At a glance
No accounts
No sign-in, and no way of telling one reader from another.
No tracking
No advertising, no tracking and no analytics of any kind.
Location if you ask
Only the three maps can ask, and only when you tap.
The short version. The Commons has no accounts and no sign-in. It does not ask who you are, and it has no way of telling one reader from another. There is no advertising, no tracking, and no analytics of any kind. The only places it can ask for your location are the community map, the holiday parade map and the Halloween map, and only if you tap a button that asks.
This page covers the app on iPhone and on Android phones. Where the two work differently, it says so.
Nothing you do in the app is recorded anywhere except on your own phone, apart from the few things this page names: a notification token if you turn notifications on, the tokens that put the holiday parade on an iPhone’s Lock Screen, and a pin on your home if you put one on the Halloween map.
What stays on your phone
The stories you have downloaded, your settings, which associations you have switched on, and the search index are all held in the app’s own storage on your phone. The app sends none of it anywhere, with one exception: if you turn notifications on, our server is told which associations you have switched off, so that it does not send you their notices (see Notifications, below). Deleting the app deletes all of it.
If your phone backs itself up to your Apple or Google account, that backup can include the app’s settings, as it does for most apps. We never see it. The codes described further down, which let your phone change its own Halloween pin or lead the parade, never move to a new phone with a backup.
What your phone asks for
The app contacts these services, and none of them are told anything about you:
- commons.kylepauljohnson.com, our own server, for the notices, stories and events you read.
- api.weather.gov (the National Weather Service), for active weather alerts.
- api.open-meteo.com and air-quality-api.open-meteo.com, for the forecast and the air quality reading.
- tiles.openfreemap.org (OpenFreeMap, made from OpenStreetMap), on Android only, for the pictures the maps are drawn from. It is told which part of the map is on your screen.
The three weather services are asked about a fixed set of coordinates for Indian Palms, written into the app. They are never told where you are.
On iPhone, the community map, the holiday parade map and the Halloween map are drawn by Apple Maps, which is part of iOS and has its own privacy policy. On Android they are drawn from OpenFreeMap, above. Directions to a place on the community map, to the start of the parade or to a home on the Halloween map open in Apple Maps on iPhone and in Google Maps on Android, which are handed only the place you are going.
When an Android phone works out where it is, it does so through Google Play services, which is part of the phone and has its own privacy policy.
Like any request to any website, these carry your phone’s IP address to the service answering them. The weather and map services are run by other people and have their own privacy policies.
What our server keeps
The server keeps an ordinary web request log: the address requested, whether it succeeded, and the IP address it came from. These are deleted automatically after five days. They exist so that a problem can be found and so the server can refuse anyone hammering it, and they are not looked at for anything else.
An IP address is not a name, and because there are no accounts, there is nothing on the server to attach one to. Traffic reaches the server through Cloudflare, which handles the connection and has its own privacy policy.
Notifications
If you turn notifications on, your phone gives us a token that lets a message reach it. On an iPhone the token comes from Apple. On Android it comes from Google’s push service, Firebase Cloud Messaging, which keeps its own record of the app on your phone so that it can deliver messages, and has its own privacy policy. We store that token, which categories you chose, which associations you have switched off, and the app version. Nothing else, and no name goes with it. The messages reach your phone through Apple’s or Google’s push service.
On Android 12 and older, phones allow notifications without asking, so this happens the first time the app opens unless notifications for Commons are turned off in the phone’s settings.
The token identifies a device, not a person. Turning notifications off in your phone’s settings stops them, and the record is deleted the first time Apple or Google tells us the device is no longer accepting them.
The community map
The Map tab shows Indian Palms with the gates, pools, courts and other places a resident needs to find.
- Looking at it sends nothing about you. The app asks our server for the list of places, which is the same for everyone.
