What we keep, and for how long.

Who we are

Porchlight is operated by Gladwight LLC, a limited liability company registered in the United States. “We” and “us” below mean Gladwight LLC. Porchlight is a trading name of that company.

If you file trip plans

We store what you give us:

• Your account — your email address, the name you go by, your pronouns if you set them, and your interface preferences. There is no password: signing in is a link sent to your address.
• Your trip plans — where you said you were going, when you expected to be back, your time zone, and whatever else you chose to fill in: your vehicle and plate, your route, who was with you, what you were wearing.
• Photographs you attach — of yourself, of your vehicle, of a map. These exist so a dispatcher has something to work from.
• What we sent and what happened to it — every message we produced on your behalf, when it went, and whether it arrived. You are shown this, because a notice that silently failed is the thing this product exists to prevent.

We do not track your location. Position is recorded when you file, when you start, and when you choose to send an update — three moments you pick, not a stream.

If someone named you

You may be here because a friend put your name on a trip plan. What we hold about you is narrower, and some of it is yours to control directly.

• Your name and email address, as the person who named you entered them.
• Your phone number, only if you typed it yourself. No hiker can enter a number for you — there is no field for it anywhere in the product. We also store when you confirmed it, how, and the evidence of that confirmation, because consent that cannot be evidenced is not worth much to you.
• What you asked to hear about — which notices, on which channel, and whether you have paused or stopped.

You can see, change, or end all of it from the link in any message, or at porchlighted.com/manage. You do not need an account, and we will never ask you to make one.

How we remember that you said stop

When somebody replies STOP, we have to remember it forever — otherwise a re-invitation in two years quietly starts texting a person who already refused. But keeping a permanent list of the phone numbers of people who told us to go away would be a strange way to honor the request.

So we store a one-way hash of the number, not the number. That lets us check whether a number has opted out without our holding a readable list of them. The record survives the deletion of whatever account led to the message.

How long we keep things

• Photographs are deleted after a trip resolves. They exist for the window in which they could matter.
• A trip that never resolved never has its media purged. If somebody went out and there is no record of them coming back, deleting the photograph of their car is the last thing anyone should do. That is a deliberate exception and it has no expiry.
• Trip plans stay while your account does, so you can look back at what you filed.
• Opt-out records are permanent, as above.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account from your settings, and it removes your trips, your photographs, your plans, your message history and your account record.

Three things are true about that, and you should know them before you rely on it:

• We refuse while a trip is out. If you have a trip in flight, or one that went overdue and was never closed, deletion is blocked until it is resolved. Erasing a live trip would leave people expecting a notice that can no longer come.
• The people who agreed to watch are told. They said yes to something; they are entitled to know it ended.
• Their own records are not yours to delete. Someone who confirmed a phone number with us, or who told us to stop, has a relationship with us that does not belong to your account. Deleting yours removes you from their list; it does not erase them.

Who else sees any of this

Companies that do a specific job for us, and only for that job: sending email, sending text messages, hosting the application and its database, and processing subscription payments. They are bound to use it for that and nothing else.

Nobody else. We do not sell or rent personal information, we run no advertising, we do not share data with brokers, and we do not use your trips or your people to market anything.

We may disclose information if the law compels it. We will not do so quietly where we are permitted to tell you.

We never contact search and rescue, or any agency, on your behalf. Porchlight has no relationship with any authority and no standing with one. We show the people you named a number to call, and a human decides.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to see what we hold about you, correct it, take a copy of it, or have it deleted. You can do most of it yourself: hikers can export and delete from settings, and anyone who was named can download their own record from their manage page. Write to us for anything the interface won’t do.

Porchlight is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information.

Changes

If we change this in a way that matters, we will say so on this page and update the date at the top. We will not quietly widen what we do with your information and rely on you not re-reading.