Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

CampfireChat ("CampfireChat," "we," "us," or "our") operates CampfireChat.io and the CampfireChat mobile application (together, the "Platform"). The Platform provides private, closed-group communication tools for vetted youth-serving organizations (each a "Campground"), such as scout troops, youth sports teams, clubs, and camps.

All servers and data storage are located in the United States.

Tidewater Consulting Group of Virginia LLC 1820 Templeton Lane, Virginia Beach, VA 23454 Privacy Contact: admin@campfirechat.io

2. Our Core Privacy Commitment

CampfireChat is a closed platform. There is no public profile, no public feed, and no ability for outsiders to discover or contact members. Every person on the Platform has been specifically invited by a vetted organization leader, with parental consent required for all youth participants.

3. How the Platform Works

CampfireChat uses a three-tier model:

There is no self-registration path. No one — adult or youth — can join a Campground without an explicit invitation from an authorized organizer.

4. Information We Collect

4.1 Organizers and Adult Leaders

• First and last name (used as account identifier)
• Organization name and role
• Verification credentials provided during vetting (e.g., an organizational membership number) — used solely for identity verification and not shared
• Account credentials (user name and securely hashed password)
• Messages and files posted within the Campground

4.2 Youth Participants

We intentionally collect the minimum information necessary:

• First name and last name (used as account identifier)
• The parent's or guardian's email address (used for the invitation and consent process)
• Account credentials (user name and securely hashed password)
• A parent or guardian's confirmation that the youth meets our minimum age (see section 5.2)
• Messages and files posted within the Campground

We do not collect a date of birth or an age from anyone. We also do not collect home address, phone number, school, or any other personally identifying information about youth participants beyond what is listed above.

What we keep instead of an age is a single yes: on the screen where a parent or guardian accepts the invitation on their child's behalf, they confirm the youth is old enough. We record that the confirmation was given, and nothing more. This is deliberate — the rules we have to follow turn on whether a member is old enough, so that is the only thing we ask and the only thing we hold. A birth date would be more information about a child than the question requires.

4.3 Communications Content

Messages, announcements, and files shared within a Campground are stored to provide the communication service. This content is never public, and no member of one Campground can see another Campground's content.

Content is filtered, and every member can report and block. Chat messages, posts, and calendar events are checked against a blocked-term filter before the Platform accepts them. That filter has two tiers: a platform list we maintain, which an organization's own administrators cannot disable or edit, and an additional list each organization may add to on top of it. No role bypasses the filter — an administrator's message is checked on exactly the same path as a youth's.

Reporting. Any member can report any message, post, photo, or file from that item's own menu. This includes read-only members and parents viewing their child's Campground. Reports go to the organization's administrators for review, and they are never deleted — a report keeps its own snapshot of the reported content, so it survives that content being taken down. You can see the status and outcome of everything you have reported.

A report never dead-ends at your organization. Because the person a report concerns may be the organization's own administrator, the member who filed it — or, when that member is a youth, their parent or guardian — can escalate it past those administrators to CampfireChat staff. A report that was dismissed can be escalated straight away; a report nobody has reviewed can be escalated after 24 hours. Escalated reports go to a queue an organization's administrators cannot reach, and we can remove content over an administrator's objection.

Blocking. Any member — including a youth member, with no adult approval and no waiting — can block any other member from the message menu or the member directory. Once blocked, that member's chat messages, their attachments and reactions, their photos, and their files are hidden from you throughout the Platform, and they generate no push notifications to your device. Administrators are not exempt from being blocked. You can lift a block at any time from your settings.

Two limits on blocking, both deliberate, both about keeping young people safe. First, blocking governs what you see; it never reduces what the adults responsible for you can see. A youth who blocks a leader stops seeing that leader, but everything the youth posts remains visible to their organization's administrators and to their own parent or guardian, exactly as before. Blocking therefore cannot be used by a young person to slip out of adult oversight, and — just as importantly — cannot be used by an adult to hide their own conduct from an organization. Second, a youth's parent or guardian can see, read-only, whom their child has blocked and what their child has reported; a guardian cannot lift the block (that stays the child's decision) and cannot decide the report (that stays with the organization's administrators). We tell young people both of these things in the block and report dialogs themselves, before they act, rather than letting them find out afterward.

Reports of objectionable content or behavior can also always be sent directly to admin@campfirechat.io. Our Terms of Use set out what is never permitted on the Platform and the consequences for posting it.

CampfireChat platform staff hold administrative access to every Campground. That access exists so we can operate and repair the service, investigate safety reports and moderation cases escalated to us, respond to support requests, and comply with the law. We do not read Campground content for any other purpose, and we never use it for advertising, analytics, or any commercial purpose. We are telling you this plainly because a promise of privacy that quietly excludes the people running the service is not a promise worth much.

