Point Hope Connect ("we", "us") is a community app operated for residents of the Point Hope community in Charleston, South Carolina. The app provides a community feed, a resident forum (including hobby groups), event calendar, vendor directory, marketplace listings, lost & found pets board, direct messages between residents, issue reporting, emergency alerts, and an "Ask the POA" question answerer.
1:1 messages between verified residents are stored on our servers (Cloudflare) so they can be delivered and kept in sync across your devices. Only the two people in a conversation can see it — we don't read or scan message text with AI. When you send a message, its text is checked against automated keyword and pattern rules (for example, blocking a Social Security number or a credit-card-shaped number) before it sends; this check never uses AI and nothing is shown to a person as part of it. The POA community team only sees a message's text if a participant reports it. Push notifications for a new message never include the message's text. Deleting your account clears the text and photos of every message you sent.
Forum threads, comments, marketplace listings, and other posts are screened by automated rules and an AI safety classifier (Cloudflare Workers AI) to help detect abuse. Content flagged this way may be hidden from the community pending a moderator's review, the same as content reported by a resident.
When you paste a link into a post or forum thread, our server fetches public preview information (its title and a thumbnail image) from that site; the thumbnail itself is then loaded directly from the original site, not from us. Direct messages don't get link previews. Separately, the text of forum threads may be indexed so we can suggest similar past threads to other neighbors (the "Neighbors already shared" prompt shown when starting a new thread).
We do not sell your information, and we do not use it for advertising or ad tracking.
Vendors listed in the app's directory never see a resident's email, phone number, or address — a vendor sees only the review text, star rating, and first name/last initial you choose to leave.
"Ask the POA" conversations are automatically deleted after 365 days of inactivity. You can delete your entire account, and everything tied to it, at any time from the app (More → Account → Delete account) — see "Your choices" below.
You can delete your account from within the app at any time. Deleting your account removes your profile information, verification records, "Ask the POA" history, device and notification data, and photos you've uploaded. Community content you've posted — feed posts, forum threads and comments, vendor reviews, and lost & found pet reports — stays visible to other residents so conversations and vendor ratings stay intact, but is re-attributed to "Former resident," no longer linked to your name or account. Marketplace listings are handled differently: yours are removed from the marketplace entirely, the same as if you'd deleted them yourself, rather than kept and re-attributed. Direct messages you sent have their text and photos cleared — a conversation can still exist for whoever you were messaging, but nothing you wrote remains in it. Issue reports you filed are kept, de-identified the same way as community content, for the POA's maintenance records, but with their location and description removed — only the category, status, title, and date stay. If another resident had a notification mentioning your name (for example, a reply to their post), it's rewritten so it no longer shows your name.
This app is for adult residents of the Point Hope community and is not directed at children.
Questions about this policy or your data: hello@pointhope.app.