Privacy Policy

Last updated: 20 September 2026

Contact: milad@betterhood.app

Betterhood is an independent app for reporting potholes in Saskatoon and following their repair. It is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the City of Saskatoon.

This policy explains what Betterhood collects, where it goes, and what it never does. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

The short version

• Betterhood has no advertising, no third-party trackers, and no crash reporting, and nothing about you is ever sold. The one thing it measures is how long each section of the app is open — durations only, never what you read or reported — and you can switch that off in Settings.
• If you don't sign in, everything stays on your phone.
• If you do sign in, your reports and profile sync to Betterhood's own backend so they follow you between devices.
• For a pothole, your contact details are sent to the City only if you switch on sharing for that report — off by default, every time. For every other kind of report, the City's own form requires a name, email and phone, so they are always sent. The app tells you which is which on the review screen before you file, field by field.
• The photo you attach to a report never leaves your device. A profile picture and a photo you take to confirm somebody else's report do get uploaded, because other people are meant to see them. The Photos section below says which is which, and there are only three kinds.

What Betterhood collects

Things you type in

• Display name — how you appear to other neighbours.
• Contact details (optional) — name, email, phone. Used only to prefill the City's pothole form.
• Home and work addresses (optional) — including their coordinates, used to filter the map and pick which neighbourhoods you follow.
• Report content — the description, approximate depth, and position of a pothole you report.
• Praise, ratings and comments you post about repairs.

Things your device provides

• Location, only while you're using the app and only if you grant permission. Used to place reports accurately, to show potholes near you, and — when you mark a repair as fixed — to check whether you are actually at it, which is what earns the spot-check bonus. That last check is a measurement, not a record: your position is compared against the report's, the answer is kept as "yes" or "no", and the coordinates themselves are never stored. It also never asks: if you have not already given Betterhood location permission, the check is skipped silently rather than putting a permission request in front of you. Either way — permission declined, or your phone simply cannot get a fix indoors — your verification is recorded exactly the same, and you just do not get the bonus.
• Photos you choose to attach to a report. See below — the image itself stays on your device.
• Profile photo, if you set one. This one is uploaded; see below.
• How long each tab is open — a number of seconds for each of the five tabs (Home, City, Results, Gather and Search) and for the screens you open from your avatar, rounded into hour-long buckets. Search is named here deliberately. A duration for the Search tab says how long the tab was open and nothing whatever about what was typed into it: the app records the name of the screen, never the query, and the sentence below about what is not recorded applies to Search exactly as it applies to every other tab. Older section names are still recorded alongside them, so that readings taken before the tabs were reorganised remain readable. There are seven, and naming them all is the honest version of what this paragraph used to say by naming two: "Profile" and "Rewards" (each used to be a tab and is now a screen you open from your avatar), and "Explore", "Feed", "Vote", "Report" and "Dashboard" (sections that were renamed, merged into a tab, or moved behind one). A reading against any of those seven is a duration from an older version of the app or from a screen that still answers to its former name. Time spent anywhere else in the app is counted without being named. This is a duration and nothing else: it does not record which report you opened, what you searched for, what you read, or anything you typed. It is used to work out which parts of Betterhood are worth building on. You can turn it off in Settings → Help improve Betterhood, and turning it off also discards anything measured but not yet sent.

When you report or block someone

When you report a piece of content or block a neighbour, Betterhood stores that report or block: who made it, what it is about, when, the reason you chose and any note you wrote. The moderator — the person who runs Betterhood — sees the reported content and the reporter's name so they can act on it, and is told about each report and block by push notification and by email. Blocks are never shown to the person blocked.

Things Betterhood does not collect

No advertising identifiers. No contacts. No browsing history. No background location. No third-party analytics or advertising SDKs — nothing in Betterhood reports your activity to another company.

The one measurement Betterhood takes of its own use is the section timing described above. It is first-party, it is durations only, it never records what you looked at, and it has an off switch.

Where it goes

Signed out (guest). Everything above stays in local storage on your phone. Nothing is sent to a Betterhood server. If you erase the app's data or delete the app, it is gone — there is no copy anywhere else.

Signed in. Your profile, reports, verifications, praise, ratings and points sync to Betterhood's backend, hosted on Supabase. This is what lets your record follow you to a new phone.

Signing out removes the copy on that device, so the next person to sign in on the same phone cannot see your details. Your account keeps everything, and it comes back when you sign in again.

What Betterhood sends to the City of Saskatoon

When you submit a report, Betterhood posts it to the City's own public reporting system. The City receives:

• the location of the pothole,
• the approximate depth and position on the road you selected,
• your description, if you wrote one,
• your name, email and phone — and this depends on what you are reporting.

For a pothole, they are sent only if you turned on "Share my contact with the City" for that report. That switch is off by default and resets every time; left off, the fields go across empty.

For every other kind of report, the City's form requires a first name, last name, email address and phone number before it will accept anything, so they are always sent, filled in from your profile. Betterhood will not pretend otherwise by putting an optional-looking switch in front of a field the City insists on. The one part of that block you do control is your own address — where you live, as distinct from where the problem is — which starts unticked and is not sent unless you tick it.

Every field on the review screen carries a mark saying whether it reaches the City. Read that screen; it is the honest answer for the report in front of you.

No photo is ever sent to the City. Betterhood's submission leaves the City form's photo fields empty.