4.4 Technical and Operational Data

Our servers keep limited technical records of the requests they receive — from the website, the web app, and the mobile app alike. These are: IP addresses (used for security, fraud prevention, and abuse detection); browser or app version and operating system; and session timestamps. These records are written by our own servers as an ordinary part of answering a request. They are not gathered by analytics or tracking software running on your device, and no third party receives them.

The mobile app contains no analytics software. No analytics library of any kind — not a third party's, and not our own — and no crash-reporting or performance-monitoring software. This is enforced when the app is built: the analytics tag used on the web is stripped out of the app, by a build step that fails outright if any reference to it survives. It cannot reappear by accident in a later release.

On the website and the web app we record anonymized usage events using an open-source analytics package we host ourselves at analytics.campfirechat.io. This is software we run, not a service we send data to — the events go to a server we operate, on our own domain, and nothing reaches any other company. What we record is page and screen views, plus a small number of events. No message content, photo, or file is ever included. These events use no cookies and carry no advertising identifiers, are never sent to a third-party analytics company or advertising network, and are never used to build behavioral profiles or for advertising.

5. Children's Privacy & Parental Consent

5.1 Consent Process

When an organizer invites a youth participant, the invitation is sent exclusively to the email address of the youth's parent or guardian — not to the youth directly. The parent or guardian must affirmatively accept the invitation and agree to our Terms of Use before the youth receives any access to the Platform. The Terms are shown in full on that screen, with this Privacy Policy linked from it.

We record that acceptance: the date and time, the version of the Terms that was shown, and the fact that it was given by a parent or guardian on the youth's behalf. Without it the invitation is refused outright and no accessible account is created.

5.2 Minimum Age

The Platform is designed for youth participants aged 10 years and older. We do not knowingly enroll children under age 10. If we become aware that a participant under age 10 has been added, we will remove their account and notify the Campground organizer.

The parent or guardian confirms it, and the account does not open without that. On the screen where they accept the invitation on their child's behalf, they must affirmatively confirm the youth is 10 or older. Refuse, or skip it, and the account is never activated — no password is set and there is nothing to log in to. It is a gate on the account rather than a note attached to one.

We record that the confirmation was given, and we do not ask for a date of birth or an age from anyone, so we hold no record of how old any member is. That is the whole design: the question is whether a young person is old enough, and it is answered by the adult who already knows the answer — the parent accepting on their child's behalf, alongside the organizer who invited them.

5.3 Parental Access and Deletion

Parents and guardians can review and correct their child's profile at any time, and can delete their child's account themselves, from My Family in the app. Deletion happens immediately — it is not a request that waits in a queue — and it cannot be undone. A youth cannot delete their own account; only a parent or guardian can. A parent can also suspend a child's account without deleting it.

Deleting an account erases the child's identity — their login, contact details, and name — permanently. It does not remove the messages and photos they posted; those stay in the Campground's history, relabelled so they are no longer attributed to the child. Section 12.2 explains why. For anything else, contact us at admin@campfirechat.io and we will respond within 30 days.

5.4 COPPA Compliance

We comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). A youth account cannot come into existence unless a parent or guardian first receives the invitation at their own email address and affirmatively accepts it, so parental consent is obtained and recorded before we collect anything from a child. Parents keep the right to review their child's information and to delete the account themselves at any time, as described in section 5.3.

6. Youth Safety Principles

CampfireChat is designed around established youth protection philosophies used by youth-serving organizations nationwide. These principles are not just guidelines — they are built into the architecture of the Platform. Section 4.3 describes the content filtering, reporting, and blocking tools that work alongside them.

Two-Deep Leadership: Every conversation a youth participant can reach is visible to at least two independent adults — an administrator of the Campground, and the youth's own parent or guardian. Administrators cannot be registered as guardians, so those are always two different people. Private one-on-one messaging between an adult and a youth is not possible on the Platform.

No One-on-One Communication: The Platform does not allow private direct messages between individual users. All communication occurs in group channels visible to the organization's leadership.

No Private Groups: Sub-groups or channels cannot be created in a way that excludes adult oversight. Every communication space within a Campground is visible to all admin members.

6.1 Organizational Visibility

Any admin or leader member of a Campground can see any message or file posted within that Campground if it is accessible to youth participants. This transparency is intentional and is a core safety feature — there are no hidden conversations within a Campground.

Any conversation or file that is accessible to youth participants is also accessible to all admins and adult leaders. This preserves the Scouting America youth protection policies and ensures that leaders can monitor youth-facing communication for safety and compliance.

