Privacy Policy

Friends Ahoy LLC is a Colorado company. We run the website friendsahoy.com, the Connection Profile, the Islands pages, and the Resources page. This Policy covers everything we collect through them.

Who is responsible for your data: Friends Ahoy LLC
Contact: connect@friendsahoy.com

2.1 Things You Choose to Send Us

The Connection Profile. When you reach the end and your reading is generated, this is what is sent to us:

• Every one of your answers, stored question by question rather than only as a total: the forty Connection Profile questions, and the nine items from two published loneliness scales (see Section 8)
• Your results: your Crew Role, your scores across the five areas and the six underlying dimensions, your trust pattern, your tide, and your tensions
• The Islands you leaned toward and the trade-offs you picked
• Your Connection Plan answers: the area you chose, your goal, the obstacle in the way, what you want more of, and the optional sentence about where you would like to be in six months. Not the person and the time you write into the plan itself. Those two boxes stay in your browser, and the only thing we learn is whether both were filled in.
• Optional: an email address, and only if you ask us to send you a copy. Not the name or nickname you typed. That one is printed on your own screen and is left out of this record.
• A random ID generated by your own browser, and a count of how many times you have taken it
• Technical details: the page address, a timestamp, which version of the questionnaire you took, and a one-word note of your device family, such as Windows or iPhone. Not your full browser user agent string.

Actions on the results page. Emailing your reading to yourself, saving a PDF, sharing it, rating how accurate it felt, and checking in on your Connection Plan each send us another copy of that record, labeled with the action. One visit can produce several rows, and you should know that before you ask us what we hold.

Two of those actions also send us the file itself. Saving your reading as a PDF and emailing it to yourself both build the file in your browser and send a copy of it to us, because that is how the email gets sent and how we know the save happened. The PDF is a picture of your results page, so if you typed a nickname it is printed across the top of it. That is the one route by which a nickname reaches us, and it happens only if you press one of those two buttons.

Taking it again. The comparison you see is built in your browser from readings your own device saved, with no lookup by us. Separately, the new record we receive carries the same random ID as the earlier one, which is how we measure change across everyone.

Forms on the site. A few pages offer a short signup: a first name, an email address, and a box you can tick if you want occasional news. The contact form also takes a subject and a message. All of it goes to the same place as everything else, and any email we send back to you is sent through Google.

2.2 Collected Automatically

When you visit the site, we and Google Analytics 4 (through the MonsterInsights plugin) may collect your IP address, browser, operating system and device type, which pages you visited and how long you stayed, the page that referred you, and your general location at city or country level. Our host records your IP address in server logs; Google Analytics uses it to estimate general location and does not report it back to us.

2.3 Stored on Your Own Device

The Connection Profile saves a few things in your browser so it can pick up where you left off and show you your reading again later. These sit on your device and we cannot read them remotely: fa_anon_id and fa_visit_count (your random ID and how many times you have been back), fa_progress_v1 (your place in the questionnaire), fa_saved_result and fa_readings_v1 (your readings), and fa_plan_v1 (your Connection Plan).

Clearing this site's data in your browser deletes all of them. You will get a new random ID next time, and we will no longer be able to connect a future reading to your earlier one.

2.4 What We Never Collect

• Social Security numbers or any government ID
• Bank account, card, or payment information, since there is nothing to pay for
• Passwords, since there is nothing to log in to
• Precise GPS or real-time location
• Biometric data
• Medical records, diagnoses, prescriptions, or anything from a healthcare provider
• Data from anyone under 18

4.1 We Do Not Sell Your Personal Information

Friends Ahoy LLC does not sell, rent, trade, or lease your personal information to anyone, including data brokers, advertisers and marketing firms. It is unconditional, and it does not have a version of itself that expires when money gets tight.

What that covers. Personal information means anything that identifies you: your name, your email address, your individual answers, your random ID, your IP address. We do use aggregated, de-identified statistics about everyone who has taken the Connection Profile to write articles, report to partners and apply for grants, of the shape "this share of people scored in the loneliest third, and here is how that moved over six months." Figures like that cannot be traced back to you. We will never share, sell or disclose your individual answers or your identity for any of those purposes.

