Privacy policy
Last updated 5 September 2026
Ocala Go is a community app for Ocala and Marion County, Florida. This page describes what the app and this website collect, what they deliberately do not, and who else ever sees it. It was written from what the code actually does, and we keep it that way.
The short version
- You can use the whole app without making an account and without giving us an email address.
- We show you no advertising, we run no analytics or tracking, and we have never sold or shared your information with a data broker.
- Your precise location never leaves your phone, even when you let the app use it.
- Photos have their location and camera data stripped out before they are uploaded, and again on our server.
- There is one place a person at Ocala Go reads something you wrote privately, and it is described in full below.
- If you make an account, your real name is visible only to you — not to your neighbors, and not to our moderators.
- The app keeps a streak and a score for taking part. It is recognition and nothing else: it buys no features, no discounts and no status you can spend. You can switch off showing it, and you can switch off being ranked.
- Other people can see that you are using the app right now, never when you last were. No timestamp about you is ever sent to anybody else.
- If you join the waitlist on this website we keep your email address, an optional ZIP, and nothing else.
You do not need an account
When you first open Ocala Go, your phone is given an anonymous session. That is enough to read the feed, browse the directory, look at the map, post, comment and RSVP. We never ask for a phone number.
Making an account is optional. Its purpose is letting you get back to the same account on a second phone, or after reinstalling. If you never make one, we never have your email address.
If you do make one
There are two ways, and the app offers them in this order:
- Sign in with Apple. Apple confirms it is you and hands us
a verified email address and, once only, your name. If you choose Hide My
Email, what we get is a forwarding address at
privaterelay.appleid.comand we never see your real one. We ask Apple for nothing else, and Apple does not tell us anything else. - An email address and a password. We never see the password itself. It is hashed by our sign-in provider before it is stored, and there is no screen anywhere — including ours — that can show it to us.
Making an account upgrades the session you already had rather than starting a new one, so anything you posted as a guest stays yours.
Your real name is yours
Signing up asks for a first and last name. It is stored where only you can read it. Not your neighbors, and not our moderators — the server refuses the request rather than relying on the app to hide it.
What your neighbors see is a display name, which starts as your first name and last initial and which you can change to anything. If you would rather we did not hold your real name at all, use the app without an account, or ask us and we will remove it.
Joining the waitlist
If you give us your email address to hear when Ocala Go opens, we store the address, a ZIP code if you choose to give one, which form on the page you used, and the date you signed up. That is the whole record. The ZIP is optional and it is there so we can see which parts of the county are interested, not so we can find you.
We use it for one thing: to write to you when there is something to use. We will not send you anything else, and we will not sell it, share it, or hand it to anyone who wants to advertise to you.
The waitlist is separate from the app. Signing up does not create an account, and if you later use the app, nothing connects the two unless you use the same address to sign in.
About your IP address. To stop somebody scripting thousands of fake sign-ups, we count how many have come from one internet connection in the last hour. We do that by turning the address into a one-way code with a secret only our server holds, and counting the codes. The code cannot be turned back into an address, it is not stored next to your email, and it is used for nothing but that count.
Ask us at any time and we will take you off the list and delete the record: support@ocalago.com. We will also delete it ourselves if the app never launches.
What we collect
| What | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| The name you type | So your neighbors know who posted. Most people use a first name. It is free text and we do not verify it. |
| The neighborhood you pick | Chosen from a list, so your posts reach the right part of the county. This is an area you select, not a location we measure. |
| What you post | Posts, comments, events you submit, and questions you send to a listed business. |
| Photos you add | To show them with your post or as your profile picture. |
| Your real name | Only if you make an account. Stored so that it is readable by you and nobody else — not your neighbors, not our moderators. |
| Your email address | Only if you make an account, and only to sign you in and to write to you about the account. |
| The days you open the app | The date only, never the time, and only to work out your Porch Light streak. |
| What you did, and when | A list of the things that earn points — you posted, you replied, you RSVP'd — with the date. It is what makes the score checkable instead of a number you have to take on trust. |
| Whether you are using the app right now | One time, overwritten each time, and never handed to anybody else. See below. |
| An account number | A random identifier for your session, so the app knows which posts are yours. It is not tied to your name unless you give one. |
We also count taps on the Call button in the business directory, so a business that pays for a listing can see whether it did anything. That record is a listing, a timestamp and whether the call looked like it connected. It has no user column — the record is not attached to you, and cannot be traced back to you.
Location
The Map tab can ask for your location. If you allow it, it is used for three things: showing a blue dot for where you are, re-centring the map on you, and working out how far away a place is.
All three happen on your phone. No coordinate is ever sent to us, written down, attached to a post, or used to work out which neighborhood you live in. We only ask when you tap the button that needs it, never when the app starts, and the app works fine if you say no. There is no background location: the app cannot see where you are when you are not using it.
Photos
A photo taken on a phone usually carries the exact spot it was taken and the camera that took it. Before any photo you add leaves your phone, Ocala Go removes that information and resizes the picture. Our server then removes it a second time, because we would rather check twice than trust one step.
Photos attached to posts are visible to other people using the app.
Porch Light: streaks, points and patches
Ocala Go keeps a streak for the days you open it, a score for taking part, a level that follows from the score, and patches for milestones.
It is recognition and nothing else. There is no currency, no paid tier, no perk, and nothing anywhere in the app that a point can be spent on. We are saying so here because a points system that later turns into a loyalty scheme is exactly the sort of change people are right to expect to be told about, and if we ever make it we will change this page first.