Conversations that include only adults, or that are limited to a subset of adults, are permitted. This allows adult leaders to discuss or document sensitive topics without exposing those conversations to youth or other adult leaders who are not part of that specific discussion.

6.2 Organizer Vetting

CampfireChat manually vets every Campground owner before granting access to the Platform. This includes verification of organizational credentials (such as an organizational membership credential). We do not permit self-service Campground creation without completing this verification step.

7. Cookies & Authentication

We use strictly functional cookies only. These are necessary to authenticate users and operate the Platform securely. No advertising, tracking, or analytics cookies are used.

We do not use third-party cookies. No external ad networks, analytics platforms, or social media trackers have any presence on CampfireChat.io.

8. Mobile Application

The CampfireChat app is available on iOS and Android. It communicates exclusively with our own servers. The app contains no advertising SDKs, no analytics or behavioral-tracking libraries, and no data-sharing libraries of any kind — including our own. The anonymized usage events described in section 4.4 are collected on the web only, never in the app.

The only external communication the app performs beyond our servers is with Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and Google Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) to deliver push notifications, if you choose to grant that permission. Section 11 sets out exactly what those two services receive.

Some things you do in the app cause our server to send an email. Requesting a password reset, requesting a username reminder, and inviting a new member all work this way: the app tells our server what you asked for, and the server sends the message through our email provider (section 11). The app never contacts the email provider itself, and it does not read your inbox or your address book. For a youth member these emails go to their parent or guardian rather than to the youth — unless a guardian has specifically enabled self-service password recovery for that child.

8.1 Device Permissions

Every permission below is optional, and each is requested only at the moment you first use the feature that needs it.

We do not request access to your contacts, your location, your calendar, or your health data. We never read your photo library in bulk — only the specific items you pick are uploaded.

9. Payments & Billing

CampfireChat is currently offered at no charge. No payment information is collected at this time.

If we introduce paid plans in the future, this policy will be updated before any payment processing begins. At that time, we intend to use a third-party payment processor, meaning payment card data will be entered directly with the processor and will never be stored on our servers. We will notify existing users before implementing any billing.

10. How We Use Information

We use the information we collect solely to:

• Operate, secure, and improve the Platform
• Authenticate users and maintain secure sessions
• Deliver messages and files within a Campground
• Send push notifications (if enabled by the user)
• Send transactional emails — account invitations, consent confirmations, and system notices — via our email provider
• Analyze anonymized web usage patterns, processed on our own infrastructure, to find problems and improve the Platform experience
• Record that a parent or guardian confirmed their child meets our minimum age
• Filter, review, and act on reported content, and operate the blocking and escalation tools described in section 4.3
• Investigate and respond to safety, abuse, or legal matters
• Comply with applicable law

We do not use data for advertising, marketing, or automated profiling. Usage analytics are processed entirely on infrastructure we control and are never shared with third-party analytics or advertising services.

11. Sharing & Third Parties

We do not sell, rent, or trade any personal information. We share limited data only with the following service providers, who are contractually prohibited from using your data for any purpose other than providing services to CampfireChat:

No data is shared with advertising networks, data brokers, analytics companies, or any third party for commercial purposes.

11.1 Legal Requirements

We may disclose information if required by valid legal process (such as a court order or subpoena) or to protect the immediate safety of our users or the public. We will notify affected users when legally permitted to do so.

11.2 Business Transfers

In the event of a merger, acquisition, or sale of substantially all assets, user data may be transferred. We will provide notice before any such transfer and will require the receiving party to honor commitments at least as protective as this policy. Youth data will be afforded particular care in any such event.

12. Data Retention & Anonymization

12.1 Active Members

While a member has an active account in a Campground, we retain their account information and the content they have posted, for as long as that account stays active. This is what lets them log in, and what lets their organization keep a usable record of its own communications.

12.2 When a Member Leaves or Is Removed

A member's access ends the moment they leave or are removed from a Campground. They can no longer sign in, and they can no longer see or post anything.

For a youth participant, the account is then anonymized automatically after 90 days. This happens on a timer, not on request: no child, parent, guardian, or organizer has to ask for it, and there is nothing to remember to do. Anonymizing an account permanently erases the identity attached to it — login and credentials, email address, display name, username, and profile — and relabels every historical reference to that account, including @-mentions, as an anonymous placeholder. It cannot be undone.

