Privacy Policy

Hey Neighbor collects your mobile phone number so you can take part in your neighborhood group by text. Most residents give us their number by replying JOIN to an invitation text from their neighborhood moderator; some give it to us by texting HEY and the name of their area to ask for Hey Neighbor on their street; residents who use the web app provide it there instead. Your phone number is never displayed to other Hey Neighbor members and is never shared between residents.

We use your number only to operate Hey Neighbor: delivering your neighborhood group's messages to you, posting your texted replies back into that group, sending sign-in passcodes if you use the web app, delivering the sponsored local offers described in our SMS Terms, which go to every member of a free group, and processing your HEY, JOIN, MUTE, UNMUTE, LEAVE, REPORT, OFFER, CLIP, HELP, STOP, and START replies. The only ways to stop sponsored offers are the group's paid ad-free plan or replying STOP; STOP ends all Hey Neighbor texts and takes you out of every group. Message frequency varies with how active your groups are. Every post in a group is delivered to you as its own text as it happens. Each group also carries clearly labeled offers from local sponsors, up to 8 a month, unless the neighbor who runs the group pays for the ad-free plan. Expect up to about 400 messages per month for each group you belong to. Sponsored offers are only ever sent between 9am and 8pm your local time. Ordinary group messages can arrive at any hour; there is no quiet-hours setting. Message and data rates may apply. We retain your number while your account is active and delete it when you close your account.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text message originator opt-in data and consent are not shared with any third party. We use Twilio as our messaging service provider solely to deliver these messages on our behalf.

Is Hey Neighbor end-to-end encrypted? No, and we would rather say so than let you assume it. Hey Neighbor delivers your group's messages as ordinary text messages, and a text message is handed to your phone company to carry to your handset. No service that reaches a phone by SMS can be end-to-end encrypted, whatever it says on its website.

Is it encrypted in transit? Yes, everywhere we control. The app and the website reach our servers over an encrypted connection, and our servers reach the database the same way. The last hop, from our messaging provider to your phone, crosses the carrier network - the same network that carries every other text you receive, and one no messaging service controls.

Who can read my messages? The other members of your group, which is the point of a group. Nobody else who uses Hey Neighbor: a signed-out visitor can read nothing at all, and a signed-in member can reach only the groups they belong to. That is enforced by the database itself rather than by the screens, so it holds no matter how a request arrives. And we can - we run the service and the messages sit in our database. Anyone who tells you their messages are unreadable by the company storing them is telling you something that is not true. What we do instead of pretending otherwise is keep the access narrow and keep the messages briefly: most groups' posts are deleted after 90 days, a bus group's after 30.

Who can read my phone number? Nobody but us and your phone company. Your number is not merely kept off the screens - the database refuses to hand it over. Every privilege on the resident table is revoked from signed-out visitors and from signed-in members alike, and what is then granted back to a signed-in member is a named list of columns that does not include the phone number. There is no screen, no export and no request that returns another resident's number, because permission to read that column was never given to anyone but our own servers. Sponsors never receive it either, along with never receiving your name or anything you have written.

Messages posted in a group are deleted automatically after 90 days. In groups organised around a school bus or a similar daily run, where a message is worthless within hours of being sent, they are deleted after 30 days. Private messages between two members are deleted after 90 days.

Two things are kept longer, deliberately. A message a moderator has pinned stays until it is unpinned, because pinning marks it as something the group needs to keep. A message with an open report stays until the report is resolved, so a safety concern cannot be erased by the passage of time. Everything else goes on schedule, and deletion is permanent rather than hidden.

Your profile settings ask, optionally, whether you are male or female. You can skip the question, and you can remove your answer at any time from Settings. Nothing about your membership, your messages or your notifications depends on it.

If you answer, no other person ever sees it. It is not shown to other members, not shown to your group's moderator, and not shown to sponsors. It is not in any screen, export or report that names you.

The one thing it is used for is choosing which local business sponsors your group, and it is used only as a total. We look at the make-up of a whole group — never at you — and only when the group is large enough and enough people have answered that the total cannot point at any individual. Sponsors are shown a rough description like "mixed" or "mostly women" and the number of people in the group, never a percentage and never a person. We do not use it at all in school groups.

We do not sell it, share it, or send it to any advertiser, analytics service or other company.

When you text a group, our text message provider tells us the general area your phone number was issued in, such as a town or ZIP code. That is where the number comes from, not where you are. We turn it into a rough area about three miles across, combine it with the other members' to estimate the general area the group serves, and do not keep the town or ZIP code itself.

No one is ever shown this as yours. Sponsors see only a group's approximate area, like "the Lakewood area", and never where any member is. When you leave a group your part in its area is removed, and anything older than six months is deleted. Chesed and community groups are kept at town level and do not use it at all.

We never ask your phone or your browser for your location.

If you join the waiting list with an email address rather than a phone number, we send you at most two messages: a confirmation that you are on the list, and one message on the day it opens. Both carry a one-click unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing stops both.

We do not track what you do with those emails. There is no invisible image reporting that you opened one, and no redirect counting that you followed a link, so every address in our messages goes where it says it goes. We know whether a message was delivered or bounced, and nothing beyond that.

Our SMS Terms & Conditions describe what we send, how often, and how to stop. Our Terms of Service cover the rest of the service.

Abadi Judaica LLC · support@hey-neighbor.com