Neighbor Trails
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Neighbor Trails — Privacy Policy

Effective date: November 9, 2026
Last updated: November 9, 2026
Website: https://neighbortrails.com
Privacy contact: neighbortrails@gmail.com

1. Introduction and Who We Are

Neighbor Trails is an independently owned and operated online service based in California, United States. It helps adults discover nearby yard sales, publish sale listings, save sales, and plan routes to visit them. This Privacy Policy describes how information is collected, used, disclosed, retained, and protected when you use our website and related features.

Throughout this policy, “Neighbor Trails,” “we,” “our,” and “us” refer to the individual currently operating the service. Neighbor Trails is not currently described as an LLC or a separately formed corporation. Questions and privacy requests can be sent to neighbortrails@gmail.com.

2. Information We Collect

Depending on the features you use, we may collect:

  • Account and profile information: email address, account identifiers, the display name you provide, optional profile image, authentication information managed through our login provider, and account preferences.
  • Policy acceptance records: the account identifier, Terms of Service version, Privacy Policy version shown, server-recorded acceptance time, and acceptance context.
  • Listing reports: limited account-linked information stored privately on our server, including the reporting account identifier, listing identifier, report type or reason, and any optional details you submit.
  • Sale listing information: title, description, categories, dates and hours, location and address, exact and generalized map coordinates, photos, and the public seller display name.
  • Saved sales and Trails: saved listing IDs, private notes, Trails, selected stops, stop order, and recorded visit/skip information.
  • Location and map inputs: cities or ZIP codes you search, map locations you select, and one-time device location when you explicitly grant permission. Some routing requests use these coordinates.
  • Stay in the Loop information (formerly Early List): signup email, city or ZIP code, signup/referral source, and any optional survey responses collected through the earlier Early List experience about interest in Neighbor Trails and possible beta testing.
  • Payment records: listing/payment references, transaction status, amount and currency, and identifiers returned by Stripe; payment card details are handled by Stripe's hosted checkout rather than stored by Neighbor Trails.
  • Technical and communications information: authentication/session data, necessary browser storage, device/network or request information processed by our infrastructure and providers, error diagnostics where enabled, and the content of support or privacy-request communications.

You can browse some sale information without creating an account. Other features require a signed-in account or information you choose to submit.

3. How We Use Information

We use information to run Neighbor Trails, authenticate accounts, create and display permitted listings, process publication payments, show sale locations during authorized time windows, maintain Saved sales and Trails, provide route estimates, and send supported account or sale-related communications.

We also use limited information to address support, safety concerns, and privacy requests, protect the service from misuse, diagnose failures, document policy notice and agreement, maintain records needed for legitimate operational or legal purposes, and improve reliability.

We use Stay in the Loop signup details to understand interest in Neighbor Trails and, where appropriate, communicate occasional product, beta, or launch updates. We may review optional survey responses collected through the earlier Early List experience. Stay in the Loop is not currently connected to Mailchimp or an automated marketing-email program.

4. Sale Listings and Address Privacy

Sellers provide an exact sale address so visitors can find a sale when it is taking place. Before address reveal is authorized, Neighbor Trails shows a generalized location rather than the seller's exact street address and map coordinates.

For each scheduled sale day, the exact address and map location become available beginning at 5:00 AM in the listing's local timezone and remain available through that day's scheduled end. For multiday sales, the exact address hides overnight between scheduled days. Exact location also hides after the final scheduled end or when the seller uses End Early.

When an address is authorized for public viewing, anyone with access to the relevant listing may be able to see it and could independently remember, copy, or share it. Seller-provided listing descriptions, images, or other visible content could also reveal information, so sellers should avoid including private details they do not want public.

5. Location, Maps, and Trails

Neighbor Trails provides sale discovery and route planning, not continuous location tracking or turn-by-turn navigation. You can search for an area by city or ZIP code or move the map without granting device-location permission. If you choose My Location, your browser asks for permission to obtain a one-time device-location reading; the app does not request GPS access automatically or continuously track your movement.

