Privacy, plainly

Kintsu is a free neighborhood discovery platform for the San Francisco Bay Area, published at kintsu.city. This policy explains what we do with personal information when you browse the map, join as a member, or subscribe to the newsletter.

Browsing Kintsu is anonymous. You do not need an account to use the map, open an event, or read a guide. We only hold personal information in these cases:

• Your phone number — when you become a member, so we can verify the number is yours and sign you in.
• Your email address, neighborhood, and interest categories — when you subscribe to the newsletter, so the letter matches where you live and what you care about.
• Anything you send us directly — for example, if you email us or submit an event for review.
• Standard server logs — our hosting provider records technical details such as IP address, browser type, and the pages requested, which we use to keep the site running and to investigate abuse.

We do not ask for your name, address, date of birth, or payment details. Kintsu never handles payments, checkout, or in-app messaging, so there is no transaction history to store. We do not use advertising cookies, cross-site tracking pixels, or third-party analytics suites, and we do not build advertising profiles about you.

We use your contact details for one purpose: to send you the thing you asked for.

• To send the newsletter you subscribed to.
• To text you a one-time code that verifies your number and signs you in, if you joined as a member. We send no other texts.
• To choose which events and places to feature for you, based on the neighborhood and categories you picked.
• To reply to you when you contact us.
• To keep the platform secure, prevent spam, and meet our legal obligations.

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

The listings on Kintsu are gathered from public sources, then reviewed by a person before they are published. That includes publicly posted social media announcements from venues, organizers, and makers, along with business information from the Google Places directory. Automated tools help us read a public post and draft a listing, but a curator approves it before it appears.

We only collect information that the business or organizer chose to publish publicly. If you are an organizer or business owner and you want a listing corrected or removed, email hello@kintsu.city and we will take care of it.

We keep our stack small. These providers process data on our behalf, and only to run the service:

• Supabase — hosts our database and stored files.
• Google Cloud — hosts and serves the website.
• Mapbox — renders the map and resolves addresses to coordinates.
• Google Places — supplies business details and photos for places on the map.
• Cloudinary — stores event images uploaded by our curators.
• Apify and Google Gemini — help collect and interpret public event posts. Your contact details are never sent to these tools.

We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.

We may also disclose information if we are legally required to, or if it is necessary to protect the safety of our community.

Kintsu does not set advertising or analytics cookies. Some event pages embed the original social media post so you can see it in context. When that embed loads, the social network that hosts it may set its own cookies and receive your IP address, under its own privacy policy rather than ours. If you would rather avoid that, you can block third-party content in your browser and the rest of the page will still work.

We keep your phone number or email address until you unsubscribe or ask us to delete it, and then we remove it from our active systems. Server logs are kept for a short period for security and troubleshooting. Published event and place listings stay in our archive as a record of what happened in the neighborhood.

• Stop the newsletter — use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any issue.
• Stop the sign-in codes — we only text a code when you ask to sign in, so they stop when you do. Ask us to delete your account and we erase the number.
• See or delete your data — email hello@kintsu.city and we will confirm what we hold about you, correct it, or erase it.

If you live in California, the CCPA and CPRA give you the right to know what personal information we hold, to request its deletion or correction, and not to be discriminated against for exercising those rights. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of. To make a request, email hello@kintsu.city.

Kintsu is meant for adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you believe a child has given us their details, email hello@kintsu.city and we will delete it.

We use reputable hosting providers, encrypted connections, and restricted access to our admin tools. No service can promise perfect security, but we keep the amount of personal data we hold small on purpose, which is the most effective protection we can offer you.

If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this page and change the date at the top. If the change is significant and we have your contact details, we will tell you directly.

Questions, corrections, or deletion requests: hello@kintsu.city. See also our Terms and Conditions.