Privacy Policy

BarHookups is operated by Realty Investment Solutions, LLC, a Texas limited liability company doing business as BarHookups. This policy explains what we collect, why, and the choices you have.

We collect the following.

• Account details — your email address, an optional display name, and your password. Your password is never stored in readable form: it is kept only as a one-way hash, and we cannot recover it.
• Verification — the one-time code we email you, and whether your email address is verified.
• Age and consent records — your confirmation that you are at least 21, the date you gave it, and the versions of these documents you accepted.
• Your activity — bars you save, reviews you write (rating, text, display name and date), venue recommendations, venue claims, venue and event submissions, and reports you file.
• Technical data — your IP address and basic request information, processed by our hosting provider to deliver and protect the service.
• Location — only when you use Near Me, and only as described below.

To create and secure your account, verify your email address, show your saved bars and reviews, publish your reviews and recommendations, review venue claims and submissions, moderate content, respond to reports, prevent abuse, and meet our legal obligations.

We do not use your information for advertising, and we do not sell it.

Near Me uses your device's location to sort venues by distance. While it is in use the coordinates are held only in memory. They are never written into the page address, your browser history, cookies, or local or session storage, they are never saved onto any record, and they are discarded when you leave the feature, close the session or sign out.

Your location is never published and is not used for anything else. You can decline the browser's location request and still browse by city.

BarHookups application code does not intentionally set cookies. We use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in — the sign-in token — and clearing it signs you out. Our hosting and authentication providers may set cookies or use other storage as part of delivering and securing the service; we have not independently verified what those providers set, and this policy does not claim to describe it. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking technologies ourselves.

Reviews are public. They appear under your account display name; if your account has no display name, or the name resembles an email address, we show "BarHookups Member". Your sign-in email address is never shown on a review or anywhere else public.

Internally, a review is linked to the account that posted it, so we can enforce one review per member per venue and handle moderation. That link is not published.

Venue listings are public and, where they come from OpenStreetMap, carry the required attribution.

If the text of a review appears to contain personal information, we hide the review from public display while we review it by hand. It stops counting toward the venue's rating while it is hidden.

Reports you file are recorded with the account that filed them and reviewed by our team. When we hide a review it stops counting toward the venue's rating.

BarHookups Connect is not available in the service: it is disabled, so no member can create a profile, check in, message, or send a meeting request, and no Connect information is collected from members.

Connect records do exist in our own private test environment — created by us and by automated testing using simulated identities, not real members — and are used only to test and review the feature. They are not part of the public service and are never shown to members.

If we introduce Connect, we will publish a separate privacy notice before it is switched on. Its settings will be private by default and participation will be optional.

The singles check-in feature is not active, and no check-in information is collected from members.

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only with providers who help us run the service: our hosting provider, which serves the app and processes request data including your IP address; our email provider, which delivers verification and password-reset messages; and our map provider. A request for a map image goes from your browser directly to the map provider — currently CARTO, with OpenStreetMap's own tile service as a fallback — which receives your IP address and the area you are viewing.

We may also share information where the law requires it. Content you post publicly, such as a review, is visible to everyone. If we enable an additional venue-data provider, this policy will name it before it is used.

We use reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect your information, including one-way hashing of passwords and verification of email addresses. No method of storage or transmission is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

We keep your account information while your account is open, and for as long as we need it for the purposes described above. We do not keep personal information longer than we need it, and we do not operate an automated deletion schedule.

How long we keep a particular record depends on what it is and why we hold it. Account details are kept while the account exists. Reports and moderation records are kept while they are needed to keep the service safe and to deal with repeat abuse. Where the law requires us to keep something — for tax, accounting or a legal claim — we keep it for the period the law requires, and then delete it.

When you ask us to delete your account from inside the app, we record the request as a task in our own systems, showing what was cleared and when, so we can demonstrate that we handled it. We keep that record after the account is removed. It holds no email address: we need the address only to find your account while your request is open, and we clear it from the record as soon as your account has been removed. A request made by email does not create one of these records; our team handles it by hand.

You can delete your account from inside the app, in Profile, by choosing Delete my account. You are shown what happens and asked to confirm before anything is removed. If you cannot sign in, you can ask us to delete it by writing to contactus@barhookups.com.

Deletion is a request that our team completes, so it is not instant. When you confirm, we clear the data that belongs to your account: your saved bars, your account preferences, your recommendations, your pending and rejected owner claims, your check-ins, and any BarHookups Connect records you have. BarHookups Connect is not open to members yet, so a member cannot create Connect records today; if you took part in our testing, this covers your Connect profile, check-ins, meeting requests, messages, meeting codes and block list. We also remove the link between you and any venue you had claimed. The account itself, including your sign-in details, is removed when the request is processed, and we confirm when it has been dealt with.

Reviews you have posted are public content, and they are anonymized rather than deleted: your name and the link to your account are removed, the review is shown as written by a member, and the rating you gave is kept so that a venue's score does not change when a member leaves. If the text of a review appears to contain personal information that we cannot remove without rewriting your words, we hide that review from public display, review it by hand, and it stops counting toward the venue's rating. We then keep the anonymized text or remove the review.

We keep a small amount of information where we must, and wherever a retained record still serves its purpose without the parts that identify you, we remove those parts rather than keeping them. Some of what we hold outlives an account, each for a reason we state here. This is not an exhaustive list: an uploaded file, for example, can remain in platform storage pending separate deletion, and the rest of this section sets out what else is kept and why:

Records the law requires us to keep.

An approved owner claim, which is our record of how a venue's ownership was verified. We keep the record — which venue, when, and that it was approved — and we remove the claimant's name, email address and account link from it. Pending and rejected claims are deleted with the rest of your data.

A report you filed that is still open, which keeps your account identifier so that we can ask you about what you reported. Once the report is resolved, that identifier is removed and the record is kept without it.

The record of your deletion request itself, where you started the request in the app, so we can show that we handled it. It keeps an internal account reference, the dates, a count of what was cleared and which of our team handled it — and no email address, because we clear that as soon as your account has been removed. A request made by email creates no such record: our team handles it by hand.

Where a legal or safety matter applies, we tell you that your request is on hold rather than deleting the records it depends on.

If you uploaded a profile photo, it is stored privately and is never shown on a public page. No member can upload one today: profile photos belong to BarHookups Connect, which is not open to members, so the only photos we hold come from our own testing with simulated accounts. If you ever upload one and later delete your account, we remove the reference to it, but we cannot always delete the stored file ourselves: the platform we build on does not provide a documented way for an app to delete a file, so that removal may need to be carried out with the platform's help. Write to us if you need a photo file erased and it has not been.

While your request is outstanding, member features are switched off for the account, and you keep access to your request status and to support. Deleting an account cannot be undone.

You can update your display name and your email preferences in your account at any time. You can ask us for a copy of the information we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it, by writing to contactus@barhookups.com.

Depending on where you live you may have further rights, and we will honour those the law gives you.

Promotional email is opt-in only. The box is unchecked by default when you create your account, we record your answer explicitly — an unticked box records a refusal, never a subscription — and you can change it at any time in your account settings.

We send no promotional email to anyone who has not opted in.

BarHookups is for adults aged 21 and over. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 21. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 21, we will close it and delete it.

When we change this policy we publish a new version, and the acceptance recorded on your account no longer matches, so you are asked to accept the new version the next time you visit.

Questions, requests or complaints can be sent to contactus@barhookups.com.

Our mailing address is not published on this page. It is available on request for formal legal notices.