Privacy Policy

Effective Date: August 21, 2026  |  Previous version: August 19, 2026

1. Who We Are

This Privacy Policy explains how ParkNarc (“we,” “us,” or “our”) collects, uses, and shares information when you use the ParkNarc mobile app and services.

ParkNarc is operated by Noe Gutierrez, a sole proprietor in California, United States, who is the data controller for the purposes of the GDPR, the Norwegian Personal Data Act, and the CCPA/CPRA. Contact for any privacy question or request: support@parknarc.com.

2. Information We Collect

Account and profile

• Email address, via Google Sign-In or Sign in with Apple.
• Username you choose, and whether you have chosen to display it on your posts.
• The campus you select and the parking lots you add to your list. The list covers institutions in the University of California, the California State University, the California Community Colleges, and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Your selection is self-declared — we do not verify it with the institution, and the institution is not told about it.
• Push notification token for your device, if you enable notifications.
• A count of alerts you have not yet read, per lot, so the app and the app icon can show a badge. It is a number only — no message contents — and it is not shared with anyone else.
• Legal acceptance records — which versions of these documents you agreed to, and when.

Content you create

• Reports — enforcement sightings, incident reports (including type, vehicle make and color, and a short note), and check-ins with an open-spots estimate.
• Votes on other people's reports, and reports you file about other users' posts.
• Gas price reports you submit for nearby stations.
• Your blocklist — the accounts you have blocked.

Location and presence

• Precise location (GPS) when you use a feature that asks for it — such as sorting lots by distance, finding nearby gas stations, “Locate Me,” or checking in. We request permission first, and we do not track your location in the background.
• Checking in sends a coordinate for verification. To check you in, the app sends your position to our servers so we can confirm you are near that lot. That coordinate is used to make the decision and to record the distance and whether the check was passed or bypassed.
• Lot check-ins. When you check in to a parking lot, we record which lot, when the check-in started, when it ended, and how long you said you would be parked. This is what powers live open-spot counts and lot activity, and it means we know which lot you were parked in during that window.
• Staff test check-ins are logged. Staff and moderator accounts pass the same distance requirement everyone else does. When one of them checks in we record the account, the lot, the measured distance and the reason, so a staff test can be told apart from a real student’s presence afterwards. This does not apply to ordinary accounts.
• We do not keep the position you parked at. The coordinate your phone sends when you check in is used to decide whether you are close enough to that lot, and then discarded. We do not store it, and there is no history of parking positions attached to your account.
  • We keep the lot, not the spot. A check-in records which lot you were in and for how long — never where within it you parked.
  • “Vehicle location” never leaves your phone. The pin that walks you back to your car is held on your device only. It is deleted when you check out, sign out, or delete the app, and it is never sent to us.

License plate (optional)

• Your license plate, if you choose to add one. Adding a plate is optional and the app works fully without it. See Section 4.

Suggestions you send us

• If you use the Suggestion Dropbox on the Menu screen, we collect the message you write, along with your account, your university, and the app and iOS version you are running — the versions so we can tell whether something you describe is already fixed.
• Suggestions are private to us. They are never published, never shown to other users, and are not part of any campus statistic.
• We do not reply to them. Anything needing an answer should go to support@parknarc.com, and anything about another user should be reported through the ⋯ menu on their post instead.
• Please do not put personal details — yours or anyone else's, including license plates — in a suggestion.

Activity and quality signals

• Activity logs. We keep records of report and check-in events — the type of report, the lot and the time — to produce campus statistics and to improve how the app estimates parking conditions. Check-in records carry no link to your account at all; report records have theirs removed after 90 days. See Section 11.1.
• Report accuracy signals. We keep counts of how many reports you have posted, how many were corroborated by other users, and how many vehicle alerts you sent that the recipient marked as unhelpful. See Section 6.
• Moderation records. Reports filed about your content, moderator actions taken on your account, and ban records.
• Analytics and diagnostics. App usage events and performance data (Firebase Analytics) to improve reliability.

