Privacy Policy

Loctarim LLC, 2627 South Cooper Street, Suite B16, Arlington, TX 76015, operating as Loctarim, is the controller of the personal data described here — meaning we decide what is collected and why.

For anything about your data, write to privacy@loctarim.com. We aim to respond within 30 days.

Only what the Service needs to work. In full:

You give us

Account details

Your email address, a username, your name, and a password — which we store only as a bcrypt hash and can never read back. Optionally a short bio.

A phone number, if you give us one

Entirely optional, and never required to sign up, list, rent or message. We store it only so the two people in a confirmed rental can reach each other about the handoff: it is released to the other party when a request is accepted, at the same moment the pickup details are, and to nobody else at any point. It is never shown on your public profile, never used for marketing, and never sent a text message by us — nothing in this Service sends SMS. Clearing the field deletes it.

Your approximate location

A neighbourhood you choose, stored as a coarse label and a coordinate pair. Used to measure distance. Before you choose one, we work out an approximate city from your connection instead, which is not stored while you browse — see Location for the one case where it is kept.

Listings

Titles, descriptions, photos, condition, prices, quantities, availability, a public area label, and — separately — private pickup instructions.

Rental activity

Requests you make and receive, dates, quantities, the price breakdown at the time, status changes with timestamps and who made them, and any note attached to a request. Where a rental carried a security hold, any damage claim's amount, written reason and resolution.

Messages

The content of messages you send within a rental thread, with sender and timestamp.

Reviews

Ratings and review text you write, and those written about you.

Searches and saved items

Search text you choose to save, listings you favourite, and “wanted” posts you publish to the demand board — including the text as you typed it.

Reports

If you report a listing or a person: what you reported, the reason, and any detail you add.

We collect automatically

Session records

When you sign in we record a session with its creation and expiry time and a short device description, so you can see where you are signed in and sign out everywhere.

Server logs

Ordinary web-server and error logs, which may include IP addresses, timestamps and the page requested. Used to keep the Service running and secure.

Rate-limit counters

Failed sign-in attempts are counted against an email address and an IP address, in memory, to slow password guessing.

What we deliberately do not collect

• No card numbers. Where card payments are enabled, card details are entered on our payment processor's hosted pages. We receive only a token and a display label such as “Visa ···· 4242”. No card number, expiry or security code ever reaches our servers or our database.
• No government ID document, and no data extracted from one. Identity verification is optional. Where you choose to use it, the document photograph and the selfie are captured on our verification provider's own pages and are sent to them, not to us — the same arrangement as card details. We receive the outcome and nothing else: whether the check passed, when, and the provider's reference for the session. We never hold the images, your ID number, your date of birth or your address, and we run no background checks of any kind.
• No advertising or cross-site tracking. There are no third-party advertising tags, no analytics cookies and no tracking pixels on this Service. We do not build advertising profiles and we do not participate in cross-context behavioural advertising.
• No photo metadata. EXIF data — including GPS coordinates recorded by your phone — is stripped from uploaded images before they are stored.

Location is the most sensitive thing this Service holds, so it is worth being exact about how it moves.

• Coordinates are stored for your account, for each listing and for each demand post. They are used to compute distances.
• Coordinates are never sent to a browser. Distance is computed on the server; what a public page receives is a distance and a coarse area label such as “Sellwood-Moreland”.
• Any coordinate that does leave the server is displaced. Where a listing needs an approximate point for display, it is offset from the true position by roughly a quarter to one mile. The offset is derived from the listing id rather than randomly, so it does not shift between page loads and cannot be averaged away by requesting the page repeatedly.
• Private pickup instructions are released only on acceptance. The exact address, gate code or “bins by the garage door” detail an owner writes is visible to the owner, and to the renter only once a request has been accepted. It is never on a public page, in search results, or in the sitemap.
• Browser geolocation is optional. If you use it, your browser asks first, and you can decline and pick a neighbourhood instead.
• Until you choose an area, we guess one from your connection. Every request carries the IP address it came from — that is how the internet works, and it is in our server logs either way. Our network provider resolves it to an approximate city — or, when it cannot manage even that, just a region or country — and passes us that label and a coordinate for it, so that a first-time visitor sees things near them rather than things near one hardcoded city. It is a guess about a network, not a fact about you: it lands in a neighbouring city often enough, and behind a VPN or an office connection it can be a different state entirely. Anything you have told us outranks it — a location you pick, or the neighbourhood on your profile. While you browse it is never written to a cookie and never used to build a history of where you have been; it is recomputed from the request in front of us and forgotten with it. It is kept in exactly one case: if you check out as a guest without ever choosing an area, the guess in use at that moment is saved as your new account's starting area, because an account with no area would show you distances from nowhere. It appears in the header like any other location, and you can change it there whenever you like. The location control in the header says when the guess is in use, and “Don't guess my area” in that control turns it off for good by pinning your searches to this site's own area.

