Privacy Policy

LivingRGV ("we", "us") operates a local business directory and events surface for the Rio Grande Valley, Texas. This policy describes what we collect, why, who we share it with, and what you can ask us to do about it.

Information We Collect

Account information. When you create an account we receive your email address. We never ask you for a password, and there is nowhere on this site to enter one — signing in is by emailed one-time link ("magic link") or by Google sign-in. If you use Google sign-in, Google provides us your email address and basic profile information; we never receive your Google password.

Business listing information. If you claim or submit a business listing, we collect the business details you provide: name, address, phone, hours, description, category, website, booking links, and images you upload.

Inquiry information. When you send a message to a business through our site, we collect your name, email address, and message. We do not ask for a phone number. We also record a timestamp and the exact wording of the consent you agreed to when you sent it, so the record describes what you actually saw on screen rather than what a policy says you saw.

Event submissions. Event title, description, dates, venue, and images.

Payment information. If you subscribe to a paid tier, payment is processed by Stripe. Card numbers and payment credentials never reach our servers. We store only a Stripe customer identifier, a subscription identifier, the plan, its status, and the current billing period end date.

Usage information. Two separate things, recorded by two separate systems.

Google Analytics 4, which we use to understand aggregate traffic across the site. This involves cookies and collects information such as pages viewed, approximate location derived from IP address, device and browser type, and referring site.

Our own interaction counts. We separately record when a business listing is viewed, when someone taps one of its action buttons — call, website, directions, booking, a social link — when a coupon scrolls into view or is revealed, and when a listing appears in a set of search results. We do this so we can show the business that owns the listing how its own page is performing.

We record the same kind of counts on creator profiles in the Creator Marketplace: when a profile is viewed, when it appears in a set of marketplace results, when someone starts a message to that creator, taps their listed email or phone, opens one of their social links, or plays one of their portfolio videos. We do this so we can show the creator how their own profile is performing. These are counts of interactions, not of people, and we do not record the content of any message from them — a message you send is covered separately under "Messages you send".

These records contain no information about you. Each one holds only: which listing or which creator profile, which kind of interaction, when it happened, and a short-lived random token used to avoid counting a single visit twice.

In particular, and by design:

• We do not store your IP address on these records.
• We do not store your browser user-agent. We read it to decide whether a visit is an automated crawler rather than a person, and then discard it — only the yes-or-no outcome affects whether the visit is counted at all.
• We do not store your account identifier, even when you are signed in. These records are never linked to your account.
• The de-duplication token is a random value combined with a server-side secret that changes every day. It is not derived from your IP address, your device, or anything about you, it cannot be worked backwards to identify anyone, and once the daily secret rotates it can no longer be linked to anything at all — including to earlier records made with the same token.

The result is closer to a tally than to a log: it can tell a business that its page was viewed four hundred times, and it cannot tell anyone — including us — who those people were.

We do not record what you type into the search box.

Abuse prevention. When you submit a form — an inquiry, a business submission, an event — we separately record the IP address the request came from, so we can limit how many submissions one source makes in a day. That record contains an IP address and a timestamp and nothing else: it is not linked to your name, your message, or your account.

Technical information. Standard server and security logs, and — where you consent to a legal document — the IP address and browser user-agent recorded alongside that consent, so the record is meaningful evidence of what was agreed and when.

Directory Listings Compiled From Public Sources

A substantial portion of our directory — 11,238 business listings as of this version — was compiled from publicly available sources rather than submitted by the businesses themselves. Those businesses did not sign up for LivingRGV and have not agreed to anything.

Listings of this kind contain only business contact information: name, address, phone number, category, hours, and similar operational details. They are not personal profiles, and we do not add personal information about business owners to them.

If you are the owner of a listed business, you may claim your listing to control its content, or ask us to correct or remove it by emailing privacy@livingrgv.com. We handle these requests by hand and will confirm when it is done.

How We Use Information

• To operate and display the directory, events, and editorial content.
• To deliver your message to the business you selected.
• To create and secure your account and authenticate sign-in.
• To process subscriptions and grant paid features through Stripe.
• To send transactional email — sign-in links, claim status, message notifications, billing notices.
• To moderate submitted listings, events, and images.
• To limit automated abuse of our forms.
• To show a business how its own listing is performing, and a creator how their own profile is performing.
• To understand aggregate site usage and improve the product.

