Sonar Connections is a proximity networking app: it helps you discover and connect with people at the same convention, campus, or venue. Proximity only works with location, and networking only works with a profile, so we are direct about exactly what we collect, why, and how you delete it. Two commitments up front:
We do not sell your data. We show no ads. There are no advertising SDKs in the app, no data brokers, and no third-party marketing use of your information, ever.
| Data | What it is & why |
|---|---|
| Phone number | Used to create and sign in to your account (Firebase phone authentication with a one-time SMS code). It is your account identity; it is never shown to other users unless you explicitly share it in a conversation. |
| Display name | The name you enter for your profile. Shown to people you are discoverable to. Screened automatically against an impersonation/profanity blocklist. |
| Photos | Photos you take or upload for your profile, and images you send in chats. Both are screened automatically (Google Cloud Vision) before anyone else can see them: a profile photo must show one clearly identifiable person, namely you (incidental faces in the background are fine, but group shots and photos without a face are rejected), and any image, whether profile or chat, detected as sexually explicit or violent is blocked and deleted rather than delivered. The screening is automated and takes under a second; no human at Sonar reviews your photos, and images are not retained for review. See Face data below for exactly what this check does and does not do. |
| Precise location | Your GPS position while you are using the app, to power the map, venue check-ins, booth discovery, and rendezvous. We do not collect location in the background. See Section 4 for exactly how it is protected. |
| Messages | Messages and images you send in Sonar chats, stored so your conversations sync across sessions. Deleted with your account. |
| LinkedIn profile (optional) | Only if you choose to link LinkedIn for a verification badge: your LinkedIn name, email address, profile photo, and verification status. The LinkedIn access token is used once, server-side, and is never stored. You can skip this entirely. |
| Push notification token | A device token (Expo push token) so we can deliver notifications like connection requests and messages. Stored server-side, removed when your account is deleted. |
| Voice input (optional) | If you use voice commands with DRW (our in-app assistant), speech is transcribed on your device whenever possible. If on-device transcription is unavailable, a short audio clip (max 60 seconds) is sent to Google's Gemini service for transcription and is not retained as audio. The resulting text command is handled per the DRW retention rule below. |
| DRW commands | The text of commands you give the DRW assistant, stored to improve the assistant. Automatically deleted after 60 days. Commands containing sensitive values (e.g. venue passwords) have those values redacted before storage. |
| App download page | When you open our app-download page at /get we write one row that counts the visit: the page you came from (the referring address), your browser's user agent string, whether the device looks like iOS, Android or neither, any invite tag carried in the link you followed (?from= or ?ref=), and the time. It is written for every visitor, so we can count which links actually work. No account, profile or contact detail is attached to it, and nothing else about the visit is recorded. |
| Usage & diagnostics | Anonymized-by-design telemetry: action names (e.g. profile_save), error codes, durations, app version, platform, and screen route. An automated redactor strips phone-number patterns, GPS coordinates, and long text before anything is written. It never contains names, message bodies, photos, or exact locations. Crash reports (via Sentry) are scrubbed the same way; session screen-recording is disabled. |
Sonar does not collect, store, or share face data, and never performs facial recognition. The app itself contains no face-detection code. When you upload a profile photo, our server runs a one-time automated moderation check using Google Cloud Vision, which transiently detects whether a face is present and returns technical signals about the photo (a face bounding box, a detection-confidence score, head-pose angle, and lighting/blur estimates). These signals are used once, in server memory, to produce a simple approve/reject decision and are then immediately discarded. They are never written to any database or file, never used to identify anyone, never used to create a biometric template or "faceprint," and never shared with any party other than Google Cloud Vision acting as our processor for the check itself. Face data retention is therefore zero: it exists only for the seconds the check takes to run. The only thing we keep is the approve/reject result. Your photo itself is ordinary account data, stored and deleted as described in Section 6 and Section 7.
We do not use your data for advertising, profiling for third parties, or any purpose unrelated to running Sonar.
Your data is stored on Google Firebase (Google Cloud Platform) in the United States. All data is encrypted in transit (TLS/HTTPS). Stored data is encrypted at rest by Google Cloud by default. Access to production data is restricted to the founding team and protected server code. Client devices can never read other users' private data (including anyone's location) directly; access is mediated by security rules and server functions.
Only service providers who process data on our behalf to run the app, never buyers, brokers, or advertisers:
Other users see what you make visible: your display name, profile photo, profile fields, coarse location cell while discoverable, and messages you send them. We may disclose data in a merger/acquisition (in which case this policy still binds the successor).
Legal requests. We disclose personal data only when legally required by a valid legal process, such as a subpoena or court order, served on Sonar Connections Inc. We review each request for validity and scope, disclose only the minimum required, and notify the affected person unless the law prohibits us from doing so.
You can delete your account entirely in the app: open Profile → Settings → DELETE ACCOUNT, then confirm. Deletion runs server-side and removes:
This works immediately (no recent sign-in required) and cannot be undone. If you cannot access the app, email founders@sonarconnections.com from a way we can verify and we will run the same deletion for you. You may also ask us for a copy of your data or a correction at the same address.
Separately from the one-time SMS code used to sign you in, Sonar Connections runs an optional text messaging program called Sonar Connections event messages, sent by Sonar Connections Inc. You join it only by ticking a checkbox on an event's seat page, on the same screen where you enter your phone number. That box is unchecked by default, and taking a seat never requires it.