The right-hand column matters if you are in the UK, the EU, or somewhere with comparable law; if you are not, read it as our reason.

To provide the Service — accounts, listings, search, rentals, messages

Performance of our contract with you. Without this data there is no service to provide.

To keep people safe — reports, moderation, abuse and fraud prevention

Our legitimate interest in a safe marketplace, and other users' legitimate interest in not being defrauded or harmed.

To secure the Service — sessions, rate limits, logs

Our legitimate interest in security, and our legal obligation to protect your data.

To process payments and payouts

Performance of our contract, and compliance with tax and anti-money-laundering law.

To send service emails — email confirmation, password resets, damage claim notices

Performance of our contract. These are not marketing and cannot be opted out of while you hold an account — see What we send you for the full list and the marketing commitment.

To show you things near you before you have told us where you are — approximate city from your connection

Our legitimate interest in a marketplace whose first page is useful, weighed against a guess that is coarse, unstored and refusable. Turn it off in the header's location control and we will measure from this site's own area instead.

To comply with law and respond to lawful requests

Legal obligation.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have weighed them against your rights and you may object — see Your rights.

No identity verification runs on this deployment. The feature exists in the code and is switched off here, so no document, selfie or biometric data is captured, sent anywhere, or held by anyone. If that changes, this section will describe what the verification provider retains — it is written to be conditional so it cannot quietly become untrue.

Other users

Anyone, including signed-out visitors and search engines

Your username, avatar, bio, area label, rating, completed-rental count, and your active listings with their photos, descriptions and prices. Your username is also your profile's address.

The other party to a rental

Everything above, plus the messages in that thread, the rental's history, whether your identity check passed, and — once a request is accepted — the private pickup instructions, your name and your phone number. Your name is not shown anywhere before that, to anybody.

The identity line is a yes or nothing at all. Whether you are part-way through a check, whether one was unreadable, and whether one failed are not disclosed to anybody but you — a badge appears when a check has passed, and its absence is not evidence of anything.

No other user

Your email address, your exact coordinates, your saved searches, your favourites, your session list, your payment tokens, and the content of your reports. Your password is stored only as a hash and is readable by nobody, including us. For what we can see, read the next part — it is not “nobody”.

The other party to a confirmed rental

Your phone number, if you gave one, and the owner's pickup details. Both are released only once a request is accepted, and only to the one person on the other side of that rental.

Reports are not shown to the person reported, and we do not tell them who reported them.

Us

We can technically see everything in the database. We operate the service, so we hold the credentials to the systems your data is stored in. Any platform you use is in this position; a policy that told you otherwise would be untrue, so this one does not.

What that means in practice, and what limits it:

• There is one administrative screen, and it shows reports only. An administrator can read a report — what was reported, the reason, the detail, and who filed it — and mark it open, reviewing or closed. There is no screen anywhere that lists users, reads private messages, or shows exact addresses.
• Administrative access needs two separate keys. A flag on the account, which only a command run against the database can set and which no form or link can grant, and membership of a list held in the server's configuration. Neither alone is enough, and if that list is empty nobody has access at all.
• We look when there is a reason to. Investigating a report, diagnosing a fault, preventing fraud or abuse, or complying with a legal obligation. We do not read messages, open private pickup notes or look at anybody's data out of curiosity, and we never sell or rent any of it.
• Direct database access is limited to the operator. There are no employees. If that changes, this section changes with it.

Service providers

We share data with a small number of processors, each only with what they need:

Database and file hosting

Stores the application database and uploaded listing photos. Currently Supabase.

