Privacy Policy

RWCBM (“we,” “our”) runs the website at rwcbm.com and the RWCBM app for iPhone and Android. Pineland Technologies builds and maintains both for us. This policy says what we collect when you use them, what we do with it, who else handles it, and what you can change.

By creating an account or using the app, you agree to this policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service. Questions go to privacy@rwcbm.com.

• We do not sell your information, and we show no ads.
• Messages in the app are end-to-end encrypted. We cannot read them. Messages sent before August 2026 were not, and they are still stored in readable form (see Messages).
• A short list of companies run parts of the service for us. Each one gets only what its job needs, and every one is named below.
• If your business listing names a website, we read that website and use an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) to draft a fuller listing for you to approve, and to write the opening of one welcome email (see Reading your business website).

• Your account. Sign-in is handled by Clerk, which holds your email address, your phone number if you sign in with a text message code, and your password (we never see it). We store your name, optional username and photo, your city and state, your time zone (so event times show in your own zone), and the contact details, bio and social links you choose to add.
• Business listings. The business name, description, category, what you need help with, logo and photos, video links, the contact details you publish, your website and Google Business Profile link, the city and state, and a map pin if you place one.
• What you post. Borough wall posts and comments, forum threads and replies, requests for help and your responses to other men’s requests, applications, Give Back deals, event RSVPs, answers to a borough’s joining questions, reports you file, and support requests you send us.
• Deals and activity. Deals you confirm with another member (including the dollar figure you both agree to), deal redemptions, borough memberships, notifications, what you have read, and when each of these happened.
• Payments. Stripe handles your card. We keep your Stripe customer number, the state of your membership and any borough dues, and the discounts applied. We never see or store your card number.
• Server logs. Your IP address, browser or app version, the page or address requested, and the time. We use them for security, fixing faults, and stopping abuse.
• Page counts. How often each page is opened, roughly where from, and on what kind of device. No cookie is set for this. Page addresses are stripped of anything that identifies a person before they are counted, so the count records that a member’s profile was opened, never whose.
• App crash reports. When the app crashes, it sends a report (phone model, system version, app version, and what the app was doing) to Sentry. The report is not tied to your account.

What stays on your phone. If you allow it, the app uses your phone’s location to center the borough map on where you are. That location is not sent to us or stored. The app touches your calendar only when you tap to add an event, and your camera and photos only when you choose a picture to send or upload.

We do not collect your contacts, your precise location, advertising identifiers, your browsing outside our site, or your card or bank details. We set no advertising cookies. The only cookies we set keep you signed in and remember where you were, such as the borough you last opened or an invite you followed.

Since August 2026, messages between members (one-to-one, group chats and borough rooms) are sent and read in the RWCBM app, and they are end-to-end encrypted using the Signal protocol. Each message, and each photo you send in a chat, is locked on your phone before it leaves and can be unlocked only on the phones it was sent to. We do not have the keys, so we cannot read them.

• What our server holds. Each phone’s public keys (the half meant to be shared, which lets other phones lock messages for it), and each encrypted message only until the receiving phone collects it. Once that phone confirms it has the message, our copy is deleted. A photo sent in a chat is stored in its locked form; the key to open it travels inside the encrypted message.
• What we can still see. Who sent a message to whom, when, and in which group chat. A message notification shows the sender’s name; the message itself reaches your phone still locked, and your phone unlocks it.
• Where your history lives. On your phone. We keep no readable copy, so we cannot restore it if the phone is lost or replaced.
• Messages from before August 2026. These were not encrypted. They are still stored on our server in readable form and still appear in your conversations. A member’s old messages, sent and received, are deleted when his account is deleted.
• Messages from RWCBM itself, such as the welcome note, replies to your support requests and reminders from us, are written by our server, so they are not encrypted.
• On the website you can read your older conversations but not send messages. A note you write through a form on the website (lending a hand on a request, contacting a business, applying, claiming a deal, or asking to join a borough) reaches the other man as an email from us, along with a notification.

Two features read the website you put on your business listing. Both use an AI model called Claude, made by Anthropic. Nothing else in RWCBM uses an AI model.

• A draft of your listing. When a business with a website is listed, our server reads a few public pages of that site, the way a search engine would, and honors the site’s instructions about what may be read. We send that text to Claude along with the business name, category, city and state, and what you wrote on the listing. It drafts a fuller description and a line about what the business buys from other businesses. It is only a draft: nothing on your listing changes until you approve, edit or reject it, and no one else, our admins included, can approve it for you. This runs on its own about every 30 minutes for newly listed businesses, and an admin can also start it for an older listing.
• Your welcome email. About two hours after you join, Link, who runs RWCBM, sends you one introduction email. It includes the small business website offer from Pineland Technologies, the firm that builds and maintains RWCBM. If your listing names a website by then, Claude reads it to write the email’s opening lines about your business. Those lines go into that one email and nowhere else; they never change your listing. Turning off “Send me the daily request roundup” on your Profile before then stops this email too.

