This Privacy Policy explains what BlvckMeta collects when you use the BlvckMeta mobile apps and website (the "Service"), why, who at BlvckMeta and which outside companies can see it, how long we keep it, and the choices you have. BlvckMeta is operated by Rixx City Studios, LLC, a Nebraska limited liability company doing business as BASS (Black Artists Surpassing Standards) ("BlvckMeta," "we," "us," or "our"), 1617 Farnam Street #62, Omaha, NE 68102, USA. We are the controller of your personal information. BlvckMeta is for adults 18 and older only.
1. Information We Collect
We collect the data types listed below. All of them are linked to your account. We use them to run the app's features and to keep the Service safe. We do not use them to track you across other companies' apps or websites, we do not build advertising profiles of you, and we do not sell them.
Data Types We Collect
- Email address (used to sign in and to reach you about your account)
- Name
- User ID
- Device / push token (used to deliver push notifications)
- Precise location (only with your permission)
- Coarse location (city, state, neighborhood)
- Photos and videos
- Audio
- Messages (direct messages, public Hallway room messages and voice notes, live-stream comments, and TEAIRA conversations)
- Other user content (posts, comments, guestbook entries, askbox questions and answers, bio, anthems)
- In-app social graph (neighbors, FAM, relationships, blocks, mutes)
- Purchase history (credit purchases, gifts, subscriptions, ad campaigns and shoppable-post orders)
- Sensitive information (for example, sexuality, if you choose to add it to your profile)
- Date of birth, gender, and relationship status
- Product interaction (how your Vibes perform, streaks, BlvckScore, reactions, and views and clicks on sponsored posts)
- Account security and safety data (sign-in method, passkey public keys, device check results, reports, enforcement history, and your account trust score)
- Verification information (information or documents you give us to get a Verified badge)
How you provide it. You create an account with an email address and password, and you can also sign in with Sign in with Apple or a passkey. You enter your profile details and create content. Location is collected from your device only if you grant permission, or from the city and neighborhood you enter. We do not require your phone number. If you apply through our Careers page, we receive the application details you email to us.
Contacts. If you choose to invite people from your address book, your contacts are read on your device to prepare a text-message invitation and are never uploaded to our servers.
Sensitive information and your consent. Adding your sexuality, gender or relationship status is optional. If you add sexuality, you consent to us storing it and showing it to the audience you choose. You can change the audience or remove it at any time in your profile, which withdraws your consent going forward.
Gender, sexuality, and relationship status visibility. You choose who can see each of these fields. If you set a field to "Public," it is part of your public profile. If you set it to "Neighbors" or "Private," it is stored separately from your public profile and is visible only to you or, if you choose "Neighbors," to your accepted neighbors (which includes the founder's block, see Section 3).
Your birthday. Your full date of birth is kept in your private account data and is not shown on your profile. We use it to enforce our 18+ rule and to work out an age range (for example, 25–29) that other members can filter by in Find. On your birthday, your neighbors may get a reminder to wish you a happy birthday; that reminder shows the day, never the year.
Technical data. We do not use third-party analytics or advertising tools, and the mobile apps do not include analytics or advertising SDKs. We do keep our own counts so the Service works and so we can run it: for example, the Vibe stats you see on your own Vibes, impression and click counts for sponsored posts, and overall platform totals (such as the number of members and sign-ups) that only the founder can see. Like any internet service, the infrastructure we use (Google Firebase / Google Cloud and the content delivery networks described below) processes technical information such as IP address and device or browser details as part of delivering the service and keeping it secure.
2. How We Use Your Information
- Providing the Service: creating and managing your account, showing your profile, posts and neighbors, delivering messages and notifications, showing nearby content and weather, running streaks, BlvckScore and reminders, and processing purchases and subscriptions.
- TEAIRA: generating TEAIRA's replies, fact checks, translations, recaps and voice (see Section 4).
- Communication: account, security and policy messages, and responding to support requests.
- Safety and Security: preventing fake, automated and spam accounts and scams, investigating reports, enforcing our Terms and Community Guidelines, keeping banned people from returning, and enforcing our 18+ age requirement (see Section 7).
- Verification: reviewing requests for a Verified badge and preventing impersonation.
- Legal Compliance: meeting legal obligations, responding to lawful requests, and defending our rights.
We do not use your data for third-party advertising or tracking, and we do not build advertising profiles of you.
3. Who at BlvckMeta Can See Your Information
- The founder's block. Every new member's block is automatically connected as a neighbor of the founder's block, so the founder can see what you share with "Neighbors," just like any other neighbor. You can remove this neighbor connection, or block the founder's account, at any time.
