Privacy Policy

Who we are

Gather the Event is run by Gather the Family LLC (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what we collect when you host a gathering, upload to one as a guest, text our number, or visit this site, what we do with it, and how long we keep it. Questions or requests: email support@gathertheevent.com or use the contact form.

Words used here mean what they mean in the product. A gathering is the wedding, reunion, party or work event a host creates. A guest is anyone who uploads to a gathering without an account.

What we collect

Hosts

• Your name and email address, and a password (stored only as a one-way hash) or a passkey (we store the public half; the private half stays on your device).
• The details of each gathering you create: its name, date, location, upload window, privacy setting, optional branding, and the kind of occasion if you tell us.
• Your purchases and credits. Stripe takes the payment; we keep a record of what was bought and by which account.
• If you choose to link your Gather the Family account: the identifier and email address Gather the Family gives us, and a scoped access token, which we store encrypted.
• When you sign up, the page that sent you to us and any campaign tags in the link (see “Cookies and local storage”).

Guests

Guests do not create an account. When you open a gathering’s link, your browser is given a random device token, kept in your browser’s local storage, which is how we recognise your phone within that one gathering. We store only a one-way hash of it. We collect a name or an email address only if you give one: an optional name you can give when you join a gathering or change later (stored on your guest record and in your browser), a name you type on a video message, or, if you email photos to a gathering’s upload address, the address you sent them from. Guests who text a gathering code to our number are covered under “Text messages” below.

Photos and videos

Everything you upload is stored for the gathering: the original file, and the smaller copies we make for the gallery (a thumbnail, a web-sized picture and, for video, a playable version and a poster frame). We read the metadata your phone put in the file, including the date it was taken and, if present, the GPS location. When a photo has a GPS location we send its coordinates to Photon, a public reverse-geocoding service run by Komoot, to turn them into a place name, and store the place name and the coordinates with the photo. Nothing else about you or the photo is sent to Photon. We also score each photo for blur and group near-identical shots so the gallery and live wall can prefer the sharp ones; the highlights feature uses those scores, the number of faces detected and the tags to pick standout photos.

Location in your photos. The thumbnail and web-sized copies we make of a photo are new files and do not carry the metadata of your original. The place name and exact coordinates we store with a photo are shown only to the host and co-hosts; guests and the live wall never receive them (an export the host makes to Gather the Family also carries them, below). The original files do keep whatever metadata your phone recorded, which can include where the photo was taken, and a host who downloads a gathering as a zip, or sends it to Gather the Family, receives those originals as they are. Videos may also keep metadata inside the video file. If you do not want a photo’s location shared with the host, turn off location tagging for your camera before you take it.

Video messages

Where a host has turned them on, a guest can record a video message for the host. We store the recording, the name the guest gives, and any note. It is visible to the hosts and to the guest who made it, and to everyone else only if it is shared to the gallery. If a host includes video messages in an export to Gather the Family, they are sent whether or not they were shared to the gallery (see “Who we share it with”).

Messages to us

If you use the contact form we receive your name, your email address, the subject and your message, and we reply by email.

Notifications

If a host turns on notifications on a device, we store that device’s push address (a web address supplied by the browser’s push service) and the keys needed to send to it, up to ten devices per host. Notifications go to hosts only, never to guests, and say things like “your download is ready”.

Faces and tagging

We don’t use facial recognition.

Here is exactly what we do with faces in photos, and what we do not.

• Detection. When a photo is uploaded, we use Amazon Rekognition, a service of Amazon Web Services, to detect where faces appear in it. All we keep from that is the position and size of a rectangle around each face, with a confidence score. Faces that are too small, too blurry or too uncertain are marked as dismissed and left out of the tagging screens. We do not store any other detail the service reports about a face.
• A small picture of each face. For faces large enough to be useful we cut a small cropped picture from the photo. Hosts see these as avatars next to a name and in a queue of faces nobody has tagged yet; guests are not shown them. A crop is deleted when the host dismisses that face, and with the photo.
• What we do not do. We do not recognise faces. We do not create face templates, faceprints or any numerical description of a face, and we do not keep face geometry. We do not compare one face with another, in the same photo, in other photos or in other gatherings, and we do not group faces into people. We do not guess or suggest who someone is, and we do not match faces against any other database. We do not run face detection on video.
• Names come from people. A name appears on a photo only because a person put it there: the host or a co-host, the guest who uploaded the photo (on their own uploads), or a guest tapping “That’s me” on a face in a photo they can see. A tag records who made it and when. A guest can only claim a face for themselves; they cannot take on someone else’s name. A photo or video can also be tagged as including someone without pointing at a face. A tag is a name attached to a photo, nothing more.
• Who sees a name. A name tagged on a photo is visible to the people who can see that photo in the gathering.
• Why. So guests can find the photos they are in, and so the host can see who is in the gathering. We do not use faces to identify anyone outside the gathering, for advertising, or for any other purpose.

