What we collect, and who touches it.

What you send us

Each form and each portal on this site saves only what it asks for.

Founding signup and your household account

Your area, your neighborhood (or the free-text answer if yours isn’t on the list), the street or road you gave, the pickup spot you described and, if you dropped a pin, its map coordinates, anything you told us about finding you, the plan you picked, how many bags, your name, your mobile number, and your email address, which is how you sign in to your own page. If you answered the “what’s your current trash situation” question, ticked any add-on interest boxes, or gave a soft day preference, those are saved too. If you came from a flyer, sign, or shared link, the short campaign tag on that link is saved with your entry. If you signed up with somebody else’s referral code, we save whose code it was; everyone also gets their own code to share. We assign your position on your area’s list, whether you hold the founding rate, and the price that goes with your plan and bag count — none of that is a bill, and no card is collected anywhere on this path.

How you want to be contacted

The signup, villa, HOA, route-request and driver forms each have one required box: you agree to be contacted about your spot and your route. A founding signup, a route request, a driver application and a support message store that wording’s version; a villa or HOA request does not. When texting is switched on, pickup texts are transactional, the line under the phone field says so, and automated ones go to the number on file unless it has replied STOP or its texts have been turned off on its own page. Your page has a WhatsApp switch; WhatsApp updates are not available yet, and the switch saves your choice for later. The latest STOP, START or switch answer is stored per number and per channel with the time it changed; each STOP or START text you send is also logged with the time it arrived. Sending a support message is permission for us to reply to it, and the support form says so on screen.

Villa, short-term-rental and HOA manager accounts

The account name, a contact name, a phone number, an email address, the channel preference for that account, and which manager account a property belongs to. For each property: its label, the address text, the road corridor, the pickup spot and its map coordinates, access notes, the number of units, the plan and bag allowance quoted, and how many scheduled pickups a week it takes. A building may also carry a roster of unit labels. If a manager pastes a booking calendar address for a property, we fetch that calendar on a schedule and store the turnover dates it contains and the calendar’s own identifier for each one, so the same turnover is never scheduled twice. We do not store guest names, guest contact details, or anything else from a booking.

Pickup proof photographs

At a stop, the driver photographs what is at the pickup spot — the tied bags, or the empty spot when nothing was out, or whatever is blocking the stop. The photograph is of the spot, not of people or of the inside of a home. The platform stores a small thumbnail (capped in the database at 40 KB), the map coordinates and the time the phone stamped on it, and the outcome the driver logged. The full-size photograph stays in the phone’s own album and is never uploaded. Trips to the disposal site record a receipt thumbnail the same way.

Support messages

The topic you chose, the message you wrote, your mobile number, an optional fallback email, and the replies on that thread. Anything you text back to us arrives here too, with the number it came from and the time it arrived.

Route request and driver application

The older route-request form stores the kind of request and plan, service area, property type, the street, estate or landmark you typed, how to find your pickup spot, extra notes, your name, your mobile number and an optional email; business and managed-property requests also store the typical bag volume and frequency. A driver application stores a name, mobile number, area, availability, whether the applicant has vehicle access, and an optional note.

Clean STT dump report

The map location you pinned or picked, what you saw, any description of the spot you added, and the time. A photo is optional: it is shrunk on your device to a small image (capped at 40 KB) before it is sent, and because it may show someone else’s property it is never shown publicly. A phone number or email is optional too, and is used only to follow up about that spot.

A support message, a route request and a driver application also store a reference code, a timestamp, the consent wording version, the web address the form was sent from and a hash of your phone number (or email). A founding signup stores the consent version and that contact hash, but not the web address. A villa or HOA request stores neither the consent version nor the web address, and a dump report stores no consent wording version and no web address. Most forms and lookups, including a founding signup, a villa or HOA request and looking up your page or your messages, also store a hash of the network address the request came from; the dump report form checks it in memory only and stores nothing. A signup our automated checks refuse is logged with that address hash, the browser’s name string and the first digits of the number. Asking for an emailed sign-in link, as a household or a property manager, stores a hash of the network address that asked, and a signed-in session stores the browser’s name string. The network-address hashes are used only to spot repeats and slow automated attempts. The contact hash is also how a support message you send is matched to your household. IslandHaul does not try to reverse any of them. They are kept with the rest of the records. Sign-in links are deleted 30 days after they expire, sign-in sessions 90 days after they expire, the anti-spam counters after 30 days and refused-signup logs after 180 days, each night after that night’s backup.