3. What Other Users Can See

Reports you post are visible to other signed-in users at your university.

• Your username is shown on your posts unless you turn that off in your profile settings.
• Your license plate is never shown to anyone and never appears on a post.
• Your email address is never shown to other users.
• Your accuracy score and report counts are private to you and are not displayed to other users.
• Your karma badge is public, if you have earned one. It is a word — “Active”, “Trusted” or “NARC” — and never a number, so it shows that you have a track record without revealing your score, your accuracy, or how much you have posted. There is no badge for a poor record: if you have not earned one, nothing is shown, which is also what a new account looks like. Your karma total itself is private to you.
• Live check-ins are used to produce aggregate counts for a lot. Other users see how many spots are reported open, not who reported it.

4. Your Vehicle and Vehicle Alerts

Telling us about your vehicle is optional, and there are two ways to do it. Either lets another user warn you about your own car — for example, if it is being ticketed or towed. You can add one, both, or neither.

Your license plate

• Your plate is stored in a normalized form (letters and numbers only) so it can be matched. One plate may be registered to one account at a time.
• Your plate is never written to a public post and is never shown to another user. When someone reports an incident and enters a plate, the matching happens on our servers; the person reporting is not told whether a match occurred.
• If your plate matches, you receive a notification describing the incident and lot. The person who reported it is only told that you responded if you choose to send a thank-you, and only then are they shown your username.
• The incident report itself is an ordinary post in that lot's feed, so the person who filed it is identifiable to you by their username on that post, in the same way as any other report.
• Blocking someone stops them from sending you vehicle alerts.
• You can remove your plate at any time in Settings, which frees it immediately.
• We keep a private history of when a plate was added, changed, or removed, to prevent abuse of the plate system.

Your vehicle description

You may instead — or additionally — save your car's make, model and colour. This is a weaker, deliberately narrower way of being reached, for people who would rather not register a plate. It is not as reliable as a plate, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise.

• A description is not unique. Many people drive a silver Honda Civic. A match on a description means somebody reported a car like yours, not that they reported your car.
• It only reaches you while you are checked in at that lot. If you are not checked in, a description match cannot notify you at all. This is deliberate: it is what keeps one report from alerting everybody on campus who owns the same model.
• A plate always wins. If the person reporting entered a plate and it matched somebody's registration, no description alerts are sent for that report at all.
• All three details are required. A make alone, or a make and a colour, will never match anything.
• An alert from a description match says plainly that the car may not be yours. You can say it was not, and that costs the person who reported it nothing — they are not told they were wrong, because on this route they most likely were not.
• Your vehicle description is never written to a public post and is never shown to another user. Like the plate, matching happens on our servers.
• You can change or remove it at any time in Settings, under My Vehicle.

5. How We Use Information

• Provide and operate the Service — sign-in, posting, notifications, security.
• Show live parking conditions, and produce statistics about how lots are used.
• Deliver notifications for lots you follow, and vehicle alerts if you have added a plate or a vehicle description.
• Assess whether reports are likely to be accurate, so the app can label them (see Section 6).
• Detect and act on abuse, false reporting, harassment, and misuse; enforce our Terms.
• Improve the product, including improving how we estimate parking availability from past activity.

6. Report Accuracy and Scoring

To keep reports trustworthy, we keep a private record of how your reports have performed: how many you posted, how many were corroborated by other users nearby in time, and how many vehicle alerts you sent that the recipient said were not helpful. From these we derive an accuracy rate.

• This record is private to your account. It is not shown to other users.
• It is used to help label reports in the app as confirmed or unconfirmed, and to identify accounts that repeatedly file false reports.
• It is a measure of report accuracy, not a judgment of you as a person, and it is not shared with your university or with advertisers.
• Correcting your own report does not count against you.

6.1 Karma

Karma is a running count of what other people gave you: reports of yours that somebody else confirmed, net upvotes on your reports, and the thanks from drivers whose vehicle you reported. It is a measure of contribution, and it is separate from the accuracy rate above — one counts what you gave the community, the other tracks whether you turned out to be right.

