Privacy policy
Running a community association means holding other people's information — names, addresses, what they owe, what they wrote to the board. This explains what Kahoa does with it.
What this document actually says
- ·Your association decides what goes into Kahoa. We hold it and process it on your instruction.
- ·We don’t sell personal information, and we don’t use one community’s data to serve another.
- ·Governing documents and questions are sent to Anthropic to produce answers. They are not used to train models.
- ·Card numbers never reach us. Stripe handles them, on your association’s own account.
- ·Kahoa staff can open a community read-only for support, and every time they do it is logged.
Homeowners: your association put your information here, and your association decides what happens to it. Section 11 explains what you can ask for, and who to ask.
- 1.Who controls what
- 2.What we collect
- 3.Homeowner information
- 4.How we use it
- 5.How the AI works
- 6.Who else touches it
- 7.Kahoa staff access
- 8.Payment information
- 9.How long we keep it
- 10.How we protect it
- 11.Your rights and requests
- 12.Cookies and analytics
- 13.Children
- 14.Changes to this policy
- 15.How to reach us
1.Who controls what
Your association is the controller of the personal information in its Kahoa community: it decides whose data goes in, why, and what happens to it. Kahoa is the processor: we hold and process that information to run the service your board asked for, and on your board’s instructions.
This matters for homeowners. If you are a homeowner asking about your own information, your association is the right first stop — see section 11.
Separately, we are the controller of the small amount of information about board members that exists because you have an account with us: your email address, your name if you gave it, and our billing records.
2.What we collect
Because you signed up
- Your email address, and your name and board role if you enter them.
- Sign-in records: the hashed code, the time, and the IP address that requested it. We keep the IP to stop someone spraying sign-in codes at your board.
- Session tokens, stored only as a hash.
Because your board put it there
- Governing documents — CC&Rs, bylaws, rules, plats, amendments — and the sections we index from them.
- The roster: unit labels, owner names, owner email addresses, unit types and dues amounts.
- The ledger: assessments, payments, late fees, fines and adjustments, per unit.
- Correspondence: mail to and from the community inbox, including attachments, plus drafts and the record of what was sent.
- Requests, violations, meetings, agendas, decisions, vendors, expenses and budgets.
- Questions asked of the document brain, and the answers with their citations.
Because the service runs
- Ordinary server and error logs. If a page fails we record what broke, with community and record identifiers — never a homeowner’s name, address or balance.
3.Homeowner information
Most of the personal information in Kahoa is not about our customer. It is about homeowners whose association put them on a roster. We treat that seriously.
We use homeowner information only to do the thing the association is using Kahoa for: send their statement, record their payment, answer their email, track their request, notice their meeting. We do not market to homeowners, we do not build profiles of them, and we do not share their information with anyone outside the vendors in section 6.
A homeowner who signs in sees only their own units, their own balance and their own requests, plus the community’s documents and meetings. They never see another homeowner’s ledger, and they never see the board’s tools.
4.How we use it
- To run the service: index documents, answer questions, keep the ledger, send what your board sends, track deadlines.
- To sign you in and keep your account secure.
- To bill your association and keep our own accounting records.
- To find and fix faults, and to keep the service standing up.
- To answer your support email.
We do not sell personal information. We do not share it for advertising. We do not use one community’s data to answer another community’s questions — retrieval is scoped to your community on every query.
5.How the AI works
When Kahoa answers a question, drafts a reply, or extracts facts from a document, it sends the relevant text — parts of your governing documents, the question, and sometimes the mail being replied to — to Anthropic, which runs the model.
Your association’s documents and correspondence are processed by Anthropic to produce answers, under Anthropic’s commercial terms. They are not used to train models.
Answers are logged with their citations, because the citation trail is part of the record your board may need later. Nothing the AI drafts is sent to anyone until a board member sends it.
7.Kahoa staff access
To answer a support question we sometimes need to see what you see. A Kahoa staff member can open your community read-only. While they are in it, the system refuses every write — they cannot post an entry, send a letter, or change a record, and this is enforced by the software rather than by policy.
A staff member holds no board seat. They appear in no directory, receive no board mail, and leave no “created by” trail. Every entry is written to an access log, with who and when.
Ask us at any time whether anyone has opened your community, and we will tell you from that log.
8.Payment information
Card and bank details are collected and stored by Stripe, not by us. We never see a full card number.
For homeowner dues, payments go to your association’s own Stripe account. What we keep is the record your ledger needs: the amount, the date, the unit, the payer’s email address, and Stripe’s reference for the payment.
For your association’s own $50 hosting subscription, we keep the billing record and Stripe’s customer reference.
9.How long we keep it
- While you are a customer — everything, because a ledger and a paper trail are only useful complete.
- Read-only after cancelling — everything stays, so your board can still export it.
- On a deletion request — removed within 30 days, and out of routine backups within a further 90 days.
- Sign-in codes — short-lived and single-use.
- Our billing records — kept as long as tax law requires.
10.How we protect it
- Traffic is encrypted in transit, and the database is encrypted at rest by our provider.
- Sign-in is passwordless: there is no password of yours for us to lose. Codes are stored hashed, expire in ten minutes, are single-use, and are rate limited against guessing.
- Session tokens are stored only as a hash.
- Every query is scoped to your community, so one community cannot read another’s records.
- Staff support access is read-only and logged, as described in section 7.
No service is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your association’s data, we will tell you and follow the notification law that applies.
11.Your rights and requests
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the personal information held about you, correct it, delete it, or get a copy. We do not sell personal information, so there is nothing to opt out of on that front.
If you are a board member
Email us and we will handle it. You can also export your association’s data yourself at any time.
If you are a homeowner
Ask your association first — they decided what to put in and they can change or remove it. If you cannot get an answer from them, write to us and we will help, though for records the association controls we will normally need to act on its instruction. Note that some records — an assessment, a lien-related notice — your association may be legally required to keep.
13.Children
Kahoa is a tool for adults running an association. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If a roster ends up containing a child’s information, tell us and we will remove it.
14.Changes to this policy
If we change how we handle personal information in a way that materially affects you — a new vendor with access, a new use — we will email every board seat at least 30 days before it takes effect, and change the version and date at the top of this page.
15.How to reach us
Email hello@kahoa.app and say which community you are writing about. A person reads it.
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