- Staff and moderators. BlvckMeta staff can see reports and the content that was reported, public content, and the information they need to moderate, support members and run the Service. What each staff member can do depends on their role, and moderation actions are logged.
- Act As (founder support access). The BlvckMeta founder can, for support, safety investigations and testing, sign in to the Service as a specific account to see it the way that member does. Only the founder can do this, every use is logged, and we do not use it to read your private messages or to post or act as you except to fix a problem you reported.
- Encrypted messages. BlvckMeta staff cannot read end-to-end encrypted messages (see Section 13).
4. Service Providers (Who Processes Data for Us)
We use the following companies to operate the Service. They process data for us and under their own privacy terms.
- Google Firebase / Google Cloud — sign-in (Firebase Authentication), our database (Cloud Firestore), file storage (Cloud Storage), server functions (Cloud Functions), push messaging (Firebase Cloud Messaging) and app checks (Firebase App Check). This is where your account data, content and media are stored. Learn more at firebase.google.com/support/privacy. Data may be stored on servers in the United States and other countries where Google operates.
- Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise — on the website's sign-up form, reCAPTCHA checks that a real person is signing up. Google receives information about your browser and how you use the page, under Google's privacy policy and terms.
- Stripe — card payments (for example, buying credits or advertiser campaigns on the website) and, for sellers, Stripe Connect accounts and payouts for products sold through shoppable posts. Your card and bank details are entered with and handled by Stripe; BlvckMeta does not collect or store your full card or bank account number.
- Apple — In-App Purchase and subscriptions on iOS, Sign in with Apple, passkeys, push notifications to Apple devices (Apple Push Notification service), DeviceCheck and App Attest (see Section 12), Apple Music and MusicKit for anthems, Apple Wallet passes and, if you use voice input with TEAIRA on iOS, Apple's speech recognition (audio may be processed by Apple).
- Google Play — Play Integrity checks and Google Wallet passes for the Android app.
- Anthropic — powers TEAIRA, our AI assistant, and post fact checks. When you message TEAIRA, your message and recent conversation history are sent to Anthropic, together with context such as your name, gender, general location (city/region), local time, streak, and profile anthem. If you ask TEAIRA to look something up on your block, she can read your own alerts, neighbor requests, the number of unread conversations and who they are with, your recent posts, and hallway and nearby-signal activity; TEAIRA does not read the contents of your direct messages. In public Hallway rooms, the text of room messages is sent to Anthropic to translate them into the reader's language and, when someone taps "Catch me up," to write a recap of the room; the translations and recaps are generated by TEAIRA and the translations are stored with the message. TEAIRA may run web searches and then uses an approximate location (city, region, country, time zone) to improve results. When you request a fact check, the text of the post, its date, and the author's username are sent to Anthropic.
- ElevenLabs — TEAIRA voice. When you play TEAIRA's reply aloud, the text of that reply (up to 1,500 characters) is sent from our server to ElevenLabs, which returns the audio. Your own voice recordings are not sent to ElevenLabs.
- GIPHY — GIF and sticker search. Your search words go from our server to GIPHY, without your name or account details. When a GIF is shown, your device loads it from GIPHY, so GIPHY sees your IP address and device details.
- OpenWeather — the weather widget (on iPhone, Apple Watch, Android and the web) sends your approximate location, rounded to about 1 km and without your name or account details, to our server, which asks OpenWeather for the current conditions and sends them back. We do not store your location, and OpenWeather only sees our server, not your account.
- Open-Meteo and BigDataCloud — the website's weather widget sends your coordinates to Open-Meteo for the forecast and to BigDataCloud to turn them into a city name. TEAIRA's weather lookup uses Open-Meteo from our server, with the place you ask about or the location on your profile.
- Bunny.net (Bunny Stream / CDN) — encodes and delivers Vibes videos and audio you upload.
- Cloudflare (Stream) — if live streaming is enabled for your account, live video is sent to Cloudflare Stream for broadcast and recording.
- SGNLS — if you choose to link your BlvckMeta account to a SGNLS account, we store a link between the two accounts so they can recognize each other.
- Content delivery networks — the website loads some software libraries from public CDNs (Google / gstatic, jsDelivr, cdnjs by Cloudflare, and the Tailwind CSS CDN). When your browser fetches them, those providers see your IP address and browser details.
5. Sharing and Disclosure
We do not sell your personal data. We do not sell, rent or trade your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.
