privacy policy
We wrote this in two layers. Each section opens with a plain summary of what it actually means. The formal terms follow. The formal language is what you are agreeing to, and it is worth reading if you have concerns — but we would rather start with clarity than hide behind it. We think the fine print matters, which is exactly why we do not want it to be the only thing here.
This is our Privacy Policy. Our Terms of Service covers the agreement between you and us when you use our website, apps, text messages, or attend a gathering.
Ligare is a small business. There is no legal department here, just a person and the people who help him, trying to build something worth trusting.
We wrote these pages the way we write everything else: plainly, and assuming you might actually read them. Where we advertise to you, we say so. Where we use technology to do invisible work, we say so. Where we will never go, we say that too. We would rather tell you what we do than describe it in language built not to be understood.
Our systems change often, because we are still building them. When something meaningful changes, we will update these pages in a reasonable timeframe and say what changed.
If you think we have gotten something wrong — a practice that doesn’t match what’s written here, a message you didn’t ask for, information you’d like back — email questions@ligaregatherings.com. A person reads it. We would much rather hear from you and make it right than have you assume we didn’t care.
We collect what you tell us: your contact information, your Connection Profile answers, and anything you write to us.
We use it to seat you at a table where you will connect well, to write to you, and to make the experience better.
We use AI to sort, match, draft, and screen. Some of what we send you is AI-drafted in our voice. What we never do is hand you another person’s words that a machine actually wrote.
We do not sell your data, and we never disclose your profile, your survey answers, or your writing to anyone. Our site does run advertising cookies — Section 10 says exactly what that means and how to turn it off.
We never tell an employer, client, or organizer how you personally answered anything.
We never give another guest your phone number, email address, or last name without asking you first.
You can ask us what we have, correct it, or have it deleted — just email questions@ligaregatherings.com and say so in writing.
1. who we are
Ligare Gatherings LLC ("Ligare," "we," "us," or "our") is a Texas limited liability company. Ligare means "to bind." We design and run structured social gatherings — public events, private and corporate events, and licensed gatherings hosted by others — built around board games, conversation, and deliberate table pairing.
This policy applies to our website at ