Privacy Policy

This policy explains what information Motley NYC (“Motley NYC,” “Motley,” “we,” “us,” or “our”) collects when you use motley.nyc, how we use it, and the choices you have. Motley NYC is operated by Hypno Labs LLC (d/b/a Motley NYC). This policy works alongside our Terms & Conditions.

1. Information we collect

We collect the information you give us and a small amount that helps the service run:

• Account identity. When you sign in with Google through our authentication provider, we receive your name and email address.
• Your family profile. The details you choose to enter so we can personalize results — for example your children's grade levels, the priorities you rank, your home address or neighborhood, and school-governance preferences. Some details are sensitive and entirely optional — for example whether a child needs special-education support, or a child's ethnicity — and you choose whether to provide them. You can also add the places your family goes each week — work, family, childcare, school, or activities — with a name you give each one and how often you go. We keep these at the neighborhood level only, never a street address, and use them to estimate your family's weekly travel time from each neighborhood you look at. When you save addresses as places you're considering in Apartment Check, we store them with your profile, like your home address, and they're deleted with it.
• Saved items. The schools, neighborhoods, snapshots, matches, and admissions trackers you save.
• Chat conversations. When you chat with Motley Intelligence, we store the messages you send and the answers we give, along with which lookups ran, so we can investigate a wrong or unhelpful answer and fix it. Because you may describe your family in that chat — including the same optional, sensitive details listed above — these conversations are kept for a shorter period than anything else (see section 8). Motley Intelligence is also available without an account; those conversations are stored without any account identity attached.
• School emails you paste. If you paste an email from a school into the admissions tracker, we store it so we can read it and suggest updates to your tracker — a status, a deadline, a date, or a note, each with the line of the email it came from. Nothing in your tracker changes until you accept a suggestion. An email can name your child or mention the same sensitive details listed above, so we keep its text only while you review it (see section 8).
• Lookups from AI assistants. You can also reach Motley's public data from ChatGPT, Claude, or another assistant that connects to our MCP server, with no account. When you do, we receive only the lookup the assistant sends — a neighborhood or school name, a code, the filters or priorities to search and rank by, or an address or map point to place — and never your conversation. An assistant may attach its own context to a request, such as an anonymous session ID, your language, or an approximate location; we don't use it or keep it. Addresses are sent to NYC Planning's GeoSearch to find them on the map, and a recent address lookup may be held in memory for up to a day so a repeat question doesn't have to go back out. Lookups aren't saved to our database. The IP address a request comes from (for ChatGPT, OpenAI's; for Claude, Anthropic's) is used only to rate-limit requests; it's held only in short-lived rate-limit counters and operational logs.
• Provider match requests. When you ask to be matched with a provider (for example, a tutor), the request you submit — your child's grade and the help you're looking for, plus your name, email, and neighborhood — so we can connect you with providers.
• Provider information. If you list your services as a provider, we collect your business and contact details and the content of your listing. Identity verification is handled by Stripe Identity — the document and selfie you submit are processed by Stripe; we receive only a pass-or-fail result, not your verification documents.
• Billing information. If you subscribe to Motley Pro or to a provider listing, payment is handled by Stripe. We receive confirmation of your subscription status but never see or store your full card number.
• Basic usage signals. Limited technical and interaction data that helps us keep the service working and improve it.

2. How we use your information

• to personalize neighborhood rankings, school matches, snapshots, and reports for your family;
• to operate your account and your Motley Pro subscription;
• to run the provider marketplace — connecting families with providers and verifying provider identity;
• to send you transactional email — such as welcome, billing, and feature-ready notifications — through our email provider;
• if you turn them on, to email you admissions milestone reminders before the city's published admissions dates for your children's grades, and a note when a child's next application year is coming up — they're off unless you choose them in Settings or when you set up your profile, and each one has a one-click unsubscribe link;
• if you're on Motley Pro and turn it on, to email you a weekly summary of what changed for your family — such as deadlines coming up, admissions updates and new open houses at the schools you've saved — only in a week when something changed. It's off unless you choose it in Settings, and each one has a one-click unsubscribe link. Its opening line is written by our AI provider from counts alone (how many updates of each kind), never your name, your children, your schools or your address; and
• to maintain, secure, and improve the service.

3. Service providers

We rely on a few trusted providers to run Motley, and we share only what each one needs to do its job:

• Neon — database hosting and authentication.
• Stripe — subscription payment processing, and, for providers, identity verification.
• Brevo — transactional email delivery.
• NYC Planning GeoSearch — the City of New York's public address lookup, which we use to find an address on the map (see “Lookups from AI assistants” above).
• Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics — Tag Manager loads Google's tags on motley.nyc; Analytics is our website analytics (see “Cookies and analytics” below).
• Profound — measures how AI assistants and their crawlers reach motley.nyc. It receives our standard server request logs for public pages: the page requested, the referring site, your browser type, and your IP address. It sets no cookies.
• AI and data providers — the model and data services that power our agentic snapshots, matches, and search, and that read the school emails you paste.

4. Cookies and analytics

We use Google Analytics, loaded through Google Tag Manager, to understand how visitors find and use motley.nyc so we can improve it. Google Analytics sets cookies and collects limited technical information — such as the pages you view, your approximate location (Google derives a coarse location from your IP address and does not log the address itself), your device and browser type, and how you reached the site, including the campaign or ad link you followed. We also record when a visit leads to a signup, a newsletter subscription, or a Motley Pro upgrade — the event, not your name or email — so we can see which of our campaigns bring families here. We use this only in aggregate.

We do not use Google Analytics for advertising personalization, and we do not set advertising cookies or use it to build advertising profiles.

Your controls.

• In the EU, the UK, or Switzerland, we ask first. Analytics cookies stay off until you choose OK. Necessary only keeps them off (Google still receives cookieless visit counts), and Deny stops Google's tags from loading at all.
• Everywhere else, analytics cookies are on by default. You can turn them off at any time with Cookie preferences, which is also in the footer of our public pages.
• If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we treat it as Necessary only unless you choose OK.
• You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, or install Google's Analytics opt-out browser add-on.

Apart from Google's cookies, we set the strictly necessary cookies that keep you signed in and the service working, and one first-party cookie, mtly_src, that remembers which of our videos or campaigns brought you here (for 30 days, cleared when you subscribe to our newsletter). It follows the same choice as Google's cookies. Your cookie choice itself is kept in your browser's local storage.

5. How we share information

We share your information with the service providers above so they can operate the service on our behalf, or when we are required to by law or to protect the rights and safety of our users.

Provider matching. Motley operates a marketplace that connects families with independent, third-party providers (for example, tutors). What we share depends on how you reach a provider. When you submit a match request, we share that request and your contact details — your name, email, and neighborhood — with up to three matched providers, who may then reach out to you directly. When you connect with a single provider yourself from the public directory, we share only your email and the basic context of your request (such as the subject and grade) — not your name or street address. In every case we share only when you choose to connect, and only with the provider you are connecting to. Under some privacy laws this exchange may be considered a “sale” or “sharing” of personal information. We never include your child's name in what we share, and we share a child's ethnicity or special-education status only if you explicitly opt in when you submit the request. Once a provider receives your details, their use of that information is governed by their own privacy practices.

Apart from provider matching and the service providers above, we do not sell your personal information.

6. Your choices

• You can view and edit your profile information at any time in Settings, and you can clear or reset your saved data there.
• You can choose which emails we send you in Settings → Notifications. Admissions milestone reminders and the weekly summary also carry a one-click unsubscribe link.
• You can cancel your Motley Pro subscription at any time from Settings → Plan & Billing.
• You can change your cookie choice at any time with Cookie preferences (see “Cookies and analytics” above).
• You can ask us to delete your account and associated personal information by emailing us at the address below.
• Lookups from an AI assistant aren't tied to an account or saved to our database, so there's nothing of yours to delete; you can disconnect Motley from the assistant at any time.

7. Data deletion requests

You can ask us to delete your account and the personal information associated with it by emailing hello@motley.nyc. We will process deletion requests within 30 days. When you delete your account, we remove your profile and family details, your saved schools, neighborhoods, snapshots, matches, and admissions trackers, and your billing identifiers. If you have submitted a provider match request, we can stop sharing further data and delete what we hold, but details already delivered to a matched provider are held by that provider under their own policies — contact us and we will help you reach them. We may retain a limited amount of information where we are required to by law or for legitimate purposes such as fraud prevention and recordkeeping; payment records held by Stripe are governed by Stripe's own retention policies.

8. Retention and security

We keep your information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide the service, and we use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect it. We don't keep personal data longer than we need it: information tied to a provider connection is anonymized after the request is closed, and usage signals and operational logs are pruned on a regular schedule. No method of storage or transmission is perfectly secure, so we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Chat conversations are deleted automatically after 90 days. We keep them on a short schedule, because they can contain the most personal things you tell us about your family. Ninety days is long enough for us to look into a problem you report and no longer.

A school email you paste is kept only while you review it. Once you've accepted or dismissed every suggestion from it, we delete the email's text, and we delete it after 30 days either way. The suggestions themselves are deleted after 90 days.

9. Children and teens

Motley is for anyone 13 and older researching New York City schools and neighborhoods — parents and guardians, and the students the decisions are about. If you are under 18, please use Motley with a parent's or guardian's permission. Motley is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.

The family details you enter may describe your children (for example a child's grade level or whether they need special-education support). Any optional, sensitive details you provide about a child — such as ethnicity or special-education status — are used only to improve the fit of the results and matches we show you; they are never used for advertising and never sold. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us with personal information, contact us at hello@motley.nyc and we will delete it.

10. For providers

If you list your services on Motley as a provider, a few points apply specifically to you:

• What we collect. Your business and contact details, the content of your listing, and the result of identity verification. Verification is handled by Stripe Identity — your document and selfie are processed by Stripe, not stored by us; we receive only a pass-or-fail result.
• Public listing. The information in your listing — your business name, services, specialties, and areas served — is shown publicly in our directory. Your email and phone number are not published on your directory profile.
• Email. We may send you operational and marketing email. You can opt out of marketing messages at any time using the unsubscribe instructions, or by replying STOP, in those messages. Our mailing address for these communications is Motley, 285 Nostrand Ave, Unit #494, Brooklyn, NY 11216.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will revise the “Last updated” date above. Significant changes will be communicated where appropriate.

12. Contact

Questions about your privacy, or want to request deletion? Email us at hello@motley.nyc.