Discovery may remember an area that you selected through search or the map in your browser's local storage. A one-time device-geolocation reading is not saved as that persisted Discovery area. Trail My Location is a separate, one-time, page-lifetime feature and does not alter your Discovery browsing origin. While a device location is being used, it can influence map display or route calculations; relevant coordinates and technical request information may be processed by mapping providers. We do not store your one-time device GPS readings in your Neighbor Trails account or persist them as a location history.

Mapbox provides maps, seller-address geocoding, and road-distance estimates. When a seller searches for or confirms a sale address, Neighbor Trails sends the address to Mapbox through our server to identify geographic coordinates and support the sale schedule. This may occur before the address is available to other Neighbor Trails users. Our separate address-visibility rules control when the exact seller location may be shown publicly.

When you view or interact with a map, your browser connects to Mapbox to load map resources. Mapbox may receive the displayed map area, technical request data, and related geographic coordinates. For Trail routing and optimization, Neighbor Trails sends relevant stop coordinates to Mapbox through our server; these are exact coordinates only when authorized for that use, or otherwise generalized area coordinates. If you voluntarily use Trail My Location for routing, the one-time device coordinates may also be sent through our server to Mapbox to calculate road distances or select a starting stop. Neighbor Trails does not use these features for continuous movement tracking.

Planned Trail road mileage and estimated driving time are not records of miles actually traveled. When you select navigation, Neighbor Trails opens Apple Maps or Google Maps for the current stop and passes the applicable, currently authorized destination to that service, whose privacy practices apply.

6. Photos and Public Content

Sale listing photos, listing descriptions and the public seller display name may be visible to visitors when a listing is eligible for public display. A seller's eligible, deliberately uploaded profile image may appear with their public seller information.

Neighbor Trails re-encodes new uploaded listing and profile photos to remove embedded metadata such as original EXIF information. This cannot remove addresses, people or other information visible within the image itself, and it does not guarantee the removal of copies that other people or third-party caches have already retained.

When a seller explicitly deletes a listing, Neighbor Trails hides its content and uses a server-managed process to remove that listing's associated sale photos from its Storage service. Ordinary sale expiration or End Early is different from seller deletion and does not automatically mean all historical photos are removed.

7. Saved Sales, History, and Notes

Signed-in users can save sales, maintain private notes, build Trails, and mark visits or skipped stops. These records are linked to the user's account and are not intended as public profile information.

If a seller deletes a listing or closes an account, another user's Saved or Trail history may retain a neutral unavailable-sale placeholder so that the user's existing plan remains usable. The deleted seller's address, photos, and identifiable listing details are not intended to remain visible through that placeholder.

8. Payments and Stripe

When payment is enabled for listing publication, Neighbor Trails uses Stripe-hosted Checkout for the standard $5 USD one-time listing fee. Stripe processes payment details under its own privacy and security practices. Neighbor Trails stores limited payment-attempt and fulfillment information, such as listing/payment IDs, amount, currency, state and transaction references, to verify a payment and avoid duplicate publication charges.

During Free Open Beta, eligible listings can be published for $0 USD, with no payment card or new Stripe Checkout required for free publication. Publishing a listing for free does not itself create a new publication payment attempt. Existing payment attempts and records from earlier paid publication activity may still be verified or retained as needed to prevent duplicate charges and handle payment issues.

We do not receive or store complete payment card details in our own listing database. Payment and related accounting/dispute records may be retained after an account is closed when reasonably necessary for legal, financial, security, or dispute-resolution purposes. During private alpha, Stripe remains in Test Mode; this can change only when real payment collection is intentionally enabled.

9. Notifications and Email

Neighbor Trails may send authentication-related messages, such as sign-in or account verification emails, through its configured authentication-email provider. Supported in-app notifications include certain saved-sale reminders and important listing changes, such as cancellation, End Early, or extension.

