Raiz

Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 6, 2026

1. Who this covers

This is the privacy policy for Raiz ("Raiz: Neighborhood Vibe"), the app and website at rhaeize.com, operated by People Ventures Inc., a British Columbia company. It applies wherever you use Raiz: in a browser, as an installed web app, or through the Raiz app on Google Play. It works together with our Terms of Service. Raiz was called Rise until September 2026. This is the same policy under the new name, and it covers accounts created before then.

2. What we collect

• Your email address, used to sign you in and to reach you about your account. Nothing else.
• The neighborhood you declare (for example, "Mount Pleasant"). We never collect your address.
• What you submit: your words and the short structured version Raiz records (a summary, a one-sentence statement, a topic, and the neighborhood it concerns). If you use the microphone, your device's own speech recognition turns speech into text; Raiz stores the text, not audio recordings.
• Your direct posts (heads ups, questions, recommendations, lost and found, things to share, and untagged posts), published exactly as you wrote them the moment you send them, and any photos you attach (up to four per post). Photos are stored with your other data in Canada and served at unguessable web addresses that never contain your account id.
• Your comments and reactions on direct posts and events, and your comments under neighbors' opinions: comments are published exactly as you wrote them and shown with your display name; a reaction is stored as a single yes beside a post or an event (on events: Exciting, Attending or Like), shown to neighbors as a count, and signed-in neighbors can open that count to see the display names and profile photos of who reacted. Neighbors you have blocked, or who have blocked you, never appear in those lists and never see you in them.
• Events you put up (what, when, a venue name and neighborhood, cost, host, an optional banner image, and an optional external link), and questions and answers you write on any event. Banner images follow the same storage rules as photos. An event's venue is whatever place name you type; Raiz never requires an exact address.
• Your pets, if you choose to add any: a name, a kind (dog, cat, bird and so on), an optional breed, an optional short description and up to four photos per pet. They are shown to signed-in neighbors who open your profile, and to nobody else. Pet photos are reviewed after you add them, the same way post photos are, and follow the same storage rules; a photo that breaks the ground rules is removed and you are told in the app. Removing a pet removes its photos, and deleting your account removes every pet with it.
• Your echoes on neighbors' statements, any reports you file about a statement, post, event, or event question, and any neighbors you block.
• A display name. It is required before your first opinion, Board listing, message, connection request, wave, event, or event question, and signed-in neighbors see it beside what you post. It is whatever you choose to be called; we never ask for your legal name.
• A short About, if you write one: up to 240 characters about yourself, in your own words, shown on your profile to signed-in neighbors who open it. It is checked once when you save it against the same short list of things that may not be published anywhere in Raiz, and saved exactly as you wrote it otherwise. You can change or clear it at any time, and it is deleted with your account.
• Your interests, if you pick any: up to ten from a fixed list (hiking, board games, and so on). They show on your profile to signed-in neighbors and travel with any connection request you send. You can change or clear them at any time.
• Connection requests and their notes: who you asked to connect with, the short note you wrote (up to 200 characters), when, and how they answered. A neighbor who ignores your request is never shown as having done so; the request simply lapses after 30 days. Requests you receive show you the sender's name, photo, badge, neighborhood, note and interests.
• Your direct messages: the chats between you and a neighbor you are connected with, and between you and the author of a live Board listing you wrote to (or who wrote to you). Messages are stored so both of you can read the conversation later. Raiz does not scan them for advertising and does not show them to anyone else, except when one of you reports the conversation.
• Waves: a one-tap hello between connected neighbors, stored as a line in that chat, with the time it was sent.
• Two settings on your profile: whether you take waves, and whether you are pausing new connection requests. Neighbors see only what follows from them (no Wave button, a "not taking requests right now" line), never the settings themselves.
• The Verified badge result. If you choose to verify that you live in your declared neighborhood, your device checks your location once and sends coordinates for a single yes-or-no check. The coordinates are used for that check and immediately discarded; they are never stored. What we keep is the result and when it happened. If a check fails, we record what kind of error occurred (never where you were) so we can fix problems.
• Notification settings and push addresses. If you turn notifications on, your browser or the Raiz iPhone app hands Raiz a delivery address for this device (a browser push subscription, or an Apple push token) and we store that address, a short device label such as "iPhone", and your per-category notification choices. A push message never carries names or the content of what happened; it says only that something is waiting for you in Raiz. Turning notifications off for a device from your profile deletes that device's address, and an address Apple or your browser reports as no longer valid is retired automatically.
• Standard technical logs needed to run and secure the service.