We do not sell personal information for money.

We do share limited information for advertising. When you visit this site, a Meta (Facebook) advertising pixel loads and reports your visit to Meta so that we can measure and target our own advertising. Under Texas law this is targeted advertising, and depending on how the term is read it may also count as a "sale" of personal information — the definition covers sharing for consideration other than money. You can turn it off; see Your advertising choice below.

Sharing Your Information

With the business you contact. When you send a message to a business, your name, email address, and message are delivered to that business. This is the purpose of the form, it is disclosed on the form itself before you send, and it is what you consent to at that moment. Once delivered, the business's own handling of your information is governed by its practices, not ours.

If a business has not claimed its listing on LivingRGV, there is no one to deliver to — the message is held and nobody is notified until someone claims it. The form tells you so before you send.

With the business whose listing you interact with. A business that has claimed its listing can see counts describing how its own page performed — how many times it was viewed, how many people tapped call or website or directions, how many saw a coupon. These are totals, not records of people. They cannot be expanded into a list of who did anything, because who was never recorded. A business cannot learn from us that any particular person viewed its page.

With service providers (subprocessors). We rely on the following, each of which processes data on our behalf:

| Provider | Purpose | Data involved | |---|---|---| | Vercel | Application hosting | Request and server logs | | Supabase | Database, authentication, file storage | Account, listing, message, consent, and interaction-count data | | Stripe | Subscription payments | Billing identifiers and payment data you enter with Stripe | | Resend | Transactional email delivery | Email address, message contents | | Cloudflare (Turnstile) | Bot and spam protection on our forms | Your IP address and a challenge token | | Google (Analytics 4) | Aggregate site analytics | Usage and device data, IP-derived location | | Google (YouTube) | Video embedded on some pages | Your IP address and browser user-agent, sent when the video area loads — whether or not you press play | | Meta (Facebook) | Advertising measurement and targeting | Pages visited, IP address, user-agent, Meta advertising cookies, the ad you arrived from, and — if you subscribe — the purchase amount and a hashed form of your email address | | Google (Sign-In) | Optional authentication | Email address, basic profile | | Sanity | Editorial content management | Published editorial content only |

Our own interaction counts — for listings and for creator profiles alike — are not sent to Google, or to anyone else. They are recorded in our own database — Supabase, listed above as our database provider — and used only to produce the totals we show the business that owns the listing. They are not sent to Google Analytics, not sold, not shared with advertisers or data brokers, and not used to build a profile of you.

This paragraph is about those counts specifically, and is not a statement about the site as a whole. The advertising pixel described above does send data to Meta.

For legal reasons. We may disclose information where required by law, to enforce our Terms, or to protect the rights and safety of users or the public.

In a business transfer. If LivingRGV is acquired or merged, information may transfer as part of that transaction.

Cookies and Analytics

We use cookies that are necessary for the site to function — principally to keep you signed in — and Google Analytics 4 cookies for aggregate measurement. Cloudflare Turnstile, which protects our forms from automated abuse, may also set a cookie on pages that have a form. You can block cookies in your browser; signing in will not work without the necessary ones.

We use a Meta (Facebook) advertising pixel. It sets Meta cookies (_fbp) and reports to Meta:

• the page you are on and when you visited;
• your IP address and browser user-agent;
• if you arrived from one of our Meta ads, the identifier of that ad;
• if you subscribe, that a purchase happened and the amount.

When you subscribe we also send Meta a scrambled (hashed) form of your email address, so Meta can match the purchase to an account. We do not send your email address in readable form, and the hash cannot be reversed back into it by us.

Pages with a video also load YouTube. The video is embedded through youtube-nocookie.com, which does not set advertising cookies unless you press play. Google still receives your IP address and browser user-agent when the video area loads, whether or not you play it. To measure whether the video is watched at all, we also load a YouTube script from youtube.com.

Data Retention

Most data is retained indefinitely. Account, listing, message, event-submission, and billing records are not removed on a schedule; they stay until someone acts on them.

