Privacy Policy

GateMate is built by QAlytics LLC (dba GateMate™). This policy explains what we collect, why, how long we keep it, and how to get rid of it. If something here doesn't match what the app does, treat it as a bug and tell us: support@gatemate.net.

1. What we collect

Account

• Email address, and a hashed password (we never store the password itself)
• Display name, handle, and — if you add them — a bio, profile photo, industry, interests and home city
• Your Instagram handle, if you choose to add it. It is shown to people in rooms you're in

Sign in with Apple (optional)

If you use Apple to sign in and choose "Hide My Email", we only ever receive Apple's private relay address. We store an encrypted Apple token so that deleting your GateMate account also revokes GateMate's access to your Apple ID. Because an email address typed at a door is never proven, the first time Google (or Apple) confirms that the address is genuinely yours, any password set on that account earlier is retired and any sessions already signed in are ended — so someone who had used your address before you arrived cannot keep access. You will be asked to set a new password the next time you want one.

Sign in with Google (optional)

If you use Google to sign in, Google tells us your email address, your name and a link to your Google profile picture — nothing else. We store a Google account identifier so the same Google account signs you back in even if you later change your email. If an account with that email already exists, the two are linked rather than duplicated. Because an email address typed at a door is never proven, the first time Google (or Apple) confirms that the address is genuinely yours, any password set on that account earlier is retired and any sessions already signed in are ended — so someone who had used your address before you arrived cannot keep access. You will be asked to set a new password the next time you want one. We receive no advertising identifier from Google and we do not read anything else from your Google account. You can delete a Google-created account in the app like any other: Settings → Account → Delete account.

Phone number (optional)

You can verify a phone number to earn the blue "verified" mark. Verification codes are sent by Twilio and expire in minutes. We do not keep the number. Once it's verified we store only a one-way digest of it and the date — enough to recognise the same number twice, not enough to read it back or call you. A number you start verifying and never finish is deleted within ten minutes. Your number is never shown to other members and is never used for marketing.

Your contacts (optional)

You can check whether people already in your phone are on GateMate. If you allow it, the matching happens on your device: each phone number is turned into a one-way digest before anything leaves your phone, and we only ever receive those digests. We never receive, see or store the numbers themselves, and we don't keep the digests you send — they're compared against existing accounts and discarded, with only a count of how many matched written to your activity log. We never upload your address book, never message anyone in it, and never build a social graph from it.

Anyone can opt out of being found this way at Settings → Findability, and matching is capped per account per day so it can't be used to test large lists of numbers.

What you create

• Messages you send in a room's chat, and direct messages
• Photos and short video clips you add to a room album, voice notes you record in direct messages, and your profile photo
• Reactions, votes, saved rooms, follows and connections
• Reports and feedback you send us

Voice notes and dictation (optional)

If you record a voice note in a direct message, the recording is the message. It is stored the same way your photos are and it is deleted when the message is deleted. It is not transcribed automatically. A transcript is produced only if a listener taps "Read it" — at that point the recording is sent to OpenAI's Whisper speech-to-text service, acting only as our processor, purely to turn speech into text, and the transcript is saved on the message so it does not have to be produced twice.

If you use the microphone button in room chat, that is dictation — a keyboard, not a recording. The audio is turned into text and the audio itself is discarded immediately. Only the words you then choose to send are kept.

Microphone access is when-in-use only. We ask for it the first time you press a microphone button, never before, and the app cannot record in the background.

Where you've been in the app

• Which rooms you joined, when you arrived and left, and whether you were visible or invisible in them
• A private history of your nights (place, date, how long you stayed, how many people you kept). This is visible to you alone. There is no setting, tier or endpoint that shows it to anyone else, and you can delete any night from it in one tap

Purchases (if you buy something)

GateMate+ and the Night Pass are sold through the Apple App Store and Google Play. We never see your card. Apple or Google take the payment and tell us only that a valid purchase exists — which product, when it renews or expires, and an opaque transaction identifier — via RevenueCat, who manage subscription status on our behalf. We store that alongside your account so the app knows what you're entitled to, and we keep the transaction identifiers so the same purchase can't be counted twice. Billing, renewal and refunds are handled by the store, not by us.