- Other users: Content you post publicly (for example Vibes and your public profile) is visible to other users, subject to the audience you choose. Your BlvckScore and verification status are public. Messages are visible to the people in the conversation. Direct messages sent from iOS and the web after we introduced end-to-end encryption, and messages in private hallway rooms, are encrypted on your device so that BlvckMeta's servers store only the encrypted form; older messages and open hallway chats are not end-to-end encrypted. Public Hallway rooms are open to every signed-in member: your messages and voice notes there, and your name, username, photo, city, country and languages while you are in the room, are visible to everyone in it, and moderators can read them.
- Buyers, sellers and Service Providers: When you buy from a shoppable post, the seller receives the order details needed to fill it. Sellers may be required by law to show certain business information to buyers.
- Service providers: The companies listed in Section 4, only as needed to run the Service.
- Legal requirements: When required by law, court order, subpoena or other legal process; to report child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC); or to protect the rights, property or safety of BlvckMeta, our users or the public.
- Business transfers: In connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization or sale of all or part of our assets.
- With your consent: For any other purpose with your explicit consent.
6. Sponsored Content and Homepage Takeovers
BlvckMeta has in-app sponsored placements: advertisers can pay to have a sponsored post appear in the Porch and Vibes feeds, marked as sponsored, and to sponsor a takeover of the BlvckMeta homepage. We do not use third-party ad networks or advertising SDKs. Sponsored content is placed by feed placement, rotation and schedule, not by tracking you across other apps or websites and not based on your profile. We count impressions and clicks for each sponsored post, and advertisers can see those counts for their own campaigns. Advertisers do not receive your personal information. Some homepage takeovers may show images or video loaded from the advertiser's own web address; when that happens, the advertiser's server can see your IP address and browser details, as with any website. If you click a sponsored link, you leave BlvckMeta and the advertiser's own privacy policy applies.
7. Safety Systems and Automated Decisions
To keep fake, automated and scam accounts off BlvckMeta, we use automated safety systems:
- Account trust score. Our servers give each account a score showing how likely it is to belong to a real person. It is based on signals such as whether your email is verified, how you signed in, how old the account is, your real neighbor connections, reports against the account, posting and messaging bursts, links and scam-like messages, messages to people who are not your neighbors, and whether the same bio, photo or device appears on other accounts. The score and its reasons are visible only to BlvckMeta's founder and authorized staff, never to other members.
- Limits and filters. New accounts have tighter limits, messages and requests are rate limited, scam and spam text may be held back, and sign-ups using throwaway email services or previously banned email addresses are removed automatically.
- What these systems can do. They can slow down or limit an account, or flag it for a person to review. Apart from removing sign-ups that use throwaway or banned email addresses, a decision to suspend or delete an account is made or confirmed by BlvckMeta staff. If you think an automated limit got it wrong, you can appeal as described in our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines.
8. Data Retention and Account Deletion
We keep your information for as long as your account exists and as needed to run the Service, comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes and enforce our agreements. Specific periods are described here.
Deleting your account. In the iOS app, open Edit Profile and choose Delete Account in the Danger Zone (or use Pulse → Privacy & Settings → Delete Account). On the web, open PULSE → Danger Zone, or sign in at blvckmeta.com/delete-account. You can also email support@blvckmeta.com from the address on your account.
- How it works: deletion is scheduled, and the account is permanently deleted 21 days later unless you sign back in and cancel it. A daily process then removes your sign-in account, your profile and everything stored under it (neighbors, relationships, alerts, and similar), the posts (Vibes) you authored with their comments and reactions, and the media you uploaded.
- What is not deleted: direct-message conversations are shared with the other participants and are not deleted — they remain for the other person. Messages and voice notes you posted in hallway/room chats (including public Hallway rooms, where they remain part of the room's history) and comments you left on other people's posts may also remain. Records we must keep for legal or payment purposes may be kept.
- Safety and enforcement records: if an account was suspended or removed for breaking our rules, we keep a record of the action and the reasons, and a one-way coded fingerprint (hash) of the email address so the same person cannot simply sign up again. The hash cannot be turned back into the email address. We also keep records of reports, appeals and the terms you accepted.
- Legal holds: content and accounts connected to child sexual exploitation, a law-enforcement request or a credible threat are preserved and not deleted for one year, or longer if the law or a legal process requires it.
- Removed content: content BlvckMeta removes, and accounts BlvckMeta deletes for a rules violation, can be restored for 30 days in case the decision is reversed on appeal, and are then permanently removed unless a legal hold applies.
- Undelivered messages: an encrypted message that is waiting for the recipient to set up encryption is kept for up to 30 days and then deleted, and the sender is told it could not be delivered.
Content you shared with others can remain visible in copies they made (for example screenshots) or in conversations that remain for them.
