Hotspots is a proximity-based social discovery app for verified college students. Your trust is the whole product, so we collect as little as possible and we never sell your data. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the control you have.
Who can use Hotspots
Hotspots is for people who are 18 or older and enrolled at a supported school. We verify your age and your school email at signup. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 18, we remove it.
What we collect
Account: your school email, phone number, name, age, and gender.
Profile: photos, bio, the tags you pick, and any Instagram handle you choose to link.
Verification: to give you the verified badge, we compare your photos to confirm you are a real person. We keep a match result, not a raw biometric library, and it is deleted when you delete your account.
Approximate location, only to power the core feature. To tell when you cross paths with someone, we process your device location. We do not store your precise or live location. A crossing keeps only the fact that it happened, roughly how close, and when. Your coordinates are discarded, and no one is ever shown where you are in real time.
Usage and device info: how you use the app, plus standard device and diagnostic data to keep it running and safe.
Anti-abuse signals: to stop someone we have removed from simply making a new email and coming back, we keep a one-way scrambled fingerprint of your device, your phone number, and the network address you connect from. These are stored as hashes we cannot reverse, we use them only to enforce bans and prevent fraud, never to advertise to you or track you across other apps. A shared network address, like campus WiFi, is only ever a signal for a human to review, never an automatic ban, because thousands of students share one address.
Purchases: if you subscribe to Hotspots+, the App Store or Google Play processes the payment. We receive that you are subscribed, never your card details.
How we use it
Verify you are a real, of-age student so the community stays trustworthy.
Show you people you actually crossed paths with, and let you connect.
Keep people safe: verification, blocking, reporting, and removing accounts that break the rules.
Provide subscriptions, send notifications you have turned on, and improve the app.
Location, said plainly. Location is used to detect a crossing and then thrown away. We never keep a history of where you have been, never show your live position to anyone, and Incognito mode lets you hide your crossing details entirely.
Who we share it with
We do not sell your personal information. We share only with service providers that help us run Hotspots, under contract: cloud hosting and database, text-message delivery, subscription billing, advertising for the optional rewarded videos, and analytics. We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect people from harm.
Your choices and rights
Edit or hide: update your profile anytime, or turn on Incognito.
Download your data and delete your account from within the app. Deletion is a real, permanent removal of your profile and content.
Control notifications, location permission, and ad personalization in your device settings.
Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights to access, correct, or delete your data. Contact us and we will honor them.
How we protect it
Data is encrypted in transit and at rest. Access is locked down at the database level so users can only reach their own information. Secrets are kept off your device, and we monitor for abuse. No system is perfect, but security is built into how Hotspots is designed, not bolted on.
Keeping and deleting data
We keep your information while your account is active. When you delete your account, we remove your profile and content promptly, keeping only what we must for legal, safety, or fraud-prevention reasons.
Changes
If we update this policy we will post the new version here and, for meaningful changes, notify you in the app.