4.2 Service Providers

We share data only with the providers we need to run the site, and each gets only what it needs.

We use no advertising networks, no retargeting pixels and no social media tracking pixels anywhere on this site.

4.3 Legal Disclosures and Business Transfers

We may disclose information if the law requires it, to enforce our Terms of Service, to protect someone's safety, or to prevent fraud. Where we are legally permitted to tell you, we will.

If Friends Ahoy LLC is acquired, or enters an arrangement that involves transferring the response data, we will say so here at least 30 days beforehand and give you the chance to have your data removed first. Anyone receiving it would be bound by this Policy as it stands on the day of transfer.

How to turn analytics off

Every major browser can block or delete cookies for a single site. Google publishes a browser add-on that blocks Google Analytics everywhere, including here. Any of the common tracker blockers will stop it too, and nothing on this site breaks if you use one.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track

Global Privacy Control. If your browser sends a GPC signal we treat it as a request to opt out of the sale or sharing of your personal information. We do not sell or share personal information for advertising in the first place, so there is nothing for it to switch off, and that stays true whether or not you send the signal.

Do Not Track. Browsers send this inconsistently and there is no agreed standard for what a site should do about it. We would rather tell you that than claim we honor something we do not measure. If you want no analytics at all, the three options above do work.

Colorado law requires reasonable security around personal data, and the response database is the asset that matters most. What is in place:

• HTTPS encryption for everything in transit, including every questionnaire submission
• Wordfence firewall, malware scanning and brute-force protection
• Administrative access limited to Friends Ahoy LLC, with two-factor authentication on site administrator logins
• Response data held in Google Sheets with access limited to named accounts, not shared by link
• Automated backups with encrypted remote storage
• WordPress core, plugins and theme kept up to date
• Free-text answers and loneliness-scale responses under the same restricted access as everything else

This is the most important section here, so it is written as plainly as we can manage.

8.1 Which questions, and whose they are

Nine of the questions in the Connection Profile are not ours. They come from two loneliness scales researchers have used for years:

• UCLA 3-Item Loneliness Scale. Hughes, M. E., Waite, L. J., Hawkley, L. C., & Cacioppo, J. T. (2004). A Short Scale for Measuring Loneliness in Large Surveys: Results From Two Population-Based Studies. Research on Aging, 26(6), 655 to 672.
• De Jong Gierveld 6-Item Loneliness Scale. De Jong Gierveld, J., & Van Tilburg, T. (2006). A 6-Item Scale for Overall, Emotional, and Social Loneliness. Research on Aging, 28(5), 582 to 598.

They are there for one reason. They are the accepted way to tell whether something actually helped, and if we are going to ask funders to pay for this work we should be able to show whether it works rather than assert that it does. The same citations appear on your results page under "Where this comes from, and what it is not." The items are reproduced word for word as published, because changing the wording of a validated scale makes the measurement meaningless.

8.2 What this is not

8.3 We treat it as sensitive anyway

Colorado defines sensitive data to include information about a mental or physical health condition, and Washington defines consumer health data broadly enough to include a mental health status inferred from answers that are not themselves health records. We are not going to argue the edges of that. We describe these measures to funders as a health-related outcome, so we treat your answers to them, and the scores computed from them, as sensitive data. In practice:

• Never shared with any third party for that party's own purposes
• Never used for advertising or marketing, and never will be
• Never sold, under any definition of selling
• Never placed in a web address, a page title, or anything else an analytics provider receives
• Access limited to Friends Ahoy LLC
• Anything that leaves here is a count or a trend across everyone, and never a group smaller than ten people. No report goes out below ten, and no breakdown inside a report goes below ten either, because a group that small can be worked backwards to somebody in the room

8.4 You are never shown a score

You will not see a loneliness score anywhere. Not on the results page, not in the emailed copy, not in the PDF, and not in the comparison you get when you come back. Handing someone a number for how lonely they are, on the day they were honest enough to answer, tends to do harm rather than good. One of the scales also expressly prohibits using it to make a determination about an individual, which we agree with.

