Simmer With

Privacy Policy

Effective: April 15, 2026

This Privacy Policy describes how Simmer With (“Simmer With”, “we”, “us”, or “our”) collects, uses, stores, and protects information when you use our mobile application and related services (the “Service”). If you have any questions about this policy, you can reach us at contact@simmerwith.us.

1. Information we collect

1.1 Information you provide directly

• Your first name and last name.
• Your phone number (verified during signup).
• Your approximate location (city / coordinates) and time zone, for scheduling hangouts.
• Content you create in the app: hangouts, comments, reactions, group memberships, and availability preferences.

1.2 Information from Google (via Google Sign-In)

If you choose to sign in with Google or link your Google account, we request the following OAuth scopes. These are the only Google scopes the Service uses:

• openid / profile — your display name and profile picture URL.
• email — your primary email address, used to identify your account and to prevent duplicate accounts.
• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/calendar.events.readonly — read-only access to events on your primary Google Calendar. We call this API at exactly three moments: (a) during onboarding, to populate your initial weekly availability; (b) if you skipped onboarding, at the moment you link your Google account from the Account Settings screen; and (c) on demand when another user initiates a hangout with you, so we can read your upcoming calendar and suggest times when you are both realistically free. In the “busy times” view you see during onboarding and in Account Settings, we display your own upcoming event titles so that you can visually confirm your calendar synced correctly. These titles are shown only to you, the authenticated account owner; they are never shown to any other user of the Service, never written to our database, and never used for any purpose beyond that on-screen confirmation. We do not refresh your calendar on a schedule, do not read calendar data in the background, and do not modify, create, or delete any calendar events.

1.3 Contacts (optional, user-initiated)

On the Add people screen (used when creating a hangout or adding members to a group), you can optionally grant Simmer With permission to read your device address book so you can quickly pick which friends to invite. This permission is strictly optional — if you deny or revoke it, you can still add people manually by phone number and the rest of the app is fully usable.

When you grant Contacts permission:

• On-device picker. The app reads contact names, phone numbers, and profile photos from your device to build the picker you see on the Add People screen. Profile photos, email addresses, postal addresses, and notes are never uploaded to our servers. Contacts you never interact with also stay entirely on your device.
• Match lookup. When the picker opens, the phone numbers of the contacts displayed (and only the phone numbers) are sent to our backend in a single lookup request so we can tell you which of those contacts already have a Simmer With account. Our backend responds with a list of {phoneNumber → userId} matches and performs no other action. These lookup phone numbers are not persisted to our user database; they are used only to perform the real-time match. As with any HTTP request, payloads may appear transiently in our server access logs for standard debugging, security, and abuse-prevention purposes, with limited retention.
• Inviting someone who is not yet on Simmer With. If you explicitly choose to invite a contact who does not yet have an account, we store that contact's first name, last name, and phone number on the hangout or group you invited them to, as a pending participant. We do this so that when that person later signs up for Simmer With using the same phone number, they are automatically connected to the hangout or group you invited them to — without you having to invite them a second time. We do not store a contact's photo, email, postal address, or any other field from your address book. We only store data for contacts you explicitly added as invitees; contacts you merely browsed in the picker and never selected are not stored.
• Retention and removal of pending invites. A pending invite record is removed when (a) the invited person signs up and is linked to the hangout/group, (b) you or another organizer removes them from the hangout/group, or (c) the hangout or group is deleted. You can remove a pending invitee at any time from the participant list.
• Revocation. You can revoke Contacts permission at any time from your device's system settings (Settings → Apps → Simmer With → Permissions on Android; Settings → Simmer With → Contacts on iOS). Revoking permission stops any further on-device scanning, but does not by itself remove pending invites you already created — those are tied to a specific hangout or group and can be removed from the participant list inside the app.

1.4 Device information

• A Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) device token, used to deliver push notifications about hangouts, groups, and invitations.