3. How we use it

• To run Raiz: sign you in, show your neighborhood its voices, count echoes, and close the loop.
• To show your neighborhood its voices: signed-in residents see your statements, direct posts (with any photos), events, and event questions and answers with your display name, never your email. Events are shown to residents of the event's neighborhood and the areas around it.
• To let neighbors reach you the way you allow: your profile shows signed-in neighbors your name, photo, badge, neighborhood, interests and your live Board listings. Only a neighbor you are connected with, or a neighbor writing about a Board listing you posted, can message you. Waves come only from connected neighbors, and only while you allow them. Requests to connect are capped so a popular neighbor is never flooded, and a request lapses on its own after 30 days if it is not answered.
• To deliver your messages and requests: a message, request, acceptance or wave creates a notification for the other neighbor. As with every notification, the push copy is generic and the details wait inside Raiz.
• To build the anonymized, aggregated neighborhood digests, statistics, and reports described in the Terms. Anything published outside the app, including public share pages, says "a neighbor in your area", never a name. You are never quoted in a way that identifies you unless you explicitly agree first.
• To send the notifications you asked for. In-app notifications live in your inbox inside Raiz. Browser push notifications travel through your browser's push service (Apple, Google, or Mozilla, depending on your device) as an encrypted payload the push service cannot read. iPhone app notifications travel through Apple's push service over an encrypted connection. In both cases the message text is generic by design: no names, no content, only that something is waiting for you.
• To review reported content and keep the ground rules.
• Nothing else. No ads, no sale of data, no tracking pixels, no profiles built for third parties.

4. AI processing

When you speak or type an opinion, your words are published exactly as you said them; an AI service (Anthropic's Claude) only classifies them (a topic, a sentiment and a one-line summary for the record) and never rewords them. Direct posts, comments on them and comments under opinions are checked by the same AI service against the ground rules as you post them: your words are never reworded and go up at once; the check refuses only the narrow list in the Terms and can flag a published post or comment for a human moderator to look at. Photos you attach (like profile photos) are reviewed after posting and removed if they break the ground rules. Events get the same check when you submit them and on every edit, and banner images are reviewed after they appear. When you ask a question on an event, the same AI service may generate the clearly-labeled automatic answer described in the Terms, using only the event's posted fields. None of it is used to train third-party AI models.

5. Who we share it with

• Other signed-in residents see your statements, direct posts (with any photo), comments, events, and event questions and answers with your display name, as described above. Reactions appear as counts that signed-in neighbors can open to see who reacted, by display name.
• The public record: aggregates and anonymized statements may appear in digests and reports for the public, community organizations, journalists, and decision makers.
• Service providers that run Raiz for us: Supabase (database and sign-in, hosted in central Canada), Cloudflare (serving the site), Resend (sending sign-in emails), and Anthropic (the AI processing above). They process data only to provide their service to us.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising.
• We may disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect Raiz and its residents from fraud or abuse.

6. Where it lives and how long

Your data is stored on Canadian servers (currently in central Canada). We keep it while your account is active. Anonymized statements and aggregates may persist in published reports, which no longer identify you.

7. Your rights and choices

Under British Columbia's Personal Information Protection Act you can ask what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or delete your account and everything in it.

Delete your account yourself, any time. In the app, open your profile (the person icon at the top), choose Delete my account, and type the confirmation phrase. The deletion is immediate and permanent: it removes your profile, your photo, your submissions and statements together with the echoes neighbors gave them, your direct posts and their photos, your comments and reactions, your events and their banners, your event questions and answers, your pets and their photos, your Board listings, your connections and requests, your messages and waves, your interests, your echoes, and your reports. Your display name disappears everywhere at the same moment, because it is looked up live wherever it is shown. A neighbor you chatted with keeps their own side of a conversation; your messages in it are gone. Anonymized aggregates that never identified you (for example, neighborhood statistics in published digests) may persist.

Prefer email, or no longer able to sign in? Write to hello@rhaeize.com from any address and we will handle the deletion for you.

You can also delete any of your own direct posts yourself, any time, from Posts on your profile, delete your own comments and take back reactions right where they are, edit, cancel, or remove your own events from the events page, and edit or remove any of your pets from your profile.

Your connections are your choice, too. You can clear your interests from your profile at any time, withdraw a request you sent, ignore a request you received (the sender is not told), remove a connection from that neighbor's profile (again, they are not told), turn waves off, or pause new requests, all from your profile and its settings. Blocking a neighbor, from their profile or from anything they posted, ends any connection between you and stops messages both ways. Blocks are yours to undo from Settings.

8. Children

Raiz is not for people under 16, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.

9. Security

Data moves over encrypted connections, access is restricted account by account at the database level, and secrets are kept out of the app you run.

10. Changes and contact

If we change this policy in a significant way, we will tell you in the app before the change takes effect. Questions or requests: hello@rhaeize.com, or write to People Ventures Inc., 202-19141 Ford Road, Pitt Meadows, BC V3Y 2P8, Canada.