The short version

We know you as an opaque ID from Google, not as a name. We do not sell anything, we run no advertising or third-party tracking, and we collect as little as the app can work with.

The one thing worth reading properly: Seek records your exact location when you check in.

Who we are

mySimsbury is built and operated by Michael Zemel, a Simsbury resident. The Town of Simsbury has no involvement in it — it does not own, operate, fund, endorse or administer mySimsbury, and holds none of your data.

The intention is for mySimsbury to be run by a local nonprofit with a community board of directors. That organization does not exist yet. If it takes over, or if governance ever transfers to the Town, this page will be updated before that happens — including the section on public records below, which would change.

What we collect

Who you are. When you sign in with Google we receive and store the opaque account identifier Google issues for you. We do not store your name, your email address or your profile photo from Google. The name you see in the app is a pseudonym we generate — an adjective, an animal and a number — and it is what other residents and participating businesses see.

Your email address — only if you ask us to. If you opt in to reminders about expiring points, we store the address you give us for that purpose. Opting in is separate from signing in, and you can withdraw it at any time.

Your session. One cookie, mysimsbury_jwt. It is HttpOnly, same-origin, and lasts seven days. It exists to keep you signed in and does nothing else.

Rewards activity. Every points transaction: which business, how many points, the cash amount it related to, and when. Which businesses you have favorited. This is the program's ledger and it is what your balance is computed from.

What favoriting a business does. Two things, both visible only to you: you are subscribed to that business's calendar if it has one, and the business appears under Rewards in Contacts with its published phone, email and website. The Contacts listing is read from your favorites each time the page loads, so removing a favorite removes it. A calendar subscription is kept until you unsubscribe in the Calendar app, so that un-favoriting does not silently undo a choice you made there.

Your location, in Seek. When you check in at a challenge or meet a figure, we store the exact latitude and longitude your device reports, its accuracy, the time, and whether the check-in was accepted. We keep rejected attempts too, because that record is what protects the program against fabricated check-ins.

• This happens only when you tap to check in. We do not track you in the background and we do not record your location while you are simply using the app.
• It requires Location Services permission, which you can refuse or revoke. Seek still works without it — you can browse challenges, figures, events and leaderboards — you just cannot make location-based progress.

Calendar preferences. Which calendars you have subscribed to.

Bug reports. What you type, plus the page you were on and your browser's user-agent string, because a bug report without those is usually not actionable.

If you are a participating business. Your business name, address, phone number, website, public email address and opening hours, which are published publicly in the app's business directory and in Contacts, and — kept separate from that public listing — your billing email address, which is used for settlement invoices and is not published anywhere.

If you work at a participating business. If you enter an employee code to work the counter somewhere, we store which business that is, alongside your account. This says where you work, which is more than the rest of your record says about you, so it is worth naming separately. The business's owner sees your pseudonym on their employee list; nobody else does. It is also recorded against each transaction you put through, so that a points issuance can be traced back to the person who authorized it. You can remove it yourself at any time, from the Rewards app, whether or not the business does.

What we do not collect

• Your real name, home address, date of birth or Social Security number.
• Any payment card or bank account details. mySimsbury does not process payments.
• Your browsing outside mySimsbury.
• Device fingerprints.
• Third-party advertising or analytics SDKs. There are no advertising cookies and no tracking pixels in this app.

How we use it

To run the points program and compute balances; to verify location-based challenges; to show you the calendars you chose; to send the reminders you opted in to; to fix bugs; and to produce aggregate, anonymized figures about how much the program is being used.

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Who else sees it

• Participating businesses see their own transactions, and their customers as pseudonyms — never a real name or an email address. A business's owner also sees the pseudonyms of anyone who works there under an employee code, and which of them authorized each transaction.
• Google handles sign-in. Google's own privacy policy governs what it does with your Google account.
• Cloudflare hosts the app and stores its data.
• Google, again, if you email us. Mail to michael@mysimsbury.com is delivered by Cloudflare and forwarded into a Gmail mailbox, so anything you write to us is handled by both. Do not send us anything sensitive that you would not put in an ordinary email.
• Public records requests — not currently. mySimsbury is run privately, not by a public body, so its records are not subject to the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act. This page previously said the opposite, because the project was described as being run by a Town commission; that was never accurate and has been corrected. If governance ever transfers to the Town, FOIA would begin to apply and we will say so here before it does. Even then the ledger holds pseudonymous identifiers rather than names, so a request would yield transaction patterns, not identities.

How long we keep it

• Points expire after 24 months without activity.
• Ledger entries are kept for at least seven years, as ordinary financial record-keeping requires. The ledger is append-only by design: entries are never edited or deleted, and a correction is a new offsetting entry.
• Administrative audit records — who changed what in the program — are kept indefinitely, so the points program can always be audited.
• Sign-in codes used for earning points expire after 60 seconds.

Your choices

• See everything. Your full transaction history is in the Ledger tab in Rewards.
• Take it with you. Rewards can export your ledger as JSON or CSV.
• Turn off location. Revoke Location Services for the site in your browser or phone settings at any time.
• Stop the emails. Withdraw your reminder opt-in and we clear the stored address.
• Delete your account. Ask us and we will remove your account and anonymize your ledger entries. The entries themselves must remain for the accounting record, but they stop being connected to you.

Email michael@mysimsbury.com to make any of these requests, or use Report Bug on the home screen.

Children

mySimsbury is for adults. You must be 18 or older to hold an account, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has created an account, tell us and we will remove it.

Changes

We will update this page as the app changes, and the date at the top is when it last changed. This is a pilot and the app is still growing; where a change materially affects what we collect, we will say so in the app rather than only here.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests go to michael@mysimsbury.com, which reaches Michael directly. Report Bug on the home screen also works.