Why we ask

To hold your spot on your area’s list, to know what to build a route around, and — once your area has a route — to run the pickup, tell you what happened at your spot, and bill the plan you chose. Your pickup instructions are what tells a driver where a tied bag actually is. Contact details are used to reply to you about your spot, your route and your service. A dump report is used to find and clear that pile. The network-address hashes are used only to spot repeats and slow down bots and repeated fake signups, and the contact hash also links a support message to your household; IslandHaul does not try to reverse any of them.

Texts, WhatsApp and email

• Pickup texts are about your own pickup, and STOP always works. The phone field on the signup, villa and HOA forms says how updates reach that number. When texting is on, we text pickup updates and you can reply STOP at any time. When it is off, updates come by email, and our team may also call or text that number about your route. Automated pickup texts go to the number on file unless it has replied STOP or its texts have been turned off on its own page.
• STOP, START and HELP are handled by the software. Replying STOP marks that number opted out, cancels every text already queued for it, and stops any further text going to it; START puts it back; HELP answers with what the texts are and where to get support. A number that has opted out still sees the same information on its own page, and can still be reached by email if it gave one.
• Quiet hours. A text only leaves the queue between 08:00 and 21:00 Atlantic Standard Time. A message created outside that window is held until the morning rather than sent late at night. Four notices are deliberately exempt because holding them would make them false: the truck being about twenty minutes out, and the three outcomes at your own spot (picked up, nothing out, stop blocked).
• Texts go out from hardware IslandHaul controls. There is no third-party text marketing provider in this platform. The site writes a message to its own outbox; a small program on an IslandHaul computer picks it up and hands it to an IslandHaul handset with an ordinary local SIM in it, and replies come back the same way. Your number is not uploaded to a bulk messaging service.
• Email is sent through an email delivery provider on IslandHaul’s behalf — sign-in links, pickup notices, and manager invoices. WhatsApp is not used yet; the choice on your page is saved for later.
• There is no marketing send in this platform at all. Every automated message is about your own spot, your own route, your own turnover or your own invoice. Ticking a consent box does not sign you up for offers or promotions.

Payment, and what we never see

Payments are handled by PayPal. IslandHaul never sees, receives or stores a card number, a bank account number or a PayPal password: you approve a subscription or pay an invoice on PayPal’s own pages, and PayPal tells us the result. PayPal is a separate company and its own privacy terms apply to what you do there.

What we store on our side is the record, not the instrument: the PayPal subscription identifier for your household, the plan, bag count and price that subscription was created at, the payment and refund records PayPal reports back, invoice records for villa and HOA accounts with their line items and totals, any credits on the account and what they were for, and how far along a payment reminder has gone if an invoice is past due.

A subscription cannot even be offered to a household before that area’s first pickup has actually run, and no money-moving call happens at all unless both the payment credentials and a separate billing switch are set. Both are off by default.

Your page, and who can open it

Your household page shows where you stand, your next pickup, your last twelve pickups, your plan and bags, your messages with us, your referrals and share link, and the buttons that ask for a skip, a pause or a plan change. There are deliberately two levels of access.

A bare reference link — your page’s address with your reference code on the end, opened without signing in — shows only this about your household: your area and where you stand in it, your next pickup, your pickup history without the photographs, and your plan, bags and price. It does not show your messages, your share link, billing amounts, referral earnings or the photographs, and none of its buttons work: all of those need you to sign in. Anyone who has that link can see those things without signing in, so treat it like a key — keep it to yourself and do not post or forward it.

By default you sign in with a one-time link emailed to the address on your account (or the six-digit code in the same email); it creates a session that you can sign out of, and there is no password to remember. If IslandHaul turns on optional customer accounts, you can instead choose a password for that same email address: your email address and password are then processed by Google Firebase Authentication, which checks them and tells this site who you are, and IslandHaul never stores your password. Either way, a photograph that does not belong to your household answers as if it does not exist, rather than confirming that it does.

A property manager signs in with an emailed link too and sees only their own account: their properties on a list and a map, each property’s pickup spot and access notes, upcoming pickups, the photo-proof feed for their own stops (each photo shown with the position the driver’s phone recorded at that stop), and their invoices.