Your notification settings can disable routine sale reminders where that choice is offered; important transactional or listing-change notices may still appear. Stay in the Loop collects signup details for occasional updates. Optional survey answers from the earlier Early List experience may remain subject to the retention policy below; neither signup experience represents an active automated Mailchimp campaign.

When promotional email communications are introduced, we will provide an appropriate means to opt out and honor applicable marketing-email requirements. For now, you may contact neighbortrails@gmail.com to request removal from Stay in the Loop (including earlier Early List signups) or to stop receiving future signup-list communications.

10. Cookies and Tracking

Neighbor Trails uses cookies and browser storage primarily for access, authentication, and site functionality. We do not currently operate advertising pixels, cross-site advertising trackers, or a separate behavioral-analytics or session-replay service.

While the private-alpha PIN gate is enabled, the `nt_alpha` cookie remembers that a browser successfully passed the gate. It is cryptographically signed, not encrypted; it does not store the PIN. It has HttpOnly, Secure, and SameSite=Lax attributes and ordinarily expires after about 30 days. Once the PIN gate is disabled, the cookie is no longer required for access; a previously issued cookie may remain in the browser until it expires or is cleared.

Browser local storage may retain your sign-in session information, manually selected Discovery area, filter choices, and an unfinished account-scoped seller listing draft. An unfinished guest draft may be kept in tab-specific session storage. These features may continue to store information on your device until the associated data are cleared or expire through the applicable workflow.

Our mapping provider, Mapbox, uses browser local storage and technical usage events to measure and support its web mapping service. Mapbox GL JS may store a randomly generated identifier used in telemetry events and local event metadata. Mapbox states that it does not use this information for targeted advertising or to create individual user profiles. These provider-level activities are distinct from Neighbor Trails' own functional browser storage. Google Fonts and other infrastructure providers also receive ordinary technical network information when their resources are requested.

The current Neighbor Trails application does not change its behavior in response to browser Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals. We do not currently use personal information for cross-site behavioral advertising or sell personal information. Third-party providers, including mapping and font services, may also process technical information when you use other websites that rely on their services; their independent practices are described in their own privacy notices. If our tracking or data-sharing practices change, we will reassess the disclosures and any legally required privacy choices.

11. Sharing and Service Providers

We share information where reasonably necessary to operate and protect Neighbor Trails, including with:

  • Lovable Cloud / Supabase-based services: hosting, application infrastructure, authentication, databases, technical logs, and file Storage.
  • Stripe: hosted payment checkout, transaction confirmation, fraud prevention, and payment-related operations. Complete payment-card details are entered with Stripe rather than stored in our listing database. Stripe remains in Test Mode during private alpha.
  • Mapbox: map rendering, seller-address geocoding, and road-distance calculations. Depending on the feature used, Mapbox may receive seller-submitted addresses, geographic coordinates (including optional one-time Trail routing origins), IP addresses, browser/device information, and technical map requests. Some mapping resources are loaded directly from Mapbox by your browser. For more information, see the Mapbox Privacy Policy.
  • Google services: web fonts and any supported Google sign-in flow you choose to use.
  • Apple Maps or Google Maps: destination handoff only when you choose to open external navigation.
  • Authentication-email and supporting infrastructure providers: delivery of account messages, site operation, and diagnostics as configured.

Certain eligible sale-listing content—including permitted seller display names, photos, and sale locations during the authorized reveal window—is visible to visitors. We may also disclose information where required by law or reasonably necessary to protect the service or its users.

We do not currently operate a Mailchimp campaign, and we do not sell or rent personal information to data brokers. Third-party providers may process IP addresses, technical identifiers, or location-related request information under their own privacy practices.

12. Data Retention and Deletion

We keep account, listing, saved-sale, and Trail information while it is reasonably needed to provide the corresponding features, or until an applicable deletion request is processed, subject to limited information retained for lawful operational, financial, security, or dispute-related purposes.