Payment processing

Stripe, where card payments or payouts are enabled. Stripe receives what it needs to process a payment and to verify a payee, and is an independent controller for its own compliance purposes. See Stripe's own privacy policy.

Transactional email

Delivers password-reset and notification emails. Currently Resend. It receives your email address and the message content.

Error monitoring

Where configured, receives error reports which may incidentally include a user id and a request path. Configured to avoid message bodies and credentials.

Location lookup

When you type a place name into the location field, that text is sent to OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service to be turned into coordinates. Only what you typed is sent — not your name, your account, or your IP as anything other than the ordinary source of the request. Results are cached so the same place is not looked up twice. See the OpenStreetMap Foundation's privacy policy.

Language model provider

This deployment has an external model configured. Text you type into search, and text you ask the listing helper to draft, is sent to that provider to be interpreted. Your name, email and coordinates are not sent with it.

Everyone else

We do not sell your personal data, and we never have. We do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We disclose it otherwise only where we must: to comply with a valid legal process, to enforce our terms, to protect someone's safety, or to a successor in a merger or acquisition — in which case this policy continues to apply until you are told otherwise.

This Service uses no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies. What it does use:

localrent_session — strictly necessary

Keeps you signed in. Set only after you sign in, expires after 30 days, and is marked HttpOnly (so page scripts cannot read it), SameSite=Lax (so another site cannot use it) and Secure in production. Signing out revokes it on the server, not just in your browser.

localrent_origin — strictly necessary

The place you are searching from, so results are near you rather than near a default. Set only when you choose an area or allow your browser to share your location — never inferred silently — and it holds that area's name and its approximate coordinates, not an address. Expires after 90 days, and carries the same HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax and Secure flags as the session cookie. Clearing it returns you to the default area.

localrent_radius — strictly necessary

How far from that place you want to look, so you are not asked again on every search. Set only when you choose a distance, and it holds nothing but that number — no coordinates, no address, nothing about you. Same 90-day expiry and the same HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax and Secure flags as the two above. Clearing it returns you to the default distance.

Theme preference — local storage, not a cookie

Whether you chose light or dark. Stored in your browser, never sent to us.

Both cookies are strictly necessary to deliver something you asked for — being signed in, and seeing what is near you — so no consent banner is required under the ePrivacy rules. Neither is used to track you across sites, and there is no third-party cookie of any kind.

The complete list of what this Service sends you — by email, and on your phone if you use the app — kept deliberately short:

