Your account itself is small: your phone number, when it was verified, how you signed in, your display name and your account status. An email address is optional.
When your app offers it, you add an email under Settings, Email for updates, and confirm it with a code. It is used only for that code and, if you turn them on, for activity emails. It is never used to sign in, and never for marketing.
Beyond the account, Localsville holds what you put into it (profile, photos, offerings, messages, a Place's address), what the service has to record to work (approximate location, notification token, quotes, appointments and deliveries), and ordinary operational data such as server logs and app diagnostics.
If you turn on Localsville's summary of your profile, that text is written by Localsville using AI rather than by you, and it is shown publicly.
The Privacy Policy is the authoritative and complete list. This answer is a summary of it, not a replacement.
From inside the app, and it takes 30 days. The moment you ask, your profiles are hidden and your account is marked for closure with a date 30 days out.
For those 30 days you can change your mind and cancel, and the profiles that were switched off are switched back on: exactly those, not anything you had already hidden yourself.
After 30 days your identity is stripped out for good. You can also delete your account without the app.
Your identity is removed and your content goes with it. Photos, notification tokens, preferences and anything derived from your profile text are deleted, and your offerings are stripped of their words.
The phone number that let you sign in is deleted from the authentication system as a separate step afterwards, so nothing can sign back in as you.
Some records survive: financial, transactional, moderation and safety records are kept because the law and the safety of other people require it. Your name, phone number, address and coordinates are cleared from them. Text you wrote (a message, for example) is kept as written, so anything you typed about yourself inside it stays there.
Yes, at any point in the 30 days. Cancelling puts your account back exactly as it was and reactivates precisely the profiles that the deletion request switched off.
After the 30 days have elapsed and the account has been closed, it cannot be brought back.
Because something is still open that has to finish first: a commitment in progress, a payment or refund not yet settled, money still owed to or by you, or an open support or safety matter.
The app tells you which one it is waiting on rather than leaving you guessing, and closure happens once it clears.
No. Localsville never asks for background location and cannot use it. On iPhone the code that would even request it is removed from the shipped app; on Android the background-location permission is not declared at all.
Location is only ever read while you are using the app, and only after you tap something that needs it, never on launch.
The location used to sort Discover is sent with that request and is not saved to your account. A profile is different: the location you set for your own profile is stored, because that is what lets neighbors nearby find you. What they see is only a rough label such as "About 2 mi away", never a point on a map for a Person.
You pick your town by name instead, and Localsville works. The option to enter a town is always there, not a fallback you have to hunt for.
What you give up is distance: without location, cards do not sort by how near someone is, and the "About 2 mi away" line does not appear at all. Everything else (Discover, Explore, search, messaging, profiles) is unchanged.
Localsville will not keep asking. A declined permission is left alone for at least a day.
In your phone's Settings, under Localsville. Once a permission has been permanently refused, only the operating system can change it; no app can ask again.
Localsville gives you a direct route there, and re-checks when you come back, so you do not have to restart the app.
Three things, and none of them is marketing. Messages and connections between you and another neighbor; anything to do with a commitment or money; and what is happening to your own profile: approved, needs an update, or a reminder, sent once, to finish it or add to it.
There is no promotional or engagement notification category in Localsville at all. It does not exist to be switched off.
You can turn each category off separately, and set quiet hours.
Localsville uses AI in a few named places, and never to decide anything about you. Search may send the words you type to OpenAI when it needs help working out what you mean. Nothing about you or your account goes with them.
Nothing about your profile is sent to an AI service unless you asked for it. The short Localsville summary of your profile is your own choice, and you can turn it off at any time.
AI-powered discovery, offered in earlier versions of the app, is no longer used by Search. If you turned it on, you can delete what we stored from your profile editor.
One AI use is for people who are not on Localsville yet. To prepare a private preview, Localsville may send the text of a public page about someone's work (or the answers they typed themselves) to OpenAI to draft a profile, with email addresses, phone numbers and links removed first. See Why did I get a private preview?
What is sent, and how long it is kept, is described in the Privacy Policy.
Someone at Localsville, an organization you belong to, or a member who knows your work thought you might want a profile, so we prepared a private draft for you to look at. It is not published, and nothing happens unless you claim it.
The draft was written with AI from a public page about your work (your own website, or an organization's public member page) or from what a member told us: your name, what you do and your town. Email addresses, phone numbers and links were removed before anything was sent to our AI provider, OpenAI.
Only someone with the link can open it. An unclaimed preview is deleted 14 days after we send it, and no later than 28 days after it was prepared; a preview from a member's suggestion is deleted after 14 days.
Not interested? Press Delete and don't contact me on the preview, reply “stop” to our email, or write to privacy@localsville.com. If it is about someone else, press Not me. How Localsville handles personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy.
An account that has been asked to close is anonymised 30 days after the request. That clock is fixed.
Financial, transactional, moderation and safety records are kept longer because the law requires it, with the structured identity fields cleared.
For everything else (profile content, messages, quotes, deliveries) the Privacy Policy is the authoritative statement of what is kept and for how long.
No analytics, and no cookies except on one page. localsville.com runs no analytics or advertising code and sets no cookies. The one exception is the private preview page: when you choose to verify your phone number there, it loads Firebase sign-in and Google's reCAPTCHA check, which may set a cookie.
reCAPTCHA is Google's check that a person, not an automated program, is asking for a sign-in code. It loads only after you press to verify, and no other page on the site uses it.
Fonts, images and stylesheets are served from localsville.com itself, with one exception: on a shared profile page (a localsville.com/p/ link), the profile's photos load directly from Localsville's photo storage provider, Supabase, which the Privacy Policy lists.
From the profile or the conversation: there is a report option, and you can block someone outright. Reporting is private; the other person is not told.
Yes. Blocking stops any further contact and takes you out of each other's search and discovery. Neither of you can message the other or start a new conversation, and neither appears in the other's Discover, Explore, search results, the map, or on the other's profile page.
What a block does not do is erase history. A conversation you already had stays in your conversation list, and a profile you had saved stays in your saved list. Nothing new can be sent in that thread.
Blocking is private: the other person is not notified that you did it. You can still report someone you have blocked.
You can see and undo your blocks from your settings.
Your display name, your phone number masked to the last four digits, and the year you joined.
If your account is not in its ordinary state (deactivated, suspended, or scheduled for deletion), a banner says so, including the deletion date. An ordinary active account shows no status line, because there is nothing to say.
That is the whole account. Everything else is on your profile, which is separate.