- Your location is optional and stays on your phone. The map never asks for it when it opens. If you tap the location button, your phone asks whether the app may use your location, and then shows where you are on the map. That position is used on your phone to draw the dot and is never sent anywhere. Everything else on the map works without it.
The holiday parade map
In December the app can show the route of the golf cart parade, and where the front of the parade is while it is on its way.
- Your spot stays on your phone. To work out when the parade reaches you, the map needs to know where you are watching from. You can tap your house on the map, or tap Use my location, which asks your phone for your location once. Either way the spot is kept on your phone and the app never sends it anywhere.
- The person leading the parade shares their location. One organizer’s phone, on the lead cart, sends its position to our server every few seconds from the moment they tap Start until they tap Stop or End, so neighbours can see the parade on the map. It keeps sending while the phone is locked or in a pocket, and the phone shows that it is the whole time: an iPhone shows its blue location sign, and an Android phone shows a notification saying it is sending the lead cart’s position, with a button to stop. On both, the app asks for location only while it is in use, never all the time. The organizer’s name is shown to the other organizers and to whoever runs the app, so they know who is leading. Residents see only the cart. The server keeps only the latest position, and how far along the route the parade has come over the last fifteen minutes, in memory. It is not written to a database and is gone when the server restarts.
- The parade on your Lock Screen. On an iPhone, the app gives our server a token from Apple when it opens, without you tapping anything, so that the parade’s countdown can appear on your Lock Screen by itself an hour before the parade. That token is good only for starting the parade’s card. We store it on its own, with no name, account or spot beside it, and keep it until Apple tells us it no longer works, for example after the app is deleted. Once a card is on your Lock Screen, whether it appeared by itself or you tapped Follow on the Lock Screen, your iPhone gives us a second token so the countdown can be updated while the app is closed. We store that token and which parade it follows, and it is deleted once the parade has finished. If you turn on Notify me at 5 minutes, your iPhone’s notification token from Apple is stored beside it, so our server can wake the app to move the alert as the parade moves; it goes when the card’s token goes. The alert itself is still worked out on your phone, and your spot is never sent. Turning off Live Activities for The Commons in your iPhone’s settings stops the card appearing. On Android, following the parade on the lock screen sends nothing extra. The app asks our server where the parade is every half minute, the same question the map asks, and keeps a notification on your lock screen until the parade is over or you tap Stop.
The parade and Halloween maps without the app
On an iPhone, a QR code for the parade or the Halloween map, on a flyer or a sign along the route, can open that map as an App Clip: a small part of the app that runs without installing it. It reads the same route, lead cart and homes as the app, and nothing more. Your spot for the parade, and the homes you tick as visited, stay on your phone, and iOS deletes them with the clip once you have not used it for a while. The clip cannot add a home, report one, lead the parade or put it on your Lock Screen, and it sends none of the tokens above; those need the app. If you leave its notification line on the App Clip card switched on, the clip can tell you when the lead cart is 5 minutes from your spot that evening. It works that out on your phone, so your spot is not sent to us for it either. On a phone with the app installed, the same code opens the app. The page the code links to, on our server, has the date and the store buttons. It has no scripts or fonts of our own and fetches nothing from other sites, but Cloudflare, which carries our site (see What our server keeps, above), may add a small script of its own to the page to tell people from automated traffic.
The Halloween map
In October the app can show a map of homes in Indian Palms that are handing out treats or are decorated and worth a look. Homes are put on it by the people who live in them.
- Looking at the map sends nothing. Which homes you tick off as visited, and any you hide from your own map, are kept on your phone and the app never sends them anywhere.
- Adding your home sends its position. If you choose to add your home, the app asks your phone for your location once, while you are standing there, and sends that position (moved by you if needed, by no more than about 100 feet) to our server, with whether you are offering treats, decorations or both, and any of a short fixed list of notes you tick, such as “Full-size bars”. No name, no address, and nothing you type is sent.
- Everyone with the app can see your pin. That is the point of it. You can take it off, or mark yourself out of treats, at any time.