To do that we keep the dates you opened the app — the day, in Ocala's time zone, worked out on our server rather than taken from your phone's clock — and a list of the things you did that earned points, each with the date it happened.
Who can see what. Your neighbors can see your streak and your level if you leave Show this on my profile switched on, and your position on a board if you leave List me on the board switched on. The boards show a rank and a level and never a number of points — not as a display choice, but because the server does not return one. A score nobody can check is not evidence of anything, so we do not publish one.
Your own score, you can see in full, with the list of what earned it, because that one you can check against your own memory.
Our moderators can see the activity list. That is the one place this data goes beyond you, and it is there so a report can be judged against what somebody actually did. Nobody else can read it.
Showing when you are here
A small dot shows that somebody is using the app at the same time as you, and the feed can say how many neighbors are around. It is here or not here — there is no "away", no "last seen", and no gradient anyone could read a routine out of.
No time about you is ever sent to anybody else. We store one timestamp, we overwrite it, and only you can read it. Everyone else asks a question that returns a list of people and cannot return a time, because it does not select one.
Two more things worth saying plainly:
- The switch works both ways. Turning off Show when I'm here hides you from other people and hides them from you. A switch that only hid you would be a way to watch without being watched, and that is worse than not having the feature.
- It stops when the app does. The app tells us it is open only while it is actually in front of you. Put it in your pocket and it stops, and the record ages out on its own — leaving is not something we write down.
What we do not do
- No advertising and no ad networks.
- No analytics, no tracking, no third-party trackers. The app contains no advertising or analytics software of any kind.
- We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with data brokers.
- No contacts, calendar, microphone, or health data. The app never asks.
- No browsing history, no device fingerprinting, no cross-app tracking. Ocala Go does not show the "allow tracking" prompt because it has nothing to ask for.
Who else sees your information
- Other people using Ocala Go see anything you post publicly: your posts, comments, events, display name, neighborhood and profile photo.
- Supabase stores the app's data, the waitlist, and runs sign-in. They are our hosting provider and process it on our instructions.
- Resend delivers our email — sign-in links and account messages. They see the address we are writing to and what we wrote.
- Apple, only if you use Sign in with Apple. Apple tells us you are who you say you are; we do not tell Apple anything about what you do here.
- Our moderators, who are people, can see reports, the content they concern, and the activity list described above. They cannot see your real name or your private questions to a business.
- Vercel serves this website. They see the ordinary request information any web host sees.
- The National Weather Service receives a request for the Ocala forecast. It is the same request for everybody, it carries nothing about you, and it uses a fixed point in Ocala rather than your location.
- Apple Maps or Google Maps receive a place name only when you tap Directions and choose to hand off to them.
We will also hand over information if the law requires it.
Questions you send to a business
You can ask a listed business a question from its page. That question is private — it is not published, and it is not a review.
A person at Ocala Go reads it. Businesses cannot sign in to Ocala Go yet, so we pass your question along ourselves and type the answer back. That means our staff sees your question and the reply. The app tells you this on the screen where you ask, and answers are labelled as passed on by us.
When businesses can sign in and answer directly, we will change this page and the label will disappear.
Deleting your account
In the app: Profile → Your data → Delete account.
That deletes, from our servers and not just from your phone: your profile, your name and neighborhood, your posts and comments, the photos you uploaded, your likes, your Going list, the questions you sent to businesses, your real name, your streak, your score and the record of what earned it, your patches, and the record of when you were last using the app. Your account is removed, not deactivated, and we cannot restore it afterwards.
A photo can still be served from a cache for a short while after it is deleted, if someone kept the exact link to it. It is gone from our storage immediately; that copy expires on its own.
Two things survive on purpose:
- Reports you filed stay in our moderation records with your name removed, so that a pattern of behaviour cannot be erased by the person being reported closing their account.
- Events you posted stay up, without your name on them, because other people may have planned around them.
How long we keep things
Posts, comments and events stay until you delete them or we remove them under the Community Guidelines and the Terms of Use. Moderation records are kept so we can be consistent about repeat problems. We are a new and very small operation, and we would rather tell you plainly that we have not set a fixed period for those than publish a schedule we do not follow.
Two things are deleted on a timer, automatically, whether or not anybody asks:
- When you were last in the app — the heartbeat behind the “here now” dot — is deleted after 24 hours. The app only ever asks whether somebody was around in the last few minutes, so nothing is lost by deleting it, and it means we do not accumulate a record of the hours you tend to be about.
- Waitlist rate-limit counts are deleted after two hours. They are a one-hour bucket that stops the form being hammered, and they hold a one-way digest rather than an address.
Waitlist entries themselves are kept until the app opens and we have written to you, or until you ask us to remove yours — whichever comes first.
Children
Ocala Go is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, email support@ocalago.com and we will remove it.
Security
Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted. Sign-in tokens are kept in your phone's keychain rather than ordinary app storage. Passwords are hashed by our sign-in provider and are never visible to us. Which rows a person can read and write is enforced on the server, not just hidden in the app — the app asks, and the server decides.
No service can promise perfect security, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Your choices
You can edit or delete your posts and comments, change or clear your display name and neighborhood, turn location off in iOS Settings at any time, and delete your account.
Four switches live in Profile, and none of them is on a timer or a trial:
- Show this on my profile — whether neighbors see your streak and level.
- List me on the board — off means you are ranked nowhere at all.
- Show when I'm here — off hides you, and hides other people from you.
- Streak reminders — a notification, sent by your phone, that never leaves it.
To ask what we hold about you, or to have it removed, email support@ocalago.com.
Changes to this policy
If we change how the app handles your information, we will change this page and the date at the top. We will not quietly broaden what we collect.