Location — four specific moments, never in the background

GateMate never tracks you in the background, never builds a location history, and never reads your location to show you an ad or to sell to anyone. Everything happens only while you have the app open. Your device's location is read only when:

1. First launch — to check whether your city has live rooms yet
2. "Rooms near me" — when you tap it, to list public rooms within walking distance or up to 50 km
3. Checking in at the door — only for rooms where the host requires attendees to actually be at the venue
4. Find Friends, if you switch it on — inside a single festival room, and only with people you choose

For (3) we keep your most recent check-in coordinate, overwritten each time, purely to spot physically impossible jumps between venues (someone faking their way into a room they're not at). It is not a trail: one point, replaced on the next check-in, deleted with your account. You can always join a room by typing its code without granting location at all.

Find Friends, precisely

Inside a festival GateRoom you can offer to share your location with a GateMate — someone you follow who also follows you. It exists for one situation: you came to a festival with friends and you lost each other. Seven rules, all enforced in code rather than in settings:

• It only works both ways. Your position becomes visible to them only once they have shared theirs with you. A one-way share shows nothing to anyone.
• They see a distance and a direction, not a dot on a map. "About 300 ft NE." We do not send your coordinates to the other person's device at all.
• It is deliberately imprecise. Your position is rounded to a grid of roughly 100 feet before we store it, so an exact position is never written down anywhere, including by us.
• It is one festival room at a time. A share belongs to the room you made it in. It is never room-wide, never public, and never carried into another room.
• It only runs while the screen is open. GateMate requests no background location permission whatsoever. Leave the screen, close the app, or background it, and your position stops updating immediately. Anything older than three minutes is shown to the other person as a last-known time, not as where you are now.
• We keep one point, not a path. Your latest position, overwritten each time and deleted automatically 20 minutes after your last update. We do not store where you have been.
• It ends with the room, and you can end it sooner. Sharing expires when the GateRoom closes. You can stop sharing with one person, stop with everyone in a single tap, or simply leave the screen. Blocking somebody removes it instantly in both directions.

Arriving at an airport

If you save a flight in GateMate, we tell you what is happening in that airport's room when the flight lands — at most one notification per airport every six hours, and never while the room is closed. That comes from the flight's own arrival time, published by the airline, not from your phone. GateMate asks for no background location permission on any platform, and nothing watches for you arriving anywhere. We keep a record that you reached that airport and whether we notified you, so we do not notify you twice; it is deleted automatically after 30 days. You can silence these at Settings → Notifications → Travel.

Device and diagnostics

Device type, operating system, app version, crash and performance logs, and — only if you turn notifications on — a push token from Apple or Google so we can deliver them.

Usage analytics (our own, not a third party's)

Which features you use, recorded against your account ID, so we can tell what's working. No advertising identifiers, no cross-app tracking, no ad networks — GateMate has never run ads.

Network

Your IP address is processed as requests arrive, for rate limiting and abuse prevention, and to alert us to suspicious admin sign-ins (where an approximate city is derived via ip-api.com). It is not stored on your profile.

2. What we do with it

• Run the product: let you into rooms, show you who's there, deliver messages and photos
• Keep people safe: moderation, reports, blocks, and detecting fake presence or fake accounts
• Send transactional email (sign-in, room invites, recaps) and, if you opted in, notifications
• Fix bugs, measure whether features work, and answer support requests
• Enforce our Terms

We do not sell your personal information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not run ads.

3. Content moderation and AI

Every photo you upload, and the first frame of every video clip, is screened by an automated image-moderation service (Hive AI) before it is stored. Slurs are blocked in chat text on our servers; ordinary profanity is not filtered, because GateMate is for adults.

Three features send information to Google's Gemini models (through our integration provider):

• Icebreaker suggestions — the room's title and topic, not your messages
• Report triage — when someone reports a person or a message, the reason chosen, anything typed in the details box, and the reported message are classified so that threats, self-harm and anything involving a minor reach a human first. Reports our own filters dismiss as test data are never sent
• Room banner art — a room's title, category and venue label are used to generate a backdrop image for it. No photo of a person and no message is ever sent for this

None of it is used to train anyone's model, and none of it sees your DMs. A human being, not a model, decides every moderation outcome — the classification only decides what a human looks at first.