• Your karma total is private to you and shown only in the Menu, along with how far you are from the next badge.
• The badge it earns is public. It is a word, never a number, and there are three: Active, Trusted and NARC.
• Every badge requires other people. Posting on your own earns nothing at all — karma comes from someone else confirming what you reported, upvoting it, or thanking you for a vehicle alert. No badge is given to anyone nobody has ever backed up, so it cannot be earned by posting a lot.
• There is no badge for a poor record. If you have not earned one, nothing appears, exactly as for a brand-new account. We do not publish a negative signal about anyone.
• Karma is not used to decide whether to believe a report, restrict an account, or rank anybody against anybody else.

7. Aggregate Campus Statistics

We combine reports and check-ins into campus-level statistics — for example, which lots tend to fill first, and when enforcement is most often reported.

• These statistics are counts only. They contain no username, no account identifier, no license plate, and no free text.
• Time periods with very few observations are suppressed, so a single person's activity cannot be isolated from them.
• We may share or publish these aggregate statistics, including with universities. Because they are aggregated and suppressed as described, they are not intended to identify any individual, and we will not provide statistics designed to single out a specific person.

8. Location Use Disclosure

ParkNarc requests precise GPS location only for features you invoke — finding lots or gas stations near you, “Locate Me,” or checking in to a lot. We do not track your location in the background and we do not build an advertising profile from it.

We do not retain a precise position. When you check in, your phone sends a coordinate so we can confirm you are near that lot. It is used to make that decision and then discarded — it is not stored, not associated with your account afterwards, and there is no history of the places you have parked. It is never sold and never used for advertising.

Separately, checking in to a lot records that you were at that lot for the duration of the check-in. That record is used for live spot counts, campus statistics, and improving parking estimates. If you do not want that recorded, do not check in — the rest of the app still works.

9. Moderation, Safety, and Administrative Access

• Users can report posts and block other accounts. Reports are reviewed by our moderators.
• Moderators can remove posts and suspend accounts that break our Terms. Moderation actions are recorded, including who took them and why.
• A small number of administrators can look up an account to investigate abuse. Access to a user's email address requires a deliberate action and is recorded in an audit log that administrators cannot edit or delete.
• Repeated false reporting may affect your ability to use reporting features.

10. Sharing of Information

We may share information in limited circumstances:

• Service providers: Firebase (Google) for authentication, database, hosting, analytics, and messaging.
• Support form: If you write to us through the support form on our website, that message and the email address you give are handled by Formspree, which passes them to us. Emailing support@parknarc.com directly avoids it.
• Public data sources: Gas station locations come from OpenStreetMap contributors, and fuel price benchmarks come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. We send them no personal information.
• Aggregate statistics: As described in Section 7.
• Universities and colleges: We do not give your university anything about you. Your institution has no account, no dashboard, and no access of any kind to ParkNarc. We do not send it your reports, your check-ins, your parking history, your plate, your vehicle description, your accuracy score, or the fact that you use the app at all. The only thing an institution may ever receive is the aggregate, suppressed campus statistics described in Section 7, which are counts and are not attributable to any individual.
• Legal/safety: If required by law or to protect users, rights, and safety. A university is not a law enforcement agency and has no special standing here: if an institution asks us for information about a named person, we treat that request exactly as we would a request from any other private organisation, and we decline it unless we are legally compelled. Where we are compelled and are permitted to tell you, we will.
• Business transfer: If the Service is involved in a merger, acquisition, or asset sale.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising.

11. Data Retention and Deletion

How long each kind of information is kept:

11.1 Check-in and report history is unlinked, not deleted

Records of which lot was used and when are what make live spot counts and ticket-risk estimates work, and those readings get better the longer the history runs — so deleting them would degrade what every other user sees.

Instead we remove the link to your account. Check-in records carry no account reference at all, and the report activity log has its account reference stripped after 90 days. What is left describes a lot and a time, not a person.

