Privacy

• Your account: your name, your email address, whether you are a parent, an athlete or Hometown staff, which athlete you are linked to, your email settings, and the invitation you joined with. If you set a password, the app keeps only a scrambled (hashed) form of it. If you connect Google or Apple, the app keeps your account ID with that company and the access tokens it sends, stored encrypted.
• When you sign in: the times you signed in and roughly when you last used the app. Only the times, not your device or location.
• Your athlete’s portfolio: name, school and sports, the details your family fills in (such as position, height, grades and honors), who can see each detail, the look you choose, the coach link and public page settings, and which suggestions you added or dismissed.
• A history of portfolio changes: who made each change, when, and the value before and after. A detail you change or clear stays in that history until it is removed through account deletion.
• Messages: replies to updates, chats with Hometown, and which updates you have opened, acknowledged or reacted to.
• Safety reports: when you report a private chat message or an announcement reply, Hometown associates your account with the reported message and stores the reason, any details you enter, and the report status so staff can review it.
• Blocked senders: your account’s block choices store the other account’s identifier, or a keyed hash of an outside sender’s email address. They hide that sender’s messages and stop related alerts for your account. A block remains until you unblock the sender or the associated account is deleted.
• Photos and video you send: each file exactly as your phone sent it, including any audio recorded with a video, with its caption, date and file name. Files can carry details your phone saved in them, such as when and where they were taken and which phone took them. Hometown keeps the original with those details. The smaller previews the app makes carry none of them.
• Messages from people outside the program, such as a coach writing through a portfolio: their name, email address, organization, role and message.
• Cookies that sign you in and keep you signed in, hold an invitation you opened until it is used (for up to seven days), and remember your light or dark setting, which athlete you last opened, and whether a page is open inside the iPhone app. Staff accounts use a few more.

• The portal does not save your IP address in your account or sign-in record. It holds the address briefly in memory to limit repeated sign-in attempts. Hosting providers keep separate service records, described in Website visits and service logs below.
• The portal does not save device and browser details in your account. Original photo and video files can carry those details (above), and hosting providers receive browser information with requests (below).
• Your profile photo from Google or Apple, or the sign-in token they send, which can carry your name, email address and a link to your photo.
• For people outside the program, the IP address itself. The app keeps only a scrambled form of it to limit repeated messages.

The private portal has no advertising or behavioral analytics. Hometown does not sell your information. Hosting providers keep operational traffic records for their services; public website requests are described below.

• Hometown staff can see everything in the app, including details marked Private, so they can run the program. To help with a problem, staff can also open the app signed in as a family member. While they do, they cannot send messages, replies or uploads, or turn on the public page.
• The developer who maintains the app for Hometown can reach the database, its nightly copies, and the photos and video you send.
• Your family: the parents and the athlete linked to the same athlete see the same updates, chats and portfolio. Other families never see your replies, your chats or your private details.
• Each portfolio detail has its own setting. Private: only your family and Hometown. Coaches can see: anyone with the coach link. Public: anyone with the coach link, and anyone at all, search engines included, once a parent turns on the public page. Hometown staff can also change who sees a detail, and lock that setting.
• The coach link is a secret web address. Anyone who has it sees the athlete’s name, school and sports, Hometown’s photos and film, and the details marked Coaches can see or Public, even while the public page is off. Details marked Private never appear. The page also lets them send your family a message. Turning the link off stops every copy of it at once.
• Who can make the coach link: a parent or Hometown staff can create it and choose what coaches see. So can the athlete, unless a parent or Hometown turns that off. Parents get an email when the athlete creates the link or shares a detail.
• The public page puts the portfolio at its own address, made from the athlete’s name, for anyone to open without signing in, and search engines can list it. Within a family, only a parent can turn it on or mark a detail Public. Hometown staff cannot turn it on, except a staff member the program has linked as that athlete’s own parent, acting as a parent. A parent, the athlete or Hometown can turn it off at any time. It also stops showing when no parent is linked to the athlete any more, and a parent linked later finds it off until they turn it on themselves.
• Photos and video you send go to Hometown staff. Only staff can open the original file. You can see the uploads you sent and how they are going; another parent of the same athlete cannot.
• A message from outside the program becomes a chat that Hometown staff and the athlete’s parents can read and answer. The athlete can read it but does not see the sender’s email address.

Hometown uses these companies to run the app:

• Railway hosts the app, its database, and the program that makes photo and video previews and the nightly copy of the database.
• Resend sends all of the app’s email: invitations, sign-in links, password resets, updates, notices about changes to an account or a portfolio, notices that a message is waiting, alerts to staff, and email to people outside the program who send a message (asking them to confirm their address, then any replies). Resend receives each address and the content of each email. Under Hometown’s current plan, Resend keeps email and delivery-log data for 30 days and stores it in the United States. Its backup copies persist for seven days.
• Cloudflare R2 stores the photos and video you send, and a copy of the whole database made each night, in private storage with no public address. Short-lived links go only to people allowed to see a photo or video, never to a database copy.
• Google and Apple, only if you choose to sign in with them.
• Fastmail hosts Hometown’s mailbox, so email you send to contact@hometownmediatn.com is stored there until removed. Deleting a portal account does not recall email already delivered to that mailbox.