If you tick it you receive event and meeting notices for events you seated yourself at, and replies to your own requests. Message frequency varies by event. Msg & data rates may apply. Reply STOP to cancel, HELP for help.
Mobile opt-in information is not shared with third parties for their marketing purposes.
Your consent is stored on the same server-only record as your phone number, which no other user and no client device can read, alongside the date you gave it and a version tag for the wording you were shown. It is deleted with your account. Full program terms are on the SMS Messaging Terms page.
Separately from the app, Sonar Connections runs a connector: a mostly read-only server that AI assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT can call to answer questions about our live event catalog, the businesses we serve, and public city open data. You reach it through your assistant rather than through this website, and every answer it returns names the source its facts came from. There are two doors: a public one that takes no credential and serves read-only tools, and a private one that requires a credential we issue.
For each tool call we write one diagnostic row. It holds the name of the tool that was called (for example events_list), the id of the event or business the call was about, the time, whether it succeeded, a short error or reason code, how many milliseconds it took, the label of the credential that was used (or none on the public door), and which of the two doors served it.
We do not receive your conversation. The words you type to your assistant are not sent to us and are never written to these rows: a tool argument can carry anything an end user said, so the query text and any free text in it are deliberately kept out. We do not receive your name or your account with the assistant. We do not store the calling computer's network address either: an address is used in memory only, to rate limit abuse, and on the public door it is hashed before it is used even for that.
Our hosting platform (Google Cloud) writes its own request log for every call it serves, separately from ours and with contents we do not control. That log holds the request path, the time, the status and the calling network address. Google keeps it for 30 days under this project's default log retention, and only the people who administer the project can read it.
If you hold your own connector credential (a personal 30 day credential you can be issued), then the rows for actions you take through it also carry your Sonar account id, because an action that changes something has an actor. Without such a credential the connector has no notion of a person at all: a caller is anonymous on the public door, a shared demo credential on the private one, or an order confirmation code that identifies one order and nothing else.
The booking and ordering tools accept a first name and nothing else. There is no field for a surname, a phone number, an email address or a card, an optional preparation note is limited to a short line and is scrubbed of contact details on our server, and the connector never asks for payment card details and has nowhere to put them.
Some assistants can draw a small interactive card (a menu, an order, a floorplan, a shop). A card can send back only a closed vocabulary: which of the four cards it is, a marker from a fixed list (for example mounted, floor_drawn, place_order_ok or pay_tap), a code from a fixed list, its display mode, and integers such as counts, durations, sizes and screen insets. A field the vocabulary does not know is refused outright, so a card cannot report a name, a confirmation code, an order id, a URL or any free text. The session key on those rows is a random id the card makes when it opens and it dies with the card: it is not your account, not your device, and is not derived from anything about you.
The diagnostic rows above live in one telemetry table that a scheduled job sweeps every day at 3:00 AM Pacific, deleting everything older than 7 days. Orders and appointments are business records rather than telemetry and are not on that sweep: an unpaid hold on a pickup window expires after ten minutes and is stamped expired, but a placed order or a confirmed appointment stays in that business's book. It is kept for as long as the business needs its order book, and nothing deletes it automatically today. You can ask us to delete yours through the contact at the end of this policy and we will remove it from our own book; the copy in the business's own Square account is under that business's control.
The diagnostic rows are server side only: our security rules let no client read them at all, including the app. A business sees the orders and appointments made at that business, in its own book and in its own Square dashboard. We also keep an append-only tally of what the connector did for each business, so a business can be shown how many bookings or orders it drove; those rows carry the business, the action, a status, a coarse area of at most about five kilometres (never a coordinate), a value in cents and the confirmation code, and they carry no customer fields at all, with any key that looks like a name refused by the writer. Event organizers see aggregate figures about their own event, such as visits and taps by day and by booth, as counts. They never see individual rows, a name or an account id. Those aggregates can include connector calls that named their event. Reports to organizations we serve. We may share aggregated usage statistics with the organizations whose information our connector serves, such as event organizers, participating businesses, and public agencies like the City of Long Beach. These reports contain counts only (for example, how many questions were asked about a topic in a month). They never include names, phone numbers, account identifiers, message or question text, or precise location, and any figure that would describe fewer than five people is withheld. We prepare these reports in line with the developer policies of the AI assistant platforms our connector runs on, and we will not share anything that would identify a person. None of this is sold, and none of it is used for advertising.
You can disconnect the connector in your assistant at any time. The connector keeps nothing that could be used to contact you: no phone number, no email address and no push token ever comes through this door. If you want an order or an appointment removed, email us at the address in Section 12; because we never take contact details here, the confirmation code you were given is the only way we can find your record.
Finally, the assistant is not ours. Claude, ChatGPT and any other assistant you use have their own privacy policies, and those govern the conversation itself, including everything you type before the assistant decides to call us.
Sonar Connections is for adults: you must be 18 or older to use it. The app is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 18. If you believe a minor is using Sonar, contact us and we will delete the account.
If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will update the "Last Updated" date above and notify you in the app before the change takes effect. Continued use after notice means you accept the updated policy.
Sonar Connections
Email: founders@sonarconnections.com
Web: sonarconnections.com