- Your phone is told apart by a random code. The first time you add a home or report one, your phone makes a random code and keeps it, locked to that phone. Our server stores only a scrambled form of that code beside your pin, so that your phone, and only your phone, can change or remove it, and so that each phone can add one home. It does not identify you.
- Reports. If you report a pin, the server stores the reason you chose and the scrambled code of the phone that sent it, so one phone counts once. When three different phones, on different internet connections, report the same pin, it is taken off the map until someone checks it. To tell connections apart the server looks at the IP address a report arrives from, as it does for any request, and does not store it with the report.
- Everything is deleted the morning after Halloween. Every pin and every report for the year is deleted then. The only thing kept is how many homes took part.
Your calendar
If you turn on the community calendar in Settings, the app adds events to a calendar of its own, called The Commons. On iPhone it asks for access to your calendars and puts that calendar beside your others, so it is kept wherever they are, such as iCloud. On Android it asks to read and write calendars, and the calendar it makes is kept on the phone and belongs to no account. Either way, the app only looks after its own calendar, and sends nothing from your calendars to us.
Add to Calendar, on a story or an event, opens your phone’s own new-event screen with the details filled in. It asks for no access: you choose whether and where to save it, and nothing about it is sent to us.
If you help edit, organize or run the app
A small number of residents can remove a notice from the iPhone app. Doing so sends a passphrase and a short note explaining the removal.
Parade organizers, on iPhone or Android, send the name they type when they ask to organize, so the person approving them can tell which phone is theirs, and the lead cart’s position while they lead (see above). Whoever runs the app can sign their own iPhone in to its admin tools, which sends the name they type in the same way. Those names stay on our server until the request is removed. To have yours removed, write to the address below.
Whoever runs the app can also post an event to everyone’s Events, and it may name someone to ask and a phone number to call, as the organizer gave them for that purpose. They are shown to everyone with the app, as a flyer on a notice board would be, and leave everyone’s phone when the event is removed, though our server keeps the removed event. If yours is there and should not be, write to the address below and it will be deleted. Apart from a home added to the Halloween map (see above), those are the only things anyone types or shares in this app that leave their phone.
Neighbours who do not use the app
This matters more here than the rest of the page, because most of what The Commons prints was written by someone who never installed it.
Association notices, club events and ticketed events are public postings, and they are republished with a link back to where they came from.
Discussion from the neighbourhood’s public resident group is handled differently, and deliberately never republished as written:
- Before anything reads a discussion, the names of everyone who posted, along with phone numbers and personal email addresses, are removed from it automatically. Addresses like maintenance@ are kept, because they are how residents are told to report things.
- A screening step then throws out the whole discussion, not just the offending line, if it touches a named person, household, address, unit or lot number, a dispute with a neighbour, anyone’s money, health, family or job, or anything to do with gate codes, cameras or who is away from home. When it is unsure, it throws it out.
- What survives becomes a short, aggregate summary: the subject in a few words, two or three neutral sentences on what was raised and how it was left, roughly how many people spoke, and the general feeling. Never who said it, and never about whom.
- The original posts are never sent to the app. They stay on the server, and the app is only ever given the summary.
The rule behind all of it: leaving something out costs nothing, and getting it wrong costs a neighbour their privacy.
Having something taken down
If something about you has appeared here and you would rather it did not, write to the address below and it will be removed. You do not have to explain why, and it is not a debate.
Children
The Commons is a local news reader for a residential community. It is not directed at children. The Halloween map is for families to use together, and it collects nothing about the children who go round it: which homes a family visits stays on their phone.
Changes
If what the app does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to notify, because there is no list of readers.
Who to write to
Cascadia Ascent LLC, info@cascadiaascent.com
The Commons is an independent, unofficial project. It is not the Indian Palms Community Association, the country club, or the City of Indio, and nothing in it is an official notice.