The iPhone app also lets you browse Hometown’s public website without signing in. Those pages, photos and films load from Hometown’s website and its media address, both run by Cloudflare. Cloudflare receives the IP address, browser information and requested page or resource, as a web host does. Public browsing does not receive your private portal sign-in cookie. Links to external websites, mail or phone apps open outside the private portal; third-party embedded videos in the iPhone public browsing area use an explicit browser playback link.

These providers keep information about requests to operate the service and measure website traffic:

• Railway service logs: IP address, browser information, requested path, response status and timing help operate, secure and troubleshoot the portal. Hometown’s current standard log-retention window is seven days.
• Cloudflare website statistics: requests to the public website carry an IP address, browser information and a requested page or resource. Cloudflare uses IP addresses to count visits and estimate the originating country. Its adaptive traffic statistics are kept for at least 31 days. This is a statistics-retention period, not a guaranteed deletion date for each request detail. This traffic measurement is separate from an optional page-analytics script, which Hometown’s website does not include.

Country estimates do not use the phone’s location permission. Original uploaded files can contain precise location metadata, as described above. Public website statistics do not receive your private portal cookie. Hometown does not use these records for advertising or combine them with other companies’ app data to track you.

• While your family is in the program, the app keeps your information so you can use it.
• Deleting an account removes that person’s login, authored messages and replies, submitted media, and portfolio history they authored. It also removes current portfolio values last changed by that person, while keeping values another family member last changed. The shared athlete profile, other family accounts and their content, and Hometown-owned announcements and staff content remain. See Leaving and deleting your account.
• Conversations started by people outside the program are deleted once a year has passed since their last message. While the athlete is active, Hometown staff or a parent can delete one sooner.
• A message from outside the program reaches your family only after its sender confirms their email address, within a day. To limit repeated messages, the app keeps a record of each one: the sender’s email address and a scrambled form of their IP address, and the whole message if it was never delivered. It deletes the record of an unconfirmed message two days after it was sent, any other record 30 days after, and all of an athlete’s records at once if the athlete leaves.
• The app makes these outside-message retention deletions in a check it runs every hour, so they happen within about an hour of their date. They come later only if that check stops running or falls behind.
• Sign-in links stop working after 5 minutes, password reset links after an hour, and invitations after 7 days.
• If Hometown deletes an update, the replies families sent to it are deleted with it.
• Email already delivered stays in the recipient’s inbox. The app cannot take it back.
• Each night the app may save a copy of the database in private storage. When backups run successfully, the system keeps the newest 30 copies and prunes older ones after a successful restore check. If backups are disabled, fail, or a restore check does not pass, older copies can remain longer; there is no fixed deletion date for backup copies. A signed deletion marker is kept until every retained copy was made after the deletion completed. Before a restored database is reopened, an operator must replay these markers to remove deleted accounts and their files. Hometown does not reopen service until that step succeeds.
• A minimal deletion receipt keeps its status, timestamps and keyed hashes so the request can be tracked without keeping the account ID, name, email or message text. Completed receipts are normally kept for 30 days; if Apple revocation needs manual follow-up, the receipt stays until that action is reviewed. A separate signed marker with opaque request and upload identifiers and a keyed identity hash stays in private storage until all retained database copies were made after the deletion completed; it contains no name, email or message text.

You can request deletion of your own account in Settings. The app asks you to review what will be removed, confirm with a recent sign-in, and save a receipt to check progress. It revokes your app sessions when the request is accepted. Hometown aims to finish within 24 hours; this is a target, not a guarantee. The receipt shows current status and, when a retry is scheduled, its next retry time. You can contact Hometown for help if the request is overdue, but support is not required to submit a normal request.

• Deleting one account removes that person’s login and provider links, their authored messages and replies, their own submitted photos and videos (including originals, previews, posters and unfinished uploads), and the portfolio history entries they authored. Safety reports filed by that account and reports tied to its deleted messages are removed with those records. Other family accounts stay. Shared athlete profiles and Hometown-owned announcements and staff content stay; a deleted staff author is no longer named as their author.
• If an account is linked to an athlete as a parent, the app turns off that athlete’s public page when no parent remains linked. A later parent must turn it on again. Hometown’s separately created photos and film are not submitted media and are not removed by deleting a family account.
• If a staff account that owns invitations is the last active owner, deletion must wait until another active owner can receive those invitations. The app will explain this condition before confirmation.
• If you used Apple sign-in, Hometown attempts to revoke its Apple authorization during deletion. If Apple or the required server configuration is temporarily unavailable, the request stays queued for retry before account and media cleanup proceeds. If the stored Apple authorization is missing or Apple returns a non-retryable response, deletion can finish with manual follow-up shown on the receipt. You can also remove Hometown Athletes from your Apple or Google account settings.
• If a public page was on, copies search engines made are outside Hometown’s control.
• Emails already delivered, and hosting or email-provider logs, remain under those providers’ own retention settings.

Most of the athletes in the program are under 18. Before sending an invitation, Hometown confirms the athlete is 13 or older. Only a parent can turn on an athlete’s public page, and nothing shows there until a parent does. Details marked Public also show to anyone with the coach link, even before the public page is on.

Email contact@hometownmediatn.com. The rules for using the app are in the terms. When Hometown changes this page, it changes the date at the top.