Privacy policy

What we collect

• Your account. Your @college.harvard.edu email address, the details Google sends when you sign in (see below), and a display name: your name from Google, shown in the format you choose — your full name, your first name and last initial, your first name, or your initials. Until you choose, it is the part of your address before the @.
• Your listings. What you enter — title, category, condition, size, brand, price, description, and where you would meet — and the photos you upload, along with when a listing was posted, edited, sold, or taken down. Photos are cropped and resized on your device before they are uploaded, so we store only the version you see, not the original file.
• Your profile settings. How you want your name shown, and, if you set them, the meeting area and size that new listings start with.
• Messages. When you message someone about a listing, we store each message — a question, an offer, a suggested time and place, an answer to one, a sale, or which contact detail you shared — with when it was sent and whether it has been read. Messages are chosen from buttons; there is no free-text box.
• Contact and payment details, if you add them. A phone number, a Venmo username, the email or phone number your Zelle uses, and a meeting spot you type — a general place or a room, whatever you are comfortable sharing. All are optional.
• Contact requests. When you ask to contact a seller, we record that you did, on which listing, and when. The number of requests is limited per day to stop anyone collecting sellers’ addresses.
• Technical logs. Like any website, the services we run on keep server logs — for example, the IP address and browser of a request — which we use only to keep the site working and secure.

Signing in with Google

You sign in with your college Google account. Google tells us your name, your email address, a link to your profile photo, and an identifier for your Google account, and confirms that the address is verified. We ask for nothing else: no access to your mail, files, contacts, or calendar.

We use that information only to create your account, confirm you are a @college.harvard.edu student, keep you signed in, and show your name in the format you choose. Other students never see more of your name than that format shows. We do not use it for advertising, and we do not share it except with the services listed below, which store it on our behalf.

Who can see what

• Listings and their photos are visible only to students signed in with a @college.harvard.edu account. Photos are served through short-lived links, so a copied link stops working.
• Your display name, in the format you chose, appears on your listings, along with a listing’s meeting area if you gave one.
• Messages are visible only to the buyer and the seller in that conversation — not to anyone else, including other buyers of the same listing. Both of you can still read them after the listing sells or is deleted.
• Your phone number, Venmo, Zelle and meeting spot are seen only by someone you share them with, in that one conversation, and only while they are on your profile. Remove one from your profile and nobody sees it any more. Nothing else on the site shows them.
• Your college email address can be shown to a signed-in student who asks to contact you about one of your listings that is for sale.
• A contact request is visible to the buyer who made it and to the seller of that listing, so sellers can see who is interested.
• A listing you take down or delete is no longer visible to other students.

Services we rely on

We do not sell your information, show ads, or use analytics or tracking tools. We use these services to run the site, and they process your information only to provide their service to us:

• Supabase — accounts, sign-in, and the database
• Cloudflare — photo storage
• Vercel — hosting the website
• Google — sign-in

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in. There are no advertising or analytics cookies.

How long we keep things

• Taking a listing down hides it from other students. It stays in your account, with its photos, so you can restore it.
• Deleting a listing removes it from your account, and you cannot restore it. We still keep the listing, its photos, its contact requests, and its conversations on our systems, where no other user can see them. We keep them so that we can understand how the marketplace is used — for example, whether buyers and sellers are actually connecting — and so that a mistaken delete is recoverable.
• Removing a photo while editing a listing deletes that photo, and so does replacing it with a new crop, once you save the listing.
• Conversations are kept while both accounts exist, including after the listing is sold or deleted, so either of you can look back at what was agreed.
• Contact and payment details are kept until you remove them from your profile, which also stops sharing them.
• Your account and everything in it is kept while your account exists.

If you want something permanently erased — a listing, its photos, or your whole account — email erictong@college.harvard.edu from your @college.harvard.edu address and we will delete it and confirm when it is done.

Your choices

You can edit your listings, change how your name is shown, and add or remove your phone number, Venmo, Zelle and meeting spot at any time. Your name itself comes from your Google account. To see what we hold about you, correct it, or have it deleted, email erictong@college.harvard.edu.

Changes

If we change how we handle your information, we will update this page and the date at the top.