Backups and logs maintained by our infrastructure providers are retained according to their schedules; we do not control those schedules.
Hallway presence. While you are in a Hallway room we keep a short-lived presence record (your name, username, photo, city, country, languages and whether you are typing). It expires within minutes of you leaving the room and is deleted automatically.
9. Your Rights and Choices
Depending on where you live, you may have the following rights regarding your personal information:
- Access / Portability: request a copy of your data. The web app lets you download a JSON copy of your data (PULSE → Danger Zone → Download my data); you can also email us.
- Correction: you can edit most of your profile information in the app; contact us for anything else.
- Deletion: delete your account in the app or at blvckmeta.com/delete-account as described in Section 8, or contact us.
- Restriction / Objection: contact us to ask us to restrict or stop certain processing, including processing of sensitive information.
- Opt out of sale, targeted advertising and profiling: we do not sell your data, do not use it for targeted advertising, and do not use profiling to make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects without human review.
- Notifications and location: you can turn off push notifications and location access in your device settings or in the app at any time.
How to make a request. Email privacy@blvckmeta.com or support@blvckmeta.com, or write to us at the address in Section 18. We will respond within the time the law that applies to you requires (for example, 45 days under several U.S. state laws, which can be extended once when reasonably necessary). We may need to verify your identity first, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising your rights.
Appeals. If we decline your privacy request, you can appeal by replying to our decision or emailing privacy@blvckmeta.com with the subject "Privacy Appeal." We will tell you the result of your appeal and the reasons. If you are not satisfied, you may contact your state Attorney General or local data protection authority.
10. Age and Account Eligibility
BlvckMeta is for adults only. You must be at least 18 years old to create a BlvckMeta account. We collect a date of birth at signup, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18.
When an account is identified as belonging to someone under 18, it is suspended: it is hidden from discovery and cannot post or send messages. The account is not automatically deleted. If your account was suspended or your birthday was recorded incorrectly, contact support@blvckmeta.com; a BlvckMeta founder can reinstate the account after the birthday is corrected.
If you believe that someone under 18 has created a BlvckMeta account, please contact us at support@blvckmeta.com so we can investigate and take appropriate action.
11. Push Notifications
BlvckMeta may send push notifications to your device with updates, reminders (such as streak and birthday reminders), messages, and other information related to your use of the Service. To do this we store a device / push token for your account and use Firebase Cloud Messaging and, on Apple devices, Apple's push notification service. You can control push notifications through your device settings or within the app.
12. Newer Features and Your Data
These features switch on over time. Each only uses the data described here.
- Device safety checks. To keep banned people from coming back, we use Apple's DeviceCheck. Apple stores two yes/no marks for a device (banned, under review) that only we can set and read; Apple does not tell us which device it is. We keep a device token with your account so we can set those marks. We also use Firebase App Check (Apple App Attest, Google Play Integrity, or reCAPTCHA on the web) to confirm requests come from the real app.
- App diagnostics. On iPhone, Apple's MetricKit gives us totals of crashes, hangs and launch times. They carry no account identifier and no stack trace.
- Sensitive content. If you turn on Sensitive Content Warning in your device settings, Apple's analysis runs on your device to blur pictures that may contain nudity until you tap. The pictures are not sent to us for this.
- On-device translation and recaps. Translation and "Catch me up" can run on your device with nothing leaving it. Only when your device cannot, and only if you allow it, the text goes to Anthropic (see Section 4).
- Weather. The weather widget sends your approximate location (rounded to about 1 km) to our server, which asks OpenWeather for the forecast. We do not store it.
- Widgets, Live Activities and passes. Widgets and Live Activities show a small amount of your own information, such as your Door link and unread count, kept on your device. Live Activities use a push token so we can update them. A Wallet pass holds your name, username and Door link and is kept by Apple Wallet or Google Wallet.
- NFC tags and sharing. If you write your Door link to an NFC tag, the link is stored on the tag you choose. Anything you share to BlvckMeta from another app stays on your device until you post it.
- Passkeys. If you add a passkey, we store its public key, a label you can see, and when it was last used, so you can sign in. The private key never leaves your device or your password manager.
- Nearby Knock. When you open Nearby Knock on two phones, they swap a one-time token and your public Door link over your local network to measure distance. Nothing is stored and it only runs while that screen is open.
- Push to Talk. A voice clip you send in a Hallway room is stored briefly so the room can play it. It is deleted automatically and is never used for anything else.
- Genmoji and stickers. A Genmoji you put in a comment or post is saved as a small picture next to your text so every device can show it. The BlvckMeta iMessage app and App Clip show only the public parts of a Door.
