Privacy Policy

This explains what RealAly collects, why we collect it, and who else sees it.

We do not sell your personal information.

1. What we collect

When you create an account

• Signing up with Google: your email address, name and profile picture. We request only Google’s basic email and profile scopes. We cannot see your Gmail, Drive, Calendar or contacts, and we never ask for them.
• Signing up with email: your email address and name. Your password is handled and hashed by our authentication provider; it never reaches us in readable form.
• Your time zone, so session times are shown in your own clock rather than ours.

When you use RealAly

• Bookings: who, when, which session type, what you paid, and any note you send ahead.
• Messages you exchange with an advisor, and any file you attach to one. A one-off booking has its own thread; a membership has a single ongoing one. Writing to RealAly support opens a third kind.
• If you report somebody, what you wrote and who it is about. Naming a person is optional and only offered for people you have had a session with.
• Session recordings. See section 2 below, which is about nothing else.
• The write-up an advisor may leave after a session, which describes what you discussed and stays in your library.
• Reviews you write.
• Advisors you save.
• Which version of our terms you accepted, and when.

What you type into the box on your dashboard that suggests advisors is not stored. It is used to rank advisors for that one request and is gone when the page has answered.

If you apply to be an advisor

• Professional details: license number and state, brokerage, years licensed, markets served, specialties and biography. Most of this appears on your public profile; your license number is used for verification.
• Any supporting document you upload, which is stored privately and is not public.

Payment information

Handled by Stripe. Card numbers never reach RealAly's servers. We store only the identifiers Stripe gives us, a payment reference and an account reference, plus the amount and status, so we can show your booking history and issue refunds.

Advisors complete Stripe's own identity verification in order to be paid. Whatever that involves is collected by Stripe under Stripe's privacy policy, not by us.

2. Session recordings

Sessions held in the RealAly video room are recorded. Sessions held on an advisor's own Zoom link, or in person, are not: we are not there and there is nothing for us to capture.

Both people agree before either of them is let into the room, and agreeing is a condition of joining rather than something asked once the camera is on. We record that agreement against the session. Either person can stop a recording at any point during the session, and stopping is final for that session.

A recording is stored privately. There is no public link, and no download anywhere, for anybody. Watching one means asking us for a signed link that expires, and we check who is asking every time:

• the agent who booked the session, unless it was refunded in full;
• the advisor who gave it, always, because it is their own advice;
• RealAly staff, to settle a dispute or investigate a report. We do not watch recordings for any other reason.

A full refund revokes the agent's access, whichever way the refund was issued. That is worked out from the booking each time somebody asks to watch rather than stored as a flag, so it cannot be missed. A partial refund does not revoke it, because a person chose that amount.

3. Why we collect it

• To run your account and let you book and attend sessions.
• To take payment and pay advisors.
• To show advisors publicly so people can find and evaluate them.
• To keep the marketplace honest: verifying licenses, tracking cancellations and no-shows, reading reports about a person and acting on them.
• To give a recording and a write-up back to the person who paid for the hour, and to settle a dispute about what happened in one.
• To email you about your bookings.
• To meet legal, tax and accounting obligations.

4. What is public

An approved advisor's profile is public and indexed by search engines : name, photo, headline, biography, specialties, city and state, session types and prices, rating and reviews.

Client accounts are not public. Your name is visible to an advisor you have booked; it is not shown to anyone else. Reviews are published with your first name.

5. Who else processes your information

Only these, and only to run the service:

• Supabase: database, authentication and file storage.
• Stripe: payments, payouts and identity verification for advisors.
• Vercel: hosting and request logs.
• LiveKit: carries the video and audio of a session held in the RealAly room, and makes the recording.
• Cloudflare: relays the video and audio of a session when the two browsers cannot reach each other directly, which is roughly one call in six. It carries the media and does not store it.
• Resend: sends our email, so it handles your address and the contents of what we send you.
• Google: only if you choose to sign in with Google.
• Microsoft Clarity: measures how the public pages are used, including a replay of what a page looked like as somebody moved around it. It runs on the pages anyone can see and is switched off everywhere you have to sign in, so it never touches your bookings, your messages or a session write-up.
• Google Ads: on the pages anyone can see, so we know which of our ads bring people to RealAly. Like Clarity, it is switched off everywhere you have to sign in.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, or to protect someone's safety or our legal rights. If RealAly is ever acquired, account information would transfer with the business, and we would tell you first.

6. Cookies

We use cookies to keep you signed in. Blocking those will stop sign-in working.

On the public pages, Microsoft Clarity sets two of its own so it can tell one visit from the next, which is how a heatmap knows ten people from one person visiting ten times. They are not set on any page you have to sign in to.

The public pages also carry Google Ads, which sets its own cookies so we can tell which of our ads brought somebody here. Google may use them to show RealAly ads to people who have visited before. They are not set on any page you have to sign in to.

7. How long we keep it

• Account and profile information: while your account exists.
• Bookings, payments and refunds: at least seven years after the transaction, because tax and accounting rules require it. This is the one category we cannot delete on request.
• Messages, attachments and reviews: while your account exists.
• Session recordings and the write-up an advisor leaves: while the session they belong to exists, because the point of both is that they outlast the hour. Ask us and we will delete a particular recording.
• Which version of our terms you accepted: kept, including older acceptances, because the record of what you agreed to at the time is the whole use of it.

8. Your choices

You can ask us to:

• send you a copy of what we hold about you;
• correct anything wrong;
• delete your account, and we will remove your profile and personal details, and keep only the transaction records described above;
• stop emailing you anything other than messages about your own bookings.

Email hello@realaly.com and we will respond within 30 days. Depending on where you live you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA; we will honour those requests on the same basis.

9. Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Access to your data is enforced at the database level, so a row is only readable by the people it belongs to, rather than relying on the application to remember to check. Card details are held by Stripe, not by us.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you and any regulator we are required to notify.

10. Children

RealAly is for adults. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 18; if we learn we have, we delete it.

11. International transfers

Our providers process data in the United States. If you use RealAly from elsewhere, your information will be transferred and processed there.

12. Changes

We will update this policy as the product changes, and announce material changes by email or in the product before they take effect.

13. Contact

hello@realaly.com

See also our Code of Conduct, our Platform Terms of Service, and the agreement for your side of the marketplace: Agent or Advisor.