Neither feature sends Anthropic your email address, your phone number, your messages, or anything about you beyond your business listing and the public pages of its website. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms, what we send is not used to train its models.

• To create and run your account.
• To show your posts, requests, deals and business listings to other members, to the audience you choose (your borough or the whole network).
• To deliver messages and notifications in the app, and by email and push notification.
• To suggest introductions between members whose businesses could work together, using what you wrote on your listings.
• To compute totals for the network and for each borough (open requests, deals struck, amount given back).
• To bill dues and payments you sign up for.
• To enforce our community rules and prevent abuse.
• To find and fix faults, keep the service secure, and improve it.

The companies below run parts of RWCBM for us. Each gets only what its job needs. We do not sell personal information, and we share none of it with advertisers.

• Clerk (clerk.com): sign-in and account security. Holds your email address, phone number if you use one, and password, and sends your sign-in codes. Its sign-up page uses a bot check from Cloudflare.
• Vercel (vercel.com): hosts the website and the app’s server, keeps server logs, stores the photos and files you upload (Vercel Blob), and produces the cookieless page counts described above.
• Neon (neon.tech): our database, where your profile, listings, posts and the rest are kept. Provided through Vercel.
• Stripe (stripe.com): membership dues, borough dues and one-time payments. Receives your name, email address and card details when you pay.
• Resend (resend.com): sends our email. Receives your email address and the content of each email, including a note another member sends you through the website.
• Mapbox (mapbox.com): the maps on the website, and turning a city, state or postal code into a place on the map. Mapbox sees your IP address when a map loads in your browser.
• Upstash (upstash.com): limits how often an action can be repeated, to stop abuse. Receives your member ID, or your IP address if you are signed out, in counters that clear themselves within a few hours.
• Anthropic (anthropic.com): the AI model that reads your business website, as described in Reading your business website.
• Expo (expo.dev): delivers app updates and push notifications, which Apple and Google then carry to your phone. A message notification carries the sender’s name and the still-locked message, never readable text.
• Sentry (sentry.io): receives the app crash reports described above.
• Google Maps and Apple Maps draw the borough map in the app (Google on Android, Apple on iPhone).
• YouTube and Rumble. A video a member adds to his listing plays from YouTube or Rumble, which see that your browser loaded it.
• Pineland Technologies builds and maintains RWCBM and works on the systems above on our behalf.
• Other members. Anything you post is visible to the audience you post it to. Your display name, optional username and photo, your business listings, and any contact details you switch to “share” are visible to other signed-in members.
• Law enforcement, when required. If served a valid legal request, we may disclose the minimum information needed to comply. We push back on overbroad requests and, where the law allows, tell the member affected. Encrypted messages we cannot read, so we cannot hand them over.

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. Deleting your account removes your profile, business listings, requests, posts, comments, forum posts, old messages, borough memberships, deals and notifications from our database, and closes your sign-in.

Two things it does not do yet:

• It does not cancel a paid membership or borough dues. Cancel those from the Billing page first.
• Photos and files you uploaded stop appearing anywhere on RWCBM, but copies stay in our file storage until we clear them by hand. Write to privacy@rwcbm.com if you want that done.

Our database backups and server logs expire on their own within 30 days. Stripe keeps its own payment records for as long as the law requires.

• Edit your profile. Change or clear your bio, photo, social links and location, and turn the “share my personal email / phone” switches on or off, from your Profile.
• Delete what you posted. Delete your own posts, requests, deals and businesses from their pages.
• Turn down a listing draft. Reject a drafted listing and nothing changes. You can also take the website off your listing.
• Email. Turn off the daily request roundup on your Profile (that switch also stops the welcome emails we send new members), each kind of notification under Notification settings, and a borough’s digest on that borough’s page. A few emails cannot be turned off: those about your account and billing, a note your borough’s officers send to the whole borough, and occasional announcements from RWCBM to every member. Our emails do not carry an unsubscribe link yet; use those settings, or write to us.
• Delete your account. In the app, open Account and tap Delete account. Or email privacy@rwcbm.com from the address on your account, and we will do it within 30 days. The Delete Account page has the details.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or California, you have rights under GDPR and CCPA, including the right to see, correct, or delete your personal data; to object to or limit some uses of it; and to take a copy with you. To use any of them, email privacy@rwcbm.com from the address on your account. We will answer within 30 days.

RWCBM is for adults in business. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor has created an account, email privacy@rwcbm.com and we will remove it.

All traffic to rwcbm.com and the app’s server is encrypted in transit. Passwords are held only by Clerk, which stores them hashed. Messages in the app are end-to-end encrypted as described above. Access to our systems is limited to the people who need it to run the service. No system is perfect; if you spot a weakness, please report it to security@rwcbm.com.

We update this policy when the product changes. Material changes will be announced in the app and dated at the top of this page. The “Last updated” line tells you when the current version took effect.

Privacy questions: privacy@rwcbm.com
Security reports: security@rwcbm.com
General support: support@rwcbm.com