- Vibe stats and viewer lists. If you post a Vibe you can see how it did: views, how long people watched, how much of it, where they came from and how many followed you after. You can also see which neighbors watched it, for 10 days. After 10 days only a summary is kept (counts, no names). You appear in someone's list unless you switch off "Show me in Vibe viewer lists" in the iPhone app's Privacy settings (it is on by default); the totals count everyone either way, with no name. Accounts with more than 10,000 followers get totals only, no list. Your own views of your own Vibes are not counted.
- Sign in with Apple and Apple Music. If you link your Apple ID, we store Apple's account identifier and, if you chose it, the private relay email. If you pick an anthem from Apple Music, we store the song reference, not the audio.
- Live streaming and live gifts. If live streaming is turned on for your account, your live video goes to Cloudflare Stream (Section 4), viewers can see your stream and comments, and gifts sent during a stream are recorded in both people's credit history.
- Vault. If you set a Vault PIN, our server keeps only a slow one-way hash of it, never the PIN itself, and limits wrong guesses.
13. Security
We use measures designed to protect your information, including encryption of data in transit (TLS), encryption at rest provided by our cloud infrastructure, access rules on our database, and end-to-end encryption for Mail and private hallway rooms between people who have set up encryption (see the next paragraph).
What is end-to-end encrypted, exactly. Mail (direct messages and photos) is end-to-end encrypted between people who both use a current BlvckMeta iPhone app or the web app, which create the encryption keys automatically when you sign in. If the other person has not set up encryption yet, current apps do not send the message in the clear: it is kept encrypted and delivered once their key exists. Messages from older app versions, from the Android app, and from BlvckMeta or TEAIRA are not end-to-end encrypted, and the app marks such messages "Not end-to-end encrypted." BlvckMeta cannot read end-to-end encrypted messages; we can read the ones that are not, and we may review them in response to a report or a legal request. Public Hallway rooms are never encrypted.
No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. Choose a strong, unique password and keep your account credentials private. If a data breach affects your personal information, we will notify you as required by applicable law.
14. Cookies and Local Storage
The mobile apps do not use cookies. The website uses cookies and similar browser storage (such as local storage and session storage) that are needed to keep you signed in, remember your settings (such as your theme, whether you have seen the intro, and the homepage look), and operate the site, including storage set by Firebase for sign-in. The sign-up page uses Google reCAPTCHA, which may set its own cookies to tell people from bots. We do not use advertising or marketing cookies. You can clear or block this storage in your browser settings, but the site may not work properly without it.
15. U.S. State Privacy Rights
California (CCPA/CPRA). If you are a California resident, you may have rights to know what personal information we collect and how it is used, to delete personal information we hold about you (with some exceptions), to correct inaccurate information, to limit the use of sensitive personal information, and to not be discriminated against for exercising these rights. We do not sell or share your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising, and we use sensitive personal information only to provide the Service you ask for. In the past 12 months we collected the categories listed in Section 1 from you and your devices, for the purposes in Section 2, and disclosed them only to the recipients in Sections 4 and 5. To make a request, contact privacy@blvckmeta.com. You may also designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf, and we may need to verify the agent's authority and your identity.
Nebraska and other states. Residents of Nebraska and of other states with consumer privacy laws (such as Colorado, Connecticut, Oregon, Texas and Virginia) may have the right to confirm whether we process their personal data, and to access, correct, delete and get a portable copy of it, and to opt out of sale, targeted advertising and certain profiling. We do not sell personal data or use it for targeted advertising. We process sensitive data, such as sexuality, only with your consent, which you give by choosing to add it and can withdraw by removing it. To exercise these rights or appeal a decision, follow Section 9.
16. International Users (GDPR)
If you are located in the European Economic Area, United Kingdom, or Switzerland, data protection laws such as the GDPR may apply to our processing of your personal information. We process your information to provide the Service you ask for (contract), to keep the Service safe and secure and enforce our terms (legitimate interests), to comply with legal obligations, and, where we ask, with your consent (for example, sensitive information you choose to add). Your information is processed in the United States and other countries where our providers operate, which may have different data protection laws than your country. You can contact us to exercise your rights as described in Section 9, and you have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.
17. Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will post the new policy and update the "Last Updated" date, and we will give additional notice, such as an in-app notification or email, for changes that materially affect your rights. Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.
18. Contact
If you have questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or our data practices:
- Privacy Email: privacy@blvckmeta.com
- General Support: support@blvckmeta.com
- Mail: Rixx City Studios, LLC (BASS), Attn: Privacy, 1617 Farnam Street #62, Omaha, NE 68102, USA
Last Updated: November 2, 2026