Removing tags

• A guest can tap “That’s not me” to remove any tag on the person linked to them, whoever made it. A tag under a name that is not linked to you is removed by the host, or by us if you write to us.
• A guest can open the “You” page in the gathering and choose “Remove my tags and leave”. That removes the tags that say which faces are you: if the person made for you is yours alone, it is deleted along with its tags and those faces are left untagged; if it is shared with another guest or was made by the host, it stays and only the tags you made on it are removed. It also takes you out of the gathering: your link stops working on that phone, the photos you uploaded are hidden from everyone but the host (the host keeps them, hidden, because the host paid for the gathering), and any video messages you left are deleted. Tags you made on other people stay with the photos they belong to. The name or email you gave stays on your guest record, and the host can still see the name on your hidden uploads. To have all of it deleted, write to us at support@gathertheevent.com. Photos other people uploaded of you stay in the gallery; ask the host or us if you want one taken down.
• A host can untag any face, dismiss a face (which clears its tag and deletes its cropped picture), remove every tag a particular guest made, hide or delete any photo, and delete the whole gathering.
• Anyone can write to support@gathertheevent.com and ask us to remove a tag or a photo.

Who can see a gathering’s photos

• The host and co-hosts can see everything in the gathering, including hidden photos, the people tagged, and who uploaded what.
• Guests. By default a guest sees the photos they uploaded and the photos they are tagged in. A host can open the gallery so every guest sees every visible photo, or make it public so anyone with the link can see it. That is the host’s choice, and a host can change it back.
• The live wall. A host can show a live wall: a slideshow of the gathering’s newest photos on a screen in the room, which anyone in the room can see. The wall shows every photo that is not hidden and has not been flagged or rejected by moderation, whatever the gallery setting above says, so a gathering set to show guests only their own photos still shows its photos on the wall. The wall shows photos, not names, locations or uploader details, and the host can switch it off or change its link at any time.

Content moderation

Photos are also scanned with Amazon Rekognition’s content moderation to spot explicit or violent images. Flagged photos are held back from guests and the live wall until the host approves them; photos still waiting for a scan are held back only when the host has moderation turned on. The labels the scan returns are stored with the photo. This scan looks at what a photo shows, not at who is in it.

Text messages

When our text line is active, a guest can text a gathering’s code to our toll-free number and we reply with the link they use to upload. The text line may be limited to paid gatherings. We collect your mobile number and the messages and photos you send when you text us, and use them only to reply with your upload link and to add your photos to that gathering.

We text a number only if that number texted us first, and only as a reply to that message. Hosts cannot enter a phone number, send invitations, reminders or links by text, or cause us to text anyone.

No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing or promotional purposes. Text messaging originator opt-in data and consent will not be shared with any third parties.

We use Twilio to send and receive the messages; it handles them only to deliver them for us. When the text line is active, your number is kept with your record in that gathering and deleted with the gathering when it is purged; ask us if you want it deleted sooner. Reply STOP to any message to opt out, or HELP for help. Message and data rates may apply. The full terms are in the SMS terms.

Email

We send transactional email through Amazon Simple Email Service: address verification, password resets and invitations. The contact form delivers your message to our support inbox the same way. We receive email, too: guests can email photos to a gathering’s upload address, and we save the attachments to that gathering.

Marketing email goes through Resend. Your address is added to our Resend list only after you verify it. The newsletter is off unless you tick the box at sign-up or turn it on later; product updates are on by default for every account and can be switched off. Every marketing email links to a page where you can change either choice. To unsubscribe from everything, use the one-click unsubscribe link in any marketing email. Our Resend account is shared with Gather the Family, so unsubscribing from everything applies to both. We keep your choices in our own database as well as in Resend.