Once a report reaches the City it becomes part of the City's own records, under the City's control and its own policies. Betterhood cannot delete it, and deleting your Betterhood account does not withdraw it.

Photos

There are three kinds, and they get three different answers. The difference is not a detail — it is the whole of what happens to a picture you take.

A photo you attach to a report, or to a praise post: it stays on your device. Betterhood stores a reference to it in your account so the app can show it back to you, but the image file itself is never uploaded to Betterhood's backend, is never sent to the City, and is never received by another user. If you reinstall the app, those images are gone — there is no copy anywhere else.

Your profile picture: it is uploaded, and other people see it. That is what it is for — it appears beside your name on everything you write. It is stored in Betterhood's backend at an address that anyone holding the link can open, so treat it the way you would treat a photo on any public profile.

A photo you take to confirm somebody else's report: it is uploaded, and signed-in members see it. It appears on the report it is about, under your name, because an unattributed photograph of a pothole proves nothing to anyone. It is stored privately: a link to it has to be issued to a signed-in member and stops working shortly afterwards, so it cannot be passed on to people outside the app.

Both uploaded kinds are deleted when you delete your account.

One more path, and it is worth knowing about. If you use the feature that reads a photo to fill in a report for you, that image is sent to Anthropic to be described, and the suggestion comes back for you to edit before anything is filed. Betterhood does not store that image, and no name, account or coordinates are sent with it.

What other people can see

Betterhood is partly a community app. Signed-in members can see:

• your display name and profile picture,
• the neighbourhood you live in — not your address, the neighbourhood,
• your level and points, and your place on the monthly board,
• the date you joined,
• reports you submit, including where the problem is,
• verifications you leave on other people's reports, with any photo or note,
• praise posts, ratings and comments you write,
• what you have liked.

Your name is searchable. Typing two letters of it in the app's people search returns your name, picture, level and home neighbourhood to any signed-in member.

There is no setting that hides any of this, and that is a deliberate decision rather than an omission: a name, a picture and a neighbourhood are always shown. If you would rather not be identifiable, choose a display name that is not your own — you can change it at any time in your profile.

Your contact details, email, phone number, and your home and work addresses are never shown to other users. Neither is where you stood on a Council decision: those are yours alone, and other people only ever see totals.

Who else is involved

• Supabase — hosts Betterhood's database and authentication.

• Google and Apple — only if you choose to sign in with them, and only ever two things: your email address, and the name on that account. Betterhood never receives your password.

  Your email address identifies your account and is where the welcome letter and any notification emails go. The name becomes your starting display name, which other people can see — you can change it at any time in your profile, and changing it here does not change it at Google or Apple. Betterhood asks for nothing else from either account: no contacts, no calendar, no photos, no documents. Signing in with Apple's Hide My Email works normally; Betterhood simply receives the relay address instead.

• City of Saskatoon — receives reports you submit, as described above, through the City's own form vendor, Verint. Betterhood also reads the City's public road and meeting data, and uses the City's address lookup to turn a street address into a map point.
• Anthropic — only if you use the feature that reads a photo to fill in a report. The image is sent to be described and the suggestion comes back for you to edit. No name, account or coordinates go with it, and Betterhood keeps nothing.
• ReCollect — the City's waste-collection service. If you ask for bin reminders, your address is sent there to look up your collection days.
• Resend — delivers Betterhood's emails. It is given your email address and the letter.
• Expo — delivers push notifications to your phone and ships app updates.
• Netlify and Notion — only for the feedback form on betterhood.app, which is a website form and not part of the app. If you use it, what you type goes to both.

Betterhood does not sell your information, and does not share it with anyone else. Every company named above is there to do one job for the app, and none of them is an advertiser or an analytics service.

This website

This site carries no advertising, no analytics and no third-party trackers, and it sets no cookies. There is nothing embedded in it from anywhere else.

The one thing it collects is what you choose to type into the feedback form: your message, and — only if you fill them in — your email address and name. That goes to Netlify, which hosts the site, is copied to a Notion database, and is passed on by email to the person who makes Betterhood. It is used to read and answer what you sent, and for nothing else. It is never added to a mailing list and never sold. Leaving the email box empty is fine; it only means there is no way to reply.

Keeping and deleting your information

• A copy of everything: Settings → Your data → Export. Signed in, this includes what is held on your account — your reports, verifications, praise and ratings — as well as what is on this device. The reset option on the same screen clears the device's copy; the City reference numbers for reports you filed, and any unsent drafts, exist only there and are lost with it.
• Signing out removes this device's copy.
• Deleting your account removes your sign-in, your name, photo, contact details and saved addresses from Betterhood's backend, and your points and history are erased. Your uploaded pictures — your profile photo and any verification photos — are deleted with it.
• What stays, and why. Reports, praise, ratings and comments you posted remain, re-attributed to "A neighbour". They are part of the public record of what is wrong with Saskatoon's streets, and taking them out would take that record with them. Nothing is left linking them to you. An invitation you organised stays for the people who were coming to it, likewise detached from your name.
• One thing is kept on purpose. If an email to you ever bounced or was marked as spam, that address is remembered so Betterhood does not write to it again. That record is the address alone, and it outlasts the account.
• Reports already filed with the City remain the City's records. Betterhood cannot withdraw or delete them, and deleting your Betterhood account does not touch them.

Children

Betterhood is not directed at children under 13, and does not knowingly collect information from them.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or where it goes, the app will say so rather than quietly updating this page.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or a request about your information:

milad@betterhood.app