Legal
This covers the Gathers app for iPhone and iPad and this website. It is written against what the app actually does — not a template. If something here doesn't match what you see in the app, that's a bug and we want to hear about it.
Last updated: September 4, 2026
Gathers and the Touch Grass Initiative website are operated by Justin Karl Sypek (SYTEK Consulting, LLC) ("we," "us"). We are the data controller for the information described here. You can reach us any time at hello@touchgrassinitiative.com.
Your account. You can sign up two ways:
Your profile. Whatever you choose to put there: display name, username, home base (a town or area, typed by you), a short bio, your interests, and your discovery radius in miles. We use these to show you nearby gatherings, to build the "For you" filter from your interests, and to let other members recognise you. Only the display name or username is required — the rest can stay empty.
What you create and do in the app. Gatherings you host (title, description, date, time and duration, venue name and address, capacity, intensity and category), RSVPs, gatherings you save, and chat messages you send in a gathering. Chat lives inside a specific gathering and is readable only by people who have RSVP'd to it. Gatherings expire after they happen and their chat moves to an archive you can still read.
Friends and direct messages. You can add a friend by typing their exact username; nobody is suggested to you and nobody can browse a member list. A friendship exists only when both people say yes. We store the request, its status, and the direct messages the two of you exchange. Direct messages are private to the two people in them.
Your time outside. Gathers keeps a ledger of time you spend outside your house: the minutes, the date, where it came from (typed by you, a gathering you attended, or Apple Health — see below), an optional note, and, for a workout, its name and an identifier so it is never offered to you twice. We also store your daily goal and whether you have chosen to share your weekly total with friends. Streaks are calculated from the ledger, not stored.
Subscriptions. If you subscribe to Gathers Plus or Gathers Family, the purchase is made through Apple's In-App Purchase and billed to your Apple Account. Apple handles the payment; we never see your card details. What we store is the plan you bought, whether it is active, when it renews or ends, and Apple's transaction identifiers, so we can unlock the right features and honour renewals, cancellations and refunds that Apple reports to us.
Push notifications. If you allow notifications, we store a push token for your device so we can tell you about new messages and RSVPs. The notifications themselves are deliberately generic — "New message in Saturday pickleball" — so the contents of your messages never leave our systems. You can turn notifications off in iOS Settings at any time and the token stops being used.
Calendar. If you choose to add a gathering to your calendar, iOS asks for calendar access and the event is written to your calendar on your device. We don't read your calendar and nothing from it is sent to us.
Safety records. If you report content, we store what you reported, the reason you chose, any detail you typed, and who filed it. If you block someone, we store that you blocked them. We need both to keep the community usable.
Basic technical information. Our backend keeps ordinary server logs (such as IP address and timestamps) for security, abuse prevention and reliability. Our website host does the same.
What Gathers does not collect: no photos or camera access, no contacts, no microphone, no phone number, no full date of birth, no step counts or motion data, no advertising identifier, no precise coordinates, and no browsing activity in other apps.
This is the part people care most about, so here is exactly how it works.
With a Gathers Plus or Gathers Family subscription you can connect Apple Health. Here is the whole arrangement:
Gathers Family lets adults in a household turn a child's time outside into screen time they have earned. We designed it so that a child never has an account and so that we hold as little about a child as the feature can possibly run on.
Adults. A parent or guardian with a Family subscription creates a household. Other adults — a co-parent, or a family member aged 16 or older with their own Gathers account — join it with an invite code. We store who is in the household.
Children under 16. A parent adds a child by typing a first name or nickname and, optionally, a birth year (never a full date of birth). The parent sets the rules — how many active minutes earn how much screen time, a daily cap, and whether the parent must approve each entry. To let the child log from their own device, the parent generates a one-time family code in the app and enters it on the child's device.