Interaction counts are deleted automatically after 400 days. This is the one automated deletion we operate. Records of listing views, creator profile views, action-button taps, coupon visibility, video plays, and search impressions are removed once they are 400 days old, whether or not anyone has looked at them. We chose 400 days because it is long enough to compare a month against the same month a year earlier, and because it matches the default retention period of Google Analytics, so the two systems do not disagree about how far back the data goes.

Two categories are kept deliberately rather than by default: consent records, because a consent record that could be deleted would not be evidence of anything, and billing records, which we are required to keep for tax and accounting.

If you ask us to delete your account, we act on it by hand — see Your Choices.

Your Choices

• Access and correction. Sign in to view and edit your account, listings, and events.
• Claim or correct a listing. Use the claim flow on the listing page, or email us.
• Deletion. Email us to delete your account and we will do it by hand — there is no self-service delete button today. Deleting an account cancels any active subscription immediately and forfeits the remainder of the paid period (see the Terms). Some records do not belong solely to you and survive, with your account link and identifying details removed: listings you claimed revert to unclaimed and stay in the directory, events you submitted stay published, consent records are kept with the account link severed, and claim history is kept only as an anonymous record that a claim was made and decided on a date, with name, email, phone, and IP address erased. Billing records are kept as required for tax and accounting. Interaction counts are unaffected, because they were never linked to your account and contain nothing that identifies you — there is no row in them that is yours to delete.
• Email. Transactional email about your listing cannot be turned off while that listing is active. The LivingRGV newsletter is separate, is opt-in only, and carries a one-click unsubscribe in every issue. See Email we send you below for what each kind covers.
• Advertising. Use the "Do not use my data for advertising" link in the footer of any page. See Your advertising choice immediately below for exactly what that does and does not do.
• Analytics. For Google Analytics, use Google's opt-out browser add-on or block analytics cookies. Our own interaction counts have no individual opt-out, because there is no individual record to opt out of — nothing in them identifies you, so there is nothing we could look up on request and nothing we could remove that would be yours.

To make any of these requests, email privacy@livingrgv.com.

Your advertising choice

The advertising pixel is on by default. It loads on your first visit, before you have made any choice, and we do not show a cookie or consent banner. By the time you can decline it, it has already happened once.

You can turn it off. Use the "Do not use my data for advertising" link in the footer of any page. After that, the pixel will not load on pages you visit.

Three limits, stated plainly rather than buried:

• It is not retroactive. Anything already sent to Meta before you opted out has been sent. We cannot recall it, and turning the pixel off does not delete it.
• It applies to this browser only. The setting is stored in your browser, not against your account. On another device, in another browser, or in a private window, you will need to set it again.
• Clearing site data resets it. Because the setting lives in your browser's storage, clearing cookies and site data for this site removes the opt-out along with everything else, and the pixel will load again on your next visit.

Blocking third-party scripts — through your browser's settings or an extension — also prevents the pixel loading, is not affected by clearing site data, and does not depend on us.

Email we send you

Transactional email. If you claim a listing, submit a business, or contact us, we send email related to that action — confirmations, claim decisions, and messages from our team about your listing. These are not marketing and you cannot unsubscribe from them while you have an active listing with us.

The LivingRGV newsletter. We send a community newsletter to people who sign up for it. Signing up is a separate, explicit opt-in — we never add you to it because you claimed a listing, submitted a business, or contacted us. It covers local events, grants and deadlines, free workshops, community resources, and new businesses and offers in the Rio Grande Valley.

When you subscribe we store your email address, the city you select if you provide one, the date you subscribed, and a hashed record of your IP address used only to prevent automated signups. We do not sell, rent, or share this list.

Unsubscribing. Every newsletter includes a one-click unsubscribe link. You can also unsubscribe at any time by emailing privacy@livingrgv.com. When you unsubscribe we stop sending immediately and keep a record that you opted out, so that you are not re-added.

Texas Residents

Children

The service is not directed to children and we do not knowingly collect information from children.

Changes to This Policy

We publish a new version rather than editing a published one, and every prior version stays available at its own permanent URL. For material changes we notify registered users by email and display an in-app notice.

Contact

privacy@livingrgv.com