Speech-to-text is handled by OpenAI's Whisper model under the same terms: processor only, for the feature you asked for, never for advertising, never for profiling, and never used to train anyone's model.

4. Visibility controls

• Your visibility inside a room is yours to set — including going invisible
• Rooms are not publicly indexed; a code or an invite is the only way in
• You can block anyone. A blocked person can't see you, message you, or see your messages
• You can report any person or message; reports reach a human within 24 hours
• You can leave a room at any time, and you disappear from it immediately
• You can turn off being findable by phone number or by handle at any time

5. How long we keep things

Data	Kept for
Room chat	Goes dark ~12 hours after the last arrival and is removed from the app entirely. A copy is retained for 30 days ONLY so a moderator can act on a report — "we deleted the evidence" is not an answer to a harassment complaint
Room album photos	Unlock the morning after, then delete themselves 30 days later
Direct messages and connections	Until you delete them, or you delete your account
Your nights history	Until you delete a night, or your account
Find Friends position	One point, overwritten each update and deleted automatically 20 minutes after your last update. Share agreements end when the room closes, when you stop them, or with your account
Arrival alert record (airport code, whether you were notified)	30 days. Stops the same airport notifying you twice, and answers "why did I get that?"
Purchase and subscription records	While your account exists, plus the transaction identifiers we need to stop a purchase being redeemed twice
Account and profile	Until you delete your account
Diagnostics and analytics	Rolling, and not used to identify you individually

6. Deleting your account

In the app: Settings → Manage account → Delete my account. A confirmation panel asks you to type the word DELETE; once you do, deletion is scheduled with a 48-hour grace window that you can cancel from a banner shown anywhere in the app. After that your profile, messages, photos, connections, phone-verification digest, check-in location fix, your location-share agreements and any position we were holding for you, your airport arrival records, and nights history are gone.

You can also delete at gatemate.net/delete-account or by emailing support@gatemate.net; those are processed within 30 days.

Two narrow exceptions, both required to run a safe service: content already reported to moderation is retained for up to 30 days to resolve the report, and records we must keep by law.

7. Who we share data with

Only the services needed to run GateMate, each under contract to keep it confidential:

Service	What it sees
Cloudflare R2	Your uploaded photos and video clips
Twilio	Your phone number, to send a verification code
Hive AI	Images and first video frames, for moderation
Resend	Your email address, to send transactional email
Apple	Sign in with Apple, App Store distribution, push delivery
Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging)	Push delivery on Android
RevenueCat	Your account identifier and your purchase and subscription status
Apple / Google billing	Your payment — we never see card details
Sentry	Crash and performance diagnostics — device type, OS, app version, and the error itself
Google Gemini (via our integration provider)	Reported text and the reported message, to triage safety reports; a room's title, category and venue label, to generate its banner art
OpenAI	Speech-to-text for voice-note transcripts and room-chat dictation. Receives only the audio being transcribed
AeroDataBox	A flight number and date you choose to add, to show its gate, terminal and delays. No personal data
ip-api.com	An IP address, to derive an approximate city for security alerts
MongoDB Atlas and our hosting provider	The database and servers GateMate runs on

Our website also uses Microsoft Clarity for anonymous session analytics, loaded only after you accept the cookie banner. The app does not use Clarity.

8. Security

• Everything is encrypted in transit (HTTPS/TLS)
• Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored in plain text
• Sessions use signed, expiring tokens; Apple refresh tokens are encrypted at rest
• Access to production data is limited to staff who need it

9. Children

GateMate is for people 18 and over. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone younger, and we delete such accounts when we find them.

10. Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, delete, export, or restrict use of your data, and to opt out of certain processing. California residents have additional CCPA rights. We do not sell personal information. Email support@gatemate.net and we'll action it.

11. Changes

We'll update this page as GateMate changes, and move the "Last updated" date. Material changes are announced in the app.

12. Contact

Email: support@gatemate.net · Company: QAlytics LLC dba GateMate™