2. Google API Disclosure & Limited Use

Simmer With's use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Specifically, data obtained from Google APIs is:

• Used only to provide and improve user-facing features of Simmer With that are prominent in the Service. Calendar event data is used solely to compute your real-time availability for hangout scheduling, alongside the weekly busy times you set yourself in the app.
• Never used for serving advertisements, including retargeting, personalized, or interest-based advertising.
• Never sold to data brokers, information resellers, or any third party.
• Never used to train generalized or third-party AI or machine-learning models.
• Never read by any human except (a) with your explicit consent, (b) as required by applicable law, or (c) for narrow security, debugging, or abuse-prevention purposes, in each case subject to strict access controls.

3. What we store

Your account record in our database (Google Cloud Firestore) contains the following fields relevant to Google data:

• Email address (from your Google account, if you signed in with Google).
• Profile picture URL (a link to the image hosted by Google; we do not re-host the image).
• A Google OAuth refresh token. It is used only when another user initiates a hangout with you, so that we can read your primary calendar at that moment and suggest times when you are both free, without requiring you to re-authorize. It is never used on a schedule or in the background. This token is treated as a secret and is stored encrypted at rest by Firebase.
• User-set “weekly busy times” — recurring busy windows on your week that you set yourself in the app (e.g., “Monday 9:00am – 5:00pm busy”). These are user-declared and are not derived from Google Calendar. Google Calendar events are read on demand and combined with these user-set windows only at the moment we compute scheduling suggestions; the raw calendar events themselves are never persisted to our database. Event titles, descriptions, locations, and attendee lists are never written to our servers.

We also store the non-Google information listed in section 1.1 (name, phone, coordinates, time zone, FCM token, group memberships, and your user-generated content).

Pending invitee records. When you invite a contact who does not yet have a Simmer With account (see section 1.3), we store that contact's first name, last name, and phone number on the hangout or group you invited them to. No other field from your address book (photo, email, postal address, notes) is stored. When the invited person later signs up with the same phone number, we automatically link their new account to these pending entries so they land directly in the hangout or group they were invited to. Pending records are removed when the person signs up and is linked, when an organizer removes them from the participant list, or when the hangout or group is deleted.

4. How we share information

We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal information. We share limited information in the following cases:

• With other users of the Service — your first name, last name, profile picture, and the hangouts / groups you participate in are visible to other users you interact with in the app, as necessary for the Service to function.
• With service providers — Google Cloud (Firestore, Firebase Authentication, Firebase Cloud Messaging) for hosting and infrastructure; Vercel for server hosting; Firebase for phone verification. These providers process information on our behalf under their own privacy and security commitments.
• For legal reasons — if required by law, subpoena, or to protect the rights, safety, or property of Simmer With or our users.

Raw Google Calendar data is never shared with other users, service providers beyond those strictly required to run the Service, or any third party.

5. Data retention, revocation, and deletion

You have full control over the Google data we hold:

• Delete your account — from Account Settings you can permanently delete your Simmer With account. When you do, we revoke any Google refresh token, revoke all of your authentication sessions, and delete your Firebase Authentication record. User-generated content you created (hangouts, comments, reactions) may remain visible to other participants in anonymized form where necessary to preserve the integrity of those shared records.

You can also independently revoke Simmer With's access to your Google account at any time by visiting https://myaccount.google.com/permissions.

6. Security

We store data in Google Cloud Firestore with encryption at rest and encryption in transit (TLS). Refresh tokens are treated as secrets and are only accessible to the Service's backend code path that performs the on-demand Google Calendar read when another user requests to hang out with you. We do not log refresh token values. While we take reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your data, no online service can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

7. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or delete the personal information we hold about you, and to object to or restrict certain processing. You can exercise most of these rights directly from the app (Account Settings → edit profile, revoke Google access, delete account). For any request we can't fulfill through the app, email us at contact@simmerwith.us and we will respond within a reasonable timeframe.

8. Children

The Service is not directed to children under 13 (or under 16 in jurisdictions where that is the applicable age). We do not knowingly collect personal information from children below that age. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will promptly delete it.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the app or by updating the effective date at the top of this page. Your continued use of the Service after the updated policy takes effect constitutes acceptance of the changes.

10. Contact

Questions, concerns, or requests about this Privacy Policy or your data can be sent to contact@simmerwith.us.