publication (section 4).
• To bill the association and to enforce rate limits and security controls.
• Information from one community is never combined with, shown to, or used for another community.

3. What we do not do

• We do not sell personal information.
• We do not share personal information for cross-context advertising, and the service carries no advertising.
• We do not share personal information with third parties for their direct marketing. Because we do not, the disclosure workflow in California Civil Code Sec. 1798.83 (Shine the Light) has nothing to disclose.
• We do not give residents a bulk export, print view, or copy of the Directory.

4. Who receives information

Service providers. Four categories receive information to run the service, under contract terms that limit use to operating the service:

• Hosting and database provider (Google, Firebase): stores the database, photos, and accounts, and runs the application.
• Email delivery provider (Resend): receives the recipient email address and the content of each email the service sends, including invitations, sign-in links, forwarded Admin messages, and opted-in notifications.
• Content moderation provider (TypeSafe): receives the text of posts, comments, and Admin messages for a pre-publication check and returns category scores. It receives no roster and no photos.
• Payment processor (Stripe): receives payment details directly from the Admin on Stripe pages and returns subscription status to the service.

Your community. Other verified residents of your community see what your Directory choices say they can see (section 5).

Messages to the Admin. The portal does not keep a message inbox. When you send a message to the Admin, the service forwards it to the email address your community designated for that purpose, with your name, email address, and home shown in the forwarded message, and the Admin replies by email. The service deletes the message content after forwarding; a delivery record with no message content is kept for 12 months. The Admin is a role in your association (a board volunteer or your management company's staff), not an employee of the operator.

The Admin also sees resident records to manage the roster. No other community can see your information. We disclose information if required by law, or to protect the security of the service.

5. The Directory

• The roster is used for one thing on arrival: addressing your invitation. You appear in the Directory only after you join, finish the welcome steps, and make a visibility choice. The starting choice is Not Listed.
• Visibility presets are Full, Standard, and Minimal. A preset proposes; it does not decide. Email, phone, and photo each have a separate on-off choice, and a field appears only when your preset allows it and its choice is on.
• Email and phone require a written consent record before they can appear (section 1). The record is kept for 7 years, including after you revoke, so the community can show what was consented to and when it was revoked. Revoking takes effect immediately everywhere your email or phone appears, and turning sharing back on requires a new consent record.
• You can change any choice at any time in Account. A change takes effect on every surface at once: Directory, search, Feed bylines, event lists, and notifications.
• An Admin can only lower your visibility, never raise it, and an Admin cannot turn any of your sharing choices on.
• Suppression is an Admin-set control for legal opt-outs and safety cases. Suppression removes you from the Directory, search, and event lists, and shows only your first name, with no photo, where you post. No reason for a suppression is stored or shown.
• Accounts are for adults. Account holders must be 18 or older, confirmed at acceptance. The service does not list, name, or photograph minors.
• If your account is deactivated (for example, you move out), you disappear from the Directory and search at once. Posts and comments you already wrote keep the name and photo you posted them under. If you want that changed, ask the Admin: an Admin can lower your visibility or suppress your listing, and the change re-renders your past content immediately.

6. Review, correction, and deletion

These rights are offered to every resident, in every state, whether or not a state privacy law applies to the service.

• Review: sign in and open Account to see your profile, choices, and content.
• Correction: in Account you can change your name, phone, photo, visibility, sharing choices, and notification settings at any time. To change your email address, contact your community's Admin; an Admin makes that change so the sign-in address and the account stay matched.
• Access: to request a copy of the information held about you, ask your community's Admin. The association instructs us, and we produce the information for the association to give you.
• Deletion: to request deletion of your account and information, ask your community's Admin. Deletion removes your profile, photo, and contact details. Posts and comments you wrote are removed or stripped of your name on request; tell the Admin which you prefer. We act on the association's instruction within 30 days.
• Leaving a community: an Admin, a primary resident of your home, or you can deactivate your account. Deactivation ends access on the next request and keeps the record for the association until deletion is requested or the retention schedule in section 7 runs. Consent records are kept for the 7-year period in section 5.

How requests reach us: we provide this service to your association, and the association instructs us about its residents' information. There is no public contact address for the operator. Residents contact their community's Admin, and associations reach us through the contact channels in their account.

7. Retention

• Account and content data: kept while your account is active and while your community subscribes.
• Directory consent records: 7 years from capture. If a community's data is deleted under the schedule below, consent records are deleted with it on the operator's systems; the copy in the association's export, if the association took one, is the association's record from then on.
• Moderation records: 90 days, then deleted.
• Forwarded Admin messages: content deleted after forwarding, with an automatic purge of any undelivered content within 24 hours. Delivery records with no content: 12 months.
• Sign-in and invite tokens: stored only as hashes. Invite tokens expire in 14 days, and a used token is marked used in the same step that accepts it.
• If a community cancels: the portal stays live through the paid period. Data is then kept frozen for 90 days in case the community returns, with notices to the Admin and the billing contact at the start of the window, 30 days before deletion, and 7 days before deletion. At 90 days the community's data is deleted: database records, photos and files, and billing linkage. A resident's sign-in account is deleted only if the person has no membership in any other community on the service. The Admin can request a full export at any time, including during the 90 days, and can request immediate deletion instead of waiting. A platform record of the deletion itself, holding no resident personal information, is kept permanently.

8. Tracking and Do Not Track

The service does not collect information about your activity over time and across third-party sites, and it contains no advertising or third-party analytics trackers. Because that collection does not occur, a browser Do Not Track signal does not change how the service operates. Sign-in uses browser storage on your device to keep you signed in and to remember your communities on that device only.

9. Changes to this policy

We post changes on this page with a new effective date. For a material change, we also notify residents by an announcement in the portal or by email before the change takes effect.

10. Security

We maintain reasonable security procedures for the information the service holds: encryption in transit, tenant-isolated data access checked on every request, hashed single-use tokens, rate limits, and restricted Admin access. If a breach of resident information occurs, we notify the affected association immediately on discovery and support the association's notice to its residents. To report a security concern, tell your community's Admin; Admins reach us through their account.