What those answers do affect, so you are not surprised by it. Saying no score is shown would be misleading if it left you thinking those nine questions sit in a sealed box. They do not. Along with everything else you answered, they help shape which season of friendship your reading describes, whether a particular tension shows up in it, which Islands it suggests, and the bands you see across the five areas. What never happens is a number, a label or a category being put in front of you or anyone else.

8.5 Free-text answers

The Connection Profile has one open box left, the optional sentence about what would be different in six months. Two earlier ones were retired. People write real things in a box like that, sometimes including other people's names, so that answer is never displayed publicly, never shared with anyone else, never used in marketing and never sold. It is optional, and your reading works the same if you leave it empty. The two boxes in the Connection Plan, where you name a person and a time, are never sent to us at all.

One last thing, since this section is about loneliness. If reading it puts you in mind of your own, 988 is the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and 211 connects you to local help, whether or not things feel like an emergency.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or send it to you in a portable format. You can withdraw consent or unsubscribe whenever you like, and you can object to direct marketing. Email connect@friendsahoy.com. We answer within 45 days and we will never treat you worse for asking.

You can also remove everything this site saved on your own device at any time, without asking us, by clearing this site's data in your browser. Section 2.3 lists exactly what that clears.

Colorado residents

We are a small operation and we do not currently process enough data to fall inside the Colorado Privacy Act (C.R.S. 6-1-1301 and following) by its own thresholds. We follow it anyway and will honor these requests whether or not the statute compels us to.

Everywhere else

If you live in California, Virginia, Connecticut or another state with a comprehensive privacy law, the same rights are available to you on the same terms and through the same address, whether or not that law reaches an operation our size. Friends Ahoy LLC does not sell your personal information and does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising under any of them. There is no advertising business here to feed.

This section is our Consumer Health Data Privacy Policy for the purposes of the Washington My Health My Data Act. That law has no size threshold, so it reaches us, and it treats a mental health status inferred from non-health data as consumer health data. The loneliness questions in Section 8 are why this section exists.

What we collect: your answers to the nine loneliness-scale items, the scores computed from them, and anything you write in a free-text box that touches on how you are doing socially or emotionally. Why: to generate your reading, to show change if you take it again, and to report aggregate outcomes to funders and partners. Who we share it with: nobody, for their own purposes. The only parties that touch it are the service providers in Section 4.2, which host and process it on our instructions and nothing else.

We do not sell consumer health data. A sale would require your separate, specific, written authorization under Washington law, and we are not going to ask you for one.

If you are a Washington resident you have the right to confirm whether we collect, share or sell your consumer health data, to get a list of everyone we shared it with, to withdraw your consent, and to have it deleted, including from our backups on their normal cycle. Email connect@friendsahoy.com with the subject line "Washington Health Data Request." We answer within 45 days, and the identification limit in Section 9 applies here too.

Adults only

Friends Ahoy is for adults 18 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18, which covers COPPA's under-13 rules and Colorado's rules on data about minors alike. If we find that we have, we delete it. If you believe a minor has taken the Connection Profile, email connect@friendsahoy.com.

Email

Every email we send has a working unsubscribe link, our real contact information and a subject line that describes the actual contents, as CAN-SPAM requires. Unsubscribes take effect right away rather than at the end of a legally permitted grace period.

International visitors

Friends Ahoy is a United States service and our data is stored in the United States. If you visit from the EU, EEA, Switzerland or the UK, your information is transferred here. Our legal bases are consent, legitimate interest and legal obligation, as set out in Section 3. You have the rights you would expect, including access, rectification, erasure, restriction, portability, objection and withdrawing consent, plus the right to complain to your local supervisory authority.

Changes to this Policy

When we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and note what changed. Continuing to use the site after that date means you accept the update. If a change would ever involve using data we already hold for a genuinely new purpose, we will ask first rather than announce it.