• An email confirmation link — once when you create an account, and again whenever you ask for another from your account page. Confirming is optional: nothing on the Service requires it, and all it records is that mail sent to your address arrives.
• Password reset links — only when you (or someone claiming to be you) asks for one.
• A link to set your password — once, if you rented as a guest. Renting without signing up still creates you an account, because the owner has to be able to reach you about the handoff and you have to be able to follow the rental to the end. This is how you take control of it.
• Damage claim notices — only on rentals that carried an optional security hold, when a claim is filed against it or answered. The filing notice matters more than most email: your time to respond starts when it is sent, and an unanswered claim is collected.
• Demand alerts — only if you switch them on, and off by default. When somebody posts a request that matches one of your listings, we tell you how many of your listings matched and link to the board. The request’s text, the person who wrote it, and even your own listing’s title stay out of the email; everything is on the page behind the link. Every one of these carries a one-click way to stop them, and stopping them affects nothing else.
• Cart reminders — only if you switch them on, and off by default. If something sits in your cart for a day without you touching it, we send one email saying how many items are waiting and linking to the cart. It names no item, no price and no dates — adding to the cart again resets the clock, and we send at most one of these a month however long the cart sits. Every one carries a one-click way to stop them, and stopping them affects nothing else.
• Rental notices — when somebody requests one of your items, when an owner accepts or declines a request you made, and when a rental either side had agreed to is cancelled. These carry no item name, no other person’s name and no message text: they say that something needs your attention and link to the page where the details are. A basket that creates several requests for one owner produces one notice, not one each.
• Reminders about requests you have not answered — if somebody asks to rent one of your items and you have not answered after a day, we send one reminder, and one more after three days. Never a third. It says how long somebody has been waiting and links to the request; it names no item, no person and no message text. Unlike the two above this one is on by default, because it is about your own pending business rather than something we thought you might like — but it carries a one-click way to stop it, and stopping it leaves the first notice above untouched. One reminder covers every unanswered request you have, not one each. The same switch covers the reminder both parties get when a rental passes its end date with nobody marking it returned — at most two of those, days apart, likewise naming no item and no person.
• Replies on the Community board — when somebody replies to a thread you started, we email you a link. At most one per thread between your visits — opening the thread is what resets it — and the email carries no reply text, no username and no thread title; everything is on the page behind the link. On by default because it answers something you did (starting the thread); it carries a one-click way to stop it, and the board itself still shows you every reply either way.
• Notice that these policies are changing — sent to every account, before the change takes effect, and not optional. It names which documents change and the date, links to them, and says in one line what is changing; the wording is written by us and it carries nothing about you at all. This is the one message that is not caused by anything you did — it is caused by us, and it is the notice the Terms and this policy both promise to give before a change takes effect. It carries no unsubscribe, deliberately: a notice you had opted out of would be a notice we did not give. It is also shown on the policy pages themselves for the same reason.
• Notice that a rental is about to close itself — if a rental is marked returned and neither of you closes it out, we email both of you saying the exact amount it will settle for and the exact date, at least three days beforehand. If nobody acts by then, it closes and we send a receipt saying what moved. Neither message is optional: the warning is the only reason closing a rental automatically is something we are willing to do, and a warning you could switch off would leave you settled with no warning at all. Closing it out yourself, or opening a dispute, stops it.
• Notice that a listing of yours was removed — sent when a moderator removes one of your listings for a policy violation. The email itself names no listing and no reason; both are on your listings page, behind your sign-in, along with how to appeal. Like the policy notice above it is caused by us rather than by anything you did, and it carries no unsubscribe for the same reason: it is the notice, not a newsletter.
• Notice that your account was suspended — sent when a moderator suspends your account for a policy violation. The email names no reason; that, and how to appeal, are on your dashboard behind your sign-in. Rentals already agreed still settle, and the notice says so. No unsubscribe, for the same reason as the two above.
• Notifications on your phone — only if you use the Loctarim app, and only about your own rentals: that somebody requested one of your items, that a booking was made or confirmed, that an owner accepted, declined or cancelled, and that a message arrived. Each one is a fixed sentence saying what happened, with a link to the page that has the details. None of them carries the message, the other person’s name, or the item — a notification shows on a locked screen, which is the reason that rule is stricter here than anywhere else. Switch them off under Account → Your phone, or in your phone’s own settings; signing out of the app stops them too.

One message goes the other way: if you use report a problem, what you wrote is emailed to us, along with the page you were on and — only if you choose to give one — an address to reply to. Nothing is stored beyond that email.

There is no newsletter, no digest, and your address is never given to anyone else to mail. Exactly two of the messages above are marketing — the demand alert and the cart reminder. Neither is caused by anything you did, so both are off unless you switch them on, both carry a one-click unsubscribe, and you can turn either off from your account page at any time. We asked first; we did not assume. The reminder about an unanswered request is caused by an action — somebody asking to rent your item — which is why it is on by default; it can be switched off in the same place. The overdue-return reminder and the Community reply notice follow the same rule for the same reason.

Two things we send are neither marketing nor a response to something you did, and neither can be switched off. The notice that these policies are changing is one: nothing you did causes it, and its whole purpose is to reach you before something you agreed to changes. The warning that a rental is about to close itself is the other, and it is caused by the opposite of an action — by neither of you doing anything for days. Both exist so that something cannot happen to you silently, which is exactly why neither has an off switch.

Everything else carries no unsubscribe link, because there is no list to be on. Those messages are part of operating your account: the reset link only exists when requested, a claim notice is what stops a claim proceeding without you knowing, and a rental notice only exists because somebody is waiting on an answer from you. Most are caused by an action you or a counterparty took; the policy-change notice is caused by us changing something, and the close-out warning by a deadline passing with nobody acting. None of them repeats: each is sent once for the thing that caused it, rather than at intervals. They stop when your account closes.

Unsubscribing from either optional email will never affect the service notices above or your account.