Where it goes

• IslandHaul’s own database. Everything above is stored in our hosting provider’s database, attached to the program that serves this site. That provider operates the infrastructure on IslandHaul’s behalf and is not given your data for its own use.
• The people who run IslandHaul. The operations console and the driver app are separate from the public site and require signing in with an IslandHaul staff or driver account. A driver’s day sheet shows the stops assigned to that driver — the label, area, map location, pickup and access notes and expected bags — and not your phone number or email address; a driver cannot open another driver’s stops, and a driver account cannot open the operations console.
• PayPal, for the payment step and the records above.
• Google Firebase Authentication, which checks staff and driver sign-ins and, only when optional customer accounts are turned on, customer email and password sign-ins. It receives the email address and password typed into that form; this site receives a token back, never the password.
• The email delivery provider, for the messages it sends on our behalf. Internal alerts to IslandHaul staff deliberately carry only the submission type, its reference code, whether it is time-sensitive and a link to the protected console, plus, for a founding signup, its area and its position on that area’s list, and for a villa or HOA lead, its area — never names, contact details, street addresses, map pins, access notes or message text.
• Clean STT dump reports. IslandHaul administrators see the exact location, the description, the contact you gave and whether a photo is attached. The public Clean STT map shows a report only after an administrator has reviewed it, with its location rounded to about 100 metres, its status and any note IslandHaul adds, and never with its photo or contact.
• Routing is done in-house. The order of the day’s stops is worked out by IslandHaul’s own route engine from our own map of driving times on St. Thomas. The third-party routing service this platform used earlier is still in the code but is switched off, and nothing is sent to it while it is.

Staff sign-in and staff-only assistance

Staff and drivers sign in through Google Firebase Authentication, which verifies the email address and password and hands back a token this site checks. For someone with access, IslandHaul stores an email address, a display name, the role, and when the account was last seen. For drivers, the phone’s location at the moment they tap arrive, depart, photo or not-out at a stop is stored with that stop’s record, and a property manager sees it next to their own proof photos.

Three optional assists inside the console use a language model, and all three are staff-only: a suggested draft reply to a support thread, a suggested topic for an incoming message, and the prose of the weekly summary that goes to IslandHaul itself. They work only when IslandHaul has set a key for a language-model provider; without it the buttons do not appear and the summary is written by ordinary code. When they are switched on, message text is sent to a language-model provider (OpenAI, unless IslandHaul configures another) to produce the suggestion: for a draft, the most recent messages of that support thread, each cut to 2,000 characters, with short context about the account such as a first name and area; for a topic, the one incoming message, cut the same way; for the summary, its counts and alert lines.

A model never talks to a customer. A suggested draft goes into a staff member’s reply box and is sent only if a person chooses to send it. Every draft is checked against the wording rules this whole site is held to; a draft that breaks one is still handed to the staff member, marked with the rule it broke, so that person can fix it or throw it away. A weekly summary whose wording breaks a rule is replaced by the plain version written by ordinary code.

What we do not do

• We do not sell, rent, or trade what you send — to anyone, ever.
• We do not share it with advertisers or marketing companies. There is no ad platform on this site to share it with.
• This site runs no advertising or analytics trackers.
• We never see or store your card, bank or PayPal credentials; that step happens on PayPal.
• We do not upload full-size photographs of your property, and we do not photograph people.
• We do not store guest details from a booking calendar a manager connects.
• No marketing text, WhatsApp message or email exists in this platform. Ticking a consent box does not create one.

How long it is kept

Some records are deleted automatically, each night after that night’s backup: sign-in links 30 days after they expire, sign-in sessions 90 days after they expire, anti-spam counters after 30 days, refused-signup logs after 180 days and server error notes after 90 days. Everything else stays until an IslandHaul administrator removes it. A record — your account, your messages, a pickup and its proof thumbnail, an invoice — stays in the database until an IslandHaul administrator removes it, and financial records are kept as long as the business needs them for its own accounting. If your area never fills and never opens, your entry is not quietly deleted either: it stays exactly as it is until you ask us to remove it or IslandHaul tells you it is closing that area’s list for good. Ask us to remove something and we will, by hand.

Correcting or removing what you sent

Text back the number our message came from, or use the support page, and say what you want changed or removed. One person handles these requests by hand — there is no automated deletion button yet. When you ask us to remove your household, we clear your name, phone number, email, address and pickup notes and the text of your messages, end any sign-in you have open, and retire your reference and referral code so nobody can look you up by them again. A referral you already made stays credited, and the signup of anyone who used your code is not undone. If you replied STOP, that is kept so the number is not texted. Removing an account does not erase an invoice or payment record that the business has to keep. That procedure does not reach every copy: pickup proof photos and recorded positions, driver task notes, an older route request, message delivery logs and backups are cleared by hand where we can reach them.

Changes to this page

This summary changes when the software changes. The consent version stored with each signup, support message, route request or driver application records the wording that was in place when you sent it.