We would rather be precise than flattering here: an unlinked record is not the same as an anonymous one. A lot visited by a single person at an unusual hour could in principle still be connected to them by someone holding other information. It is a large reduction in what we hold about you, not a guarantee of anonymity.

11.2 Deleting your account

You can delete your account in Settings. That removes your profile, your posts, your saved lots and notification settings, your license plate and its index entry, your accuracy record and karma, and your account credentials. Your check-in and report history has its account link removed at the same time, rather than waiting for the schedule above.

Moderation and ban records, aggregate statistics, and backups are retained as described in the table.

12. Security

We use reasonable administrative, technical, and organizational safeguards. Sensitive fields — your email, notification tokens, active check-ins, license plate, and accuracy record — are stored separately from your public profile and are not readable by other users. No system is 100% secure.

13. Your Choices

• Location: Deny or revoke location permission in device settings.
• Check-ins: Optional. The app works without checking in.
• License plate: Optional. Add or remove it at any time in Settings.
• Username visibility: Choose whether your username appears on your posts.
• Notifications: Disable in device settings or per lot in the app.
• Blocking: Block any account to stop seeing their content and to stop them contacting you through vehicle alerts.
• Account deletion: Use the in-app delete account feature.

14. Your Privacy Rights

Whoever you are and wherever you live, you can ask us to give you a copy of your information, correct it, or delete it. Write to support@parknarc.com, or use the in-app delete account feature. We will never treat you worse for exercising a right.

14.1 If you are in Norway, the EEA or the UK

The GDPR — which applies in Norway through the EEA Agreement, alongside the Norwegian Personal Data Act — gives you the right to access your data, have it corrected, have it erased, restrict or object to how we use it, receive it in a portable form, and withdraw consent at any time where we relied on it.

We answer within one month. If you think we have got something wrong, you can complain to your supervisory authority — in Norway that is Datatilsynet (datatilsynet.no). You can do that whether or not you contact us first.

14.2 Our legal basis for each purpose

Where we rely on legitimate interests you can object, and we will stop unless we have a compelling reason not to.

14.3 Where your data goes

We are based in California and our infrastructure provider is Google (Firebase), so your information is processed in the United States. For transfers out of the EEA, Norway or the UK we rely on Google's certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK and Swiss extensions, and on Standard Contractual Clauses where that framework does not cover a transfer.

14.4 If you are in California

Under the CCPA/CPRA you have the right to know what we collect and why, to access and delete it, to correct it, and not to be discriminated against for asking. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, so there is nothing to opt out of — but we honour Global Privacy Control signals as an opt-out request regardless.

We answer within 45 days and will tell you if we need longer.

Sensitive personal information. Precise location counts as sensitive under California law. We use it only to check you are near a lot, and we do not keep it — so there is no use beyond providing the service for you to limit. If that ever changes, this policy changes first and you get the choice.

14.5 If your vehicle was reported and you do not use ParkNarc

Someone can name a vehicle they saw — a plate, make and colour — in an incident report. If that was your vehicle, you have rights over that information even though you have no account and never agreed to anything.

Write to support@parknarc.com with the plate — or, if you do not know what was written, the make, model and colour — and roughly when and where, and we will tell you what we hold, correct it, or delete it. We will not need you to create an account to ask.

Neither a plate nor a vehicle description is ever shown publicly, and neither is ever matched against anything except a plate or description somebody registered about their own car.

15. Children

The Service is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

16. Changes

We may update this Privacy Policy as the app changes. When we make a material change, we will update the Effective Date above and note it in the revision history below. Continued use after changes means you accept the updated policy.