If you believe any email from us was inappropriate, or you want to object to one, write to privacy@loctarim.com — replying to the email itself may not reach a monitored mailbox.

Your account and profile

Until you delete your account.

Listings

Until you delete them. Archived listings stay visible to you and drop out of search and the sitemap.

Listing drafts you have not published

A draft is private to you and is deleted 30 days after you last edit it, along with any photographs you added to it. Editing it starts that again. Publishing it, or deleting it yourself, ends it sooner.

Rental records, including the price breakdown and status history

Kept after account deletion where we need them for tax, accounting or dispute-defence reasons, in a form disconnected from your profile. Typically seven years.

Messages

For the life of the rental thread. Deleted with the rental record, subject to the retention above and to any safety investigation under way.

Reviews

Reviews you wrote about other people remain, attributed to a deleted account, because removing them would silently rewrite someone else's public history.

Community posts

Threads and replies you posted on the community board remain, attributed to a deleted account, because removing them would hollow out conversations other people are part of. You can delete any of your own posts at any time, before or instead of deleting your account.

Sessions and password-reset tokens

Until they expire or are revoked; reset tokens are single-use. Expired and revoked entries stop working immediately and are deleted about a week later.

Carts and requests you posted to the board

A cart is cleared after about six months without being touched; adding something resets that. A request you posted is deleted about six months after you close it, or about three months after the dates you asked for have passed. A request with no dates on it stays until you close it.

Server logs

Typically 30 days, longer where an incident is being investigated.

Reports and safety records

Kept while relevant to protecting other users, including after the reported account closes.

Two of these you can do yourself, right now, without asking us. On your account page you can download a complete copy of your data as a JSON file, and you can delete your account. Neither needs an email, an identity check or a waiting period — you are already signed in, which is the only proof of identity either one needs.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• tell you what we hold about you, and why;
• give you a copy in a portable, machine-readable format — download it here. The file names what it leaves out and why, which is chiefly other people's contact details and any report somebody filed about you;
• correct anything inaccurate — most of it you can edit yourself in your profile and listings;
• delete your account and the data tied to it, subject to the retention above — do it here. That page lists exactly what goes and what stays before you confirm;
• restrict or object to processing we base on legitimate interests;
• withdraw consent where we relied on it, without affecting what came before.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these — no degraded service, no different pricing.

Some limits are honest ones. We cannot delete your side of a rental another person is relying on, cannot remove reviews you wrote about other people, and cannot delete records we are legally required to keep. Where we refuse part of a request we will tell you which part and why.

If you are in the UK or the EU

You have the rights above under the UK GDPR and GDPR, plus the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. We would rather you came to us first.

If you are in California or another US state with a privacy law

You have the rights to know, delete, correct and obtain a portable copy, and to opt out of sale or sharing for cross-context behavioural advertising — we do neither, so there is nothing to opt out of. We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for purposes requiring a limitation right. You may use an authorised agent, and we may ask you both to verify the authority.

For a copy of your data or to delete your account, use your account page — it is immediate. For anything else, email privacy@loctarim.com from the address on your account, or write to us at the postal address above. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, which usually means confirming control of the account email.

• Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, never as recoverable text.
• Sessions are signed tokens tied to a server-side record, so signing out invalidates every copy rather than just the one in your browser.
• Access to another user's data is blocked at the query level — ownership is checked on every read and write, not only in the interface.
• Traffic is served over HTTPS, with a content security policy limiting what a page may load and execute.
• Sign-in attempts are rate-limited against both email address and IP.
• Uploads are validated, re-encoded, and stripped of metadata.

No system is perfectly secure. If we discover a breach affecting your personal data we will notify you and the relevant regulator where the law requires, and tell you what happened and what to do.

We are based in United States, and our service providers may process data in other countries. Where data moves out of the UK or the European Economic Area, we rely on an adequacy decision where one exists, and otherwise on the UK International Data Transfer Addendum or the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, together with additional safeguards where needed. Ask privacy@loctarim.com for details of the mechanism used for a particular provider.

The Service is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you believe a child has given us personal data, tell us at privacy@loctarim.com and we will delete the account and its data.

We will post any change here with a new effective date. If a change materially affects how we use data you have already given us, we will tell you by email or in the Service before it takes effect — not merely by editing this page.