Stay in the Loop (formerly Early List): Signup contact information and any optional survey responses collected earlier are retained for no more than 12 months from the original signup date, unless deleted sooner because they are no longer needed or following an appropriately verified request. We use a manual monthly review, ordinarily on the first day of each month, and identify records that would reach their retention limit before the next review. We also review signup-record relevance as the service develops. This is not automated deletion.

Seller listing deletion: Explicit deletion hides the sale and retains a nonpublic, soft-deleted database record for technical integrity. The verified server-managed workflow removes the sale's associated uploaded photos from active Storage. Ordinary expiration and End Early are different from seller deletion and do not by themselves trigger the same file-removal process.

Account deletion: Our workflow removes the account and associated profile and private account features, verifies removal of account-owned sale photos and avatars from active Storage, and anonymizes retained deleted-listing records. Some neutral unavailable-sale references may remain in other users' Trails. Stripe transaction references and limited financial/security evidence may be retained where needed.

Policy acceptance records: After account closure, we may retain a limited record showing which Terms of Service version was accepted and which Privacy Policy version was presented. This record is limited to the account identifier, policy versions, server-recorded acceptance time, and acceptance context. It does not include an IP address, device fingerprint, or complete browser user-agent record. We retain it as limited legal or dispute-related evidence.

Stay in the Loop records (including earlier Early List signups) are separate from account records. Closing an account does not automatically remove a separately submitted signup under the same email address. Contact neighbortrails@gmail.com if you would like both handled.

Backups and logs: Our cloud infrastructure creates rolling database backup snapshots. Information removed from the active database may remain temporarily in existing backups until those backups expire according to the provider's retention practices. Uploaded Storage files are managed separately from database backups. Technical and error logs are retained under applicable provider operational and security policies; exact log-retention periods and a universal backup-deletion deadline have not been independently established, so removal from the active service does not guarantee immediate deletion from every backup or diagnostic system. Outside parties may also retain copies they obtained while content was publicly available.

13. Security and Privacy Choices

We use HTTPS, authentication, restricted database access, server-side authorization, privacy-aware public listing queries, and Storage access controls intended to protect information. Exact seller location visibility is governed by the listing's sale-day schedule. Although we take precautions, no online service can guarantee absolute security.

You can edit supported profile details, adjust available notification settings, decline or withdraw browser location permission, and use the account deletion option. You may also contact neighbortrails@gmail.com to request access, correction, or deletion of personal information, including a Stay in the Loop or earlier Early List record. We may need to verify identity or control of an email address before responding to a sensitive request.

14. Children's and Teens' Privacy

Neighbor Trails is intended only for adults age 18 and older. It is not designed or marketed for children or teens. Our current signup process does not collect dates of birth or independently verify every user's age. If we learn that an account or Early List submission belongs to someone under 18, we may remove the information or account as appropriate. Please contact neighbortrails@gmail.com with relevant concerns.

15. Applicable Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live and which privacy laws apply to Neighbor Trails, you may have rights to request access to, correction of, or deletion of certain personal information, or to object to some uses of it. These rights can have exceptions, including where records must be kept for legitimate legal, security, accounting or dispute-related reasons.

To make a request, contact neighbortrails@gmail.com. We will review it, take appropriate steps to verify identity, and respond as required by applicable law. This contact process does not imply that a self-service data export or fully automated privacy dashboard is currently available.

16. Policy Changes and Contact

We may revise this Privacy Policy to reflect changes in Neighbor Trails, its information practices, service providers, or applicable legal requirements. We will identify the policy's effective date and update its Last updated date when revisions are published.

For material changes that significantly affect how personal information is collected, used, shared, or retained, we will provide a prominent notice on our website explaining the change and when it takes effect. Where applicable law requires additional direct notice or consent—including before certain materially different uses of information collected under an earlier policy—we will take those steps before implementing the affected use. We encourage you to review this policy from time to time.

Privacy and support contact: neighbortrails@gmail.com
Service: Neighbor Trails — https://neighbortrails.com
Operator: Individually owned and operated in California, United States.