Revision history

• August 21, 2026 — Said plainly that your university is told nothing about you. Section 10 now states that no institution has an account, a dashboard, or any access to ParkNarc, and receives nothing about you — not your reports, check-ins, parking history, plate, vehicle description, accuracy score, or the fact that you use the app. The only thing an institution may ever receive is the aggregate, suppressed campus statistics in Section 7. It also records that a university has no special standing to ask for information about a named person: such a request is treated like one from any other private organisation and declined unless we are legally compelled. Section 2 now names the campus systems covered — UC, CSU, the California Community Colleges, and NTNU — and states that your campus selection is self-declared and is not shared with the institution.
• August 19, 2026 — Added an optional vehicle description, as a weaker alternative to a plate. You can now save your car's make, model and colour instead of, or as well as, a license plate. It is deliberately narrower than a plate: a description is not unique, so a match only reaches you while you are checked in at that lot, and only when nobody's plate matched the report. All three details are required, an alert from this route says plainly that the car may not be yours, and saying it was not costs the person who reported it nothing. Like the plate, it is never shown publicly and is only ever matched on our servers. Nothing about how plates work has changed.
• August 18, 2026 — Renamed the three karma badges. They are now “Active”, “Trusted” and “NARC”, replacing “Reporter”, “Contributor” and “Trusted”. Only the names changed: the badge is still a word and never a number, it is still earned the same way and at the same points, and nobody’s badge moved up or down as a result. No new information is collected or published, and your karma total stays private to you.
• August 18, 2026 — Added a third karma badge, and stopped counting silence against you. There is now a “Reporter” badge below Contributor and Trusted, so a first badge is reachable within a couple of weeks rather than a semester. Separately, the accuracy score used to treat a report nobody else happened to confirm as though it had been disproved — which pushed honest reporters on quieter campuses below the score of a brand-new account, and made every later report of theirs count for less. An unconfirmed report is now simply unknown, and never counts against you. Only an explicit “this didn’t help” from a vehicle owner can lower your score. No new information is collected or published: the badge is still a word, never a number, and your totals stay private to you.
• August 17, 2026 — Set out your rights properly, and cut what we keep about where you have been. Added a legal basis for every purpose, where your data is processed and under what transfer mechanism, the full set of GDPR rights with a one-month response time, and how to complain to Datatilsynet if you are in Norway. Added California specifics including that we honour Global Privacy Control, and that precise location is sensitive but not retained. Named the operator and data controller. Explained what to do if your vehicle was named in a report and you do not use ParkNarc. Replaced the retention paragraph with a per-category table: check-in history now carries no account link at all, and the report activity log has its link removed after 90 days — previously both were kept, tied to your account, indefinitely and untouched by account deletion. Disclosed the karma badge, the support form's use of Formspree, and removed the sweepstakes.
• August 17, 2026 — We stopped storing the position you park at, and deleted what had been collected. For a short period the app retained the coordinate captured when you checked in, intended for analysis of how lots fill. Nothing ever read it, so it was removed along with every record already stored. Checking in still sends a coordinate to confirm you are near the lot, and that coordinate is now discarded once the check is made. The on-device pin behind “Vehicle location” is unchanged and still never leaves your phone. Also corrected: staff and moderator accounts no longer skip the check-in distance requirement.
• August 10, 2026 — Added the per-lot count of unread alerts used to draw the in-app and app-icon badge, and the log kept when a staff or moderator account bypasses the check-in distance requirement. Described what checking in now sends: a position is transmitted so we can verify you are near the lot, and the distance and outcome are recorded while the coordinate itself is not kept. Stated that the position behind “Vehicle location” is stored on your device only and never reaches us. Noted that a check-in also records the parking duration you chose.
• August 6, 2026 — Added the Suggestion Dropbox: the message text, your account, university, and app and iOS version. Private to us, never published, and not replied to.
• August 3, 2026 — Added disclosures for optional license plates and vehicle alerts, lot check-ins as a distinct form of location data, private report-accuracy scoring, activity logs, gas price reports, aggregate campus statistics, moderation records, and administrative access with audit logging. Clarified what other users can and cannot see, and expanded retention and privacy rights.
• February 20, 2026 — Initial version.

17. Contact

Questions? Contact support@parknarc.com.