Cookies and local storage

The marketing pages set no cookies and load no third-party analytics or advertising. We count visits ourselves: on your first visit your browser stores a random identifier in local storage for 90 days and tells us once the page you landed on, any campaign tags in the link, and the site that sent you. Before we store anything we cut the page and the referring site down to their address without any query string. The record does not include your IP address and is linked to an account only if you go on to sign up. It deletes itself after 90 days. We do not send this beacon from guest pages, gathering walls, or the email preferences page.

The app itself uses:

• A session cookie when a host signs in (HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, 30 days), set on our parent domain so it works across our subdomains. A short-lived cookie (5 minutes) during a passkey sign-in, another (10 minutes) while a host links a Gather the Family account, and a support cookie that exists only while one of our staff is signed in as a user to help (see “Support access”).
• Local storage on a guest’s phone for the device token (gte_device_token: followed by the gathering), the guest record (gte_guest:<id>) and the optional name (gte_guest_name:<id>). A queue of photos waiting to upload is kept in the browser’s IndexedDB so a locked phone does not lose them.
• Local storage preferences: light or dark theme, the account you last used, an upload size setting, whether you dismissed the add-to-home-screen hint, and, for a host who turned on notifications, the push address a browser moved away from.
• Session storage for a live wall’s temporary credential, for remembering which kind of occasion page you looked at, and for a flag that stops the app reloading itself more than once to pick up an update, all cleared when the tab closes.

To limit abuse of public forms we count requests per source address using a keyed one-way hash, not the address itself; those counters expire automatically.

How we use your information

• To run gatherings: take uploads, build galleries, the live wall and downloads.
• To find where faces are in photos so people can be tagged, and to screen photos for moderation.
• To take payments, keep your credits, and issue refunds.
• To sign you in, secure accounts, and prevent abuse and fraud.
• To email you what you asked for, and what you consented to.
• To answer your messages and give support.
• To understand where sign-ups come from, with the visit record described above.

Who we share it with

We do not sell personal information. We share it only with the companies that do the work below, for that work, and in the other ways listed after the table.

• Hosts. The host of a gathering, and any co-host, can see what it contains and the people tagged in it. A host can open the gallery to all guests or make it public; that is the host’s choice.
• Gather the Family. Only if a host links an account and asks us to send a finished gathering into their own Gather the Family tree. We send the visible photos and videos (the original files for photos, with their metadata), each item’s date, place name and latitude and longitude where we have them, the gathering’s own location, the text of any photo prompt it answers, the names the host or guests gave to people, a cropped picture of each named person, the rectangles where their faces appear, and which photos they are tagged in. If the host includes video messages, they are sent too, even ones not shared to the gallery, titled “Video message from” the guest’s name and carrying the guest’s note. Once received, Gather the Family’s own policy applies to that copy.
• Support access. A small number of our staff can open a time-limited session as a user to help with a problem. It lasts at most 60 minutes, is recorded in an audit log, and cannot change your password, make payments or link accounts.
• Legal. If we are required to by law, or to protect our users and rights.

How long we keep things

Hosts can download a gathering before it is deleted. A download or export you take, and a copy sent to Gather the Family, is yours and is not deleted when the gathering is.

Your choices

• Guests: remove your tags and leave a gathering from its “You” page; delete photos you uploaded; ask the host or us to take down a photo or a tag.
• Hosts: hide or delete photos, untag or dismiss faces, remove a guest’s tags, and delete a gathering, all from the app.
• Email: use the link in any marketing email to reach the preferences page.
• Text messages: reply STOP.
• Anything else: to see, correct or delete your information, or to close an account, email support@gathertheevent.com. We will check it is really you before we act on an account.

Security

Data is stored on Amazon Web Services and sent over encrypted connections. Passwords are stored as one-way hashes and linked-account tokens are encrypted. No system is perfectly secure, so we cannot promise absolute security.

Children

Our service is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. Accounts are for adults. Gatherings often include photos of children, uploaded by the adults who attend; the host decides who may see them, and by default a guest sees only their own uploads and the photos they are tagged in. A parent or guardian can ask the host, or us at support@gathertheevent.com, to remove a child’s photos or tags, and we will. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, write to us and we will delete it.

Changes

If our practices change we will update this page and its effective date.

Contact

Gather the Family LLC · support@gathertheevent.com · contact form. Our Terms of Service also apply.