Privacy & dignity
Your privacy, in plain language.
This community has every reason to be careful about who knows what. So we'll be straightforward about how this site treats you, and just as clear about what we haven't built yet.
You can browse without an account
There's nothing to sign up for on this website. You don't need a legal name, documents, or a location to explore resources. Look around as long as you like.
Reaching out isn't logged here
When you tap a phone number or open an organization's website, you go straight to them. This site doesn't keep a record of who you called or what you looked at.
Verification is optional, never a gate
In the Same Ground app, confirming your service is entirely your choice. It can unlock peer-only community spaces, but it is never required to find or use resources and support. It's also still under construction: no badges are active yet, so use your own judgment with what members tell you about their service until it's live.
The resources are independent
The organizations listed here set their own privacy practices. When you contact them, their rules apply, so it's worth asking them directly what they keep and share.
You can delete your account anytime
If you create an account in the app, you can delete it and its data whenever you like, from the app or the web, with a 14-day grace period you can cancel. How account deletion works.
If you create an account in the app
The section above covers this website. The Same Ground app does more, because it does more for you. Here's exactly what that involves.
What an account is
A pseudonym and an email address, nothing else. You sign in with a one-time emailed link, never a password. We never ask for your legal name or phone number. An account is only required for My Table, Community posting, saved-resource sync, and optional verification; every crisis line, the resource directory, and the community group directory work with no account at all.
Encryption, and its real limit
Your email address and every message you send are encrypted at rest on our server (AES-256-GCM), and every connection to Same Ground uses HTTPS. We want to be direct about the limit of that: this is not end-to-end encryption. A My Table conversation can be read by an authorized safety reviewer in one situation only: someone in that room reported a message in it. A reviewer can then read that message and the ones around it (which includes what other people in the room said, and what the reporter said), because "harassment" as a label cannot tell them the difference between someone being cruel and someone having their feelings hurt, and they have to be able to tell. Only that stretch of conversation opens; the rest of the room does not, and a room nobody reported is never read. Every time a reviewer opens one, it is recorded against them. We're not going to call this "private messaging" when a human can read a reported conversation, so we don't.
Automated safety detection, and what it actually sees
Before a My Table message is encrypted, the server checks its text against a fixed list of threat and crisis phrases. This never blocks or delays sending. If nothing matches, that's the end of it; the check itself isn't stored anywhere. If something matches, only the matched phrase and a category are kept, never the rest of your message, and never handed to anyone outside a safety review. This is best-effort pattern matching, not a person reading your messages, and it exists to get you help faster in a crisis, not to police what you say.
Location, only if you ask, only once
If you allow it, your device's location is used one time, in memory, to rank nearby resources. It is never stored or sent anywhere, and you can deny it and still use every resource filter manually. No one else ever sees your location through Same Ground.
Who else touches your data
We don't sell data, and we don't share it for anyone else's marketing or advertising, full stop. A short list of processors handle specific jobs for us, only for that job: ID.me for optional identity verification (only if you choose it), Expo/Apple/Google to deliver push notifications (only if you turn them on, and the payload is a fixed generic message, never your name, group, or message content), Google Workspace to send account and confirmation emails, and DigitalOcean to host the service. No analytics, ad, or tracking SDK of any kind is in this app.
How long we keep things
A closed My Table room and its minimized reports are deleted together 30 days after closing. Deleting your account starts a 14-day grace period you can cancel by signing back in; after that, your account and its private data are permanently removed. You can export your data as a file from the app at any time before deletion.