What a paired device can do, and what we receive from it. A paired device gets an anonymous session tied to that child's record — no email, no password, no name we didn't already have. From it we receive: the activity minutes the child logs (which a parent approves), and messages the child sends in the household's private family chat. If notifications are allowed on that device, we also store a push token so "dinner's ready" can reach it. That is the complete list. A paired device is not asked for location, Health, photos, contacts, or anything else, cannot browse or join gatherings, cannot see or message anyone outside the household, and has no profile that other members could see.
Parental consent. Creating the child's record and generating the family code is how a parent consents to this collection. Only adults in the household can see a child's activity, credits and chat. A parent can unpair a device instantly, and removing a child from the household deletes everything about them — their record, rules, activity, credits and messages.
Everyone else. Gathers itself is for people 16 and older. We don't knowingly collect personal information from a child outside the family flow described here. If you believe a child has created an account or given us information some other way, email us and we'll delete it.
If you're in a place with laws like the GDPR or UK GDPR, our legal bases are:
Other members see your display name or username, your bio and interests if you filled them in, gatherings you host, the fact that you're going to a gathering, and the messages you send in a gathering you've joined. Your email address is never shown to other members.
Your friends can additionally message you directly and, only if you turn on "Share my week with friends", see your total minutes outside for the current week on their friends board. They never see individual entries, notes, or anything from Apple Health. Turn the switch off and the number disappears.
Adults in your household see each other's membership, the children's records, activity and credits, and the family chat.
The service providers who make Gathers run:
Each of these only gets what it needs to do its job, and none of them is allowed to use your information for their own purposes. We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We will disclose information if the law genuinely requires it, or where we believe in good faith that someone is at risk of serious harm.
Our infrastructure is operated in the United States. If you use Gathers from outside the United States, your information is transferred there.
You do not have to email anyone or wait for us. In the app:
When you confirm, we immediately and permanently delete your authentication record, your profile, your username, your RSVPs, your saved gatherings, your chat and direct messages, your friendships and requests, your outside ledger, your push tokens, your blocks, and every gathering you host (a gathering can't happen without its host, so it goes too, along with its RSVPs and its chat). The app then wipes every local trace of the account from your device.
Two things to know. Children's records live with the household, not with any one adult, so a co-parent keeps them; if you are the only adult in your household, email us and we'll delete the household and everything in it. And deleting your account does not cancel an Apple subscription — Apple bills that, so turn off renewal in Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions first, or you will keep paying for an account that no longer exists.
This cannot be undone, and we can't restore it afterwards. If you'd rather we did it for you, email hello@touchgrassinitiative.com from your account's email address and we'll handle it.
If you're a California resident: we do not sell or share your personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we will never discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right. To exercise any right, email hello@touchgrassinitiative.com — we'll verify you control the account and respond within the time the law allows.
Every request between the app and our backend uses TLS. Every table in our database has row-level security so one account can't read another's private data. Chat is restricted at the database level to people who have joined that gathering, direct messages to the two people in them, and a household's data to the adults in it. Purchases are verified against Apple's signed receipts on our server, never trusted from the device. Sign-in tokens are kept in the device Keychain. No system is perfect, and we won't pretend otherwise — but if we ever have a breach that affects you, we'll tell you plainly and promptly.
touchgrassinitiative.com collects only what you type into our signup or contact form — your email address and, if you provide them, your name, interests and message. It is emailed to our team inbox and is not stored in a separate database by this site. This site has no advertising trackers and no analytics cookies. Our host (Microsoft Azure) keeps standard server logs for security and reliability.
If we change this policy we'll update this page and the date at the top. If a change is significant — particularly if we start collecting something new — we'll say so plainly rather than bury it. This version adds Apple Health, subscriptions, push notifications, friends and direct messages, the outside ledger, and the family features, all of which shipped since the previous version.
Questions, requests, or something here that doesn't look right? Email hello@touchgrassinitiative.com. For help with the app, see our support page. Our terms are at Terms of Use.
Justin Karl Sypek (SYTEK Consulting, LLC)