Why 90 days and not immediately. Departures are reversed more often than you might expect: a young person who steps away for a season comes back, a member is removed by mistake, an organizer rebuilds a roster. During those 90 days the account can be reinstated intact. The window also means that if a safety report or a dispute involving that member is still open, it can be resolved while the identity is still attached to the conduct — which is exactly when it matters. Once the 90 days are up, neither of those needs outweighs not holding a child's information any longer, so it goes.

Adult accounts work differently, and we would rather say so than leave you to discover it. When an adult leader or member leaves, their access ends the same way, but there is no automatic timer on their account. A Campground is run by adults, and the record of which adults led it, ran which activities, and made which decisions is what the organization relies on for annual planning, for handing over to next year's leaders, and for reviewing any concern raised after the fact. An adult also has something a youth does not: they can delete their own account outright, at any moment, without asking anyone. So the automatic sweep goes where the obligation and the missing self-service both are — to young people.

Nobody has to wait for the 90 days. An adult member can delete their own account immediately from Profile → Delete Account, and a parent or guardian can delete their child's immediately from My Family. Deletion by either route anonymizes the account right away, on the same terms described above, rather than starting or waiting out the clock. Section 5.3 covers the parent's route, and section 13 covers your rights generally.

What stays. Anonymizing an account does not delete the messages and photos that member posted. Those stay in the Campground's history, no longer attributed to a named person. This is deliberate. A Campground's history is the organization's own safeguarding record of what adults said to the young people in their care, and an account deletion that erased everything the account had ever sent would be a way to destroy that record. We would rather explain that choice plainly than quietly make deletion less complete than it sounds.

12.3 What Anonymization Reaches, and What It Cannot

Anonymization covers structured references to an account: the username, the display name and profile stored on the account, and every @-mention of it.

It cannot reach a name that someone typed as ordinary text — if a member wrote a name directly in the body of a message, that text is part of what that other person wrote, and we do not rewrite it. Removing every trace of a name from all historical free-text content is not something we can honestly promise to do, so we do not promise it. If a name appearing in a message is causing a problem, contact us at admin@campfirechat.io and we will look at that message directly.

12.4 Children's Data — Our Retention Policy

This section is our written retention policy for personal information collected from children, stated here so that parents, guardians, and regulators can read it without asking us for it.

We do not retain a child's personal information indefinitely. Retention is bounded by the timeframe above in every case, and it does not depend on anyone remembering to make a request.

Parents and guardians do not have to wait for any of this. Section 5.3 describes deleting a child's account outright, and section 13.2 describes reviewing and correcting their information at any time.

12.5 When a Campground Is Closed

When a Campground is closed, all member accounts associated with it are deleted, and all messages, posts, and files within it are permanently deleted. This is completed within 30 days of the shutdown request.

12.6 Retention Summary

13. Your Rights & Choices

13.1 Organizers and Leaders

You may access, update, or delete your account at any time through the Platform, from Profile → Delete Account. Deletion is immediate and irreversible; sections 12.2 and 12.3 explain what it does and does not remove. The Platform will refuse if you are your Campground's only administrator, and will tell you so before you get to the last step.

To request a copy of your Campground's data, contact us at admin@campfirechat.io. We prepare these by hand and will respond within 30 days.

13.2 Youth Participants and Their Parents

Parents and guardians have the right to review, correct, or remove their child's information at any time. A parent or guardian can delete their child's account themselves from My Family in the app — see section 5.3 — and can also suspend it without deleting it. A Campground organizer can remove a youth member as well. For anything else, contact us at admin@campfirechat.io and we will respond within 30 days.

13.3 California Residents (CCPA)

California residents have the right to know what personal information is collected, to request deletion, and to opt out of the sale of personal information. We do not sell personal information. To exercise your rights, contact admin@campfirechat.io.

13.4 Other Jurisdictions

While our servers are located in the United States, we respect the rights of users in other jurisdictions and will honor requests for access, correction, deletion, and portability to the extent practicable.

14. Security

We implement industry-standard security measures appropriate for a platform serving youth:

• Encryption of all data in transit using TLS/HTTPS
• Secure, salted, and hashed password storage — we never store plaintext passwords
• Access controls that limit data access to authorized personnel only
• Closed, invitation-only platform architecture that prevents unauthorized access
• Regular security reviews

If you believe there has been unauthorized access to your account or our systems, contact us immediately at admin@campfirechat.io.

15. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. When we make material changes — particularly any changes affecting how youth data is handled — we will notify Campground owners by email before the changes take effect and update the "Last Updated" date at the top of this page. We encourage Campground owners to share material changes with the parents of their youth participants.

16. Contact Us

For questions, concerns, data requests, or reports of potential privacy or safety issues, please contact our designated Privacy Contact:

CampfireChat is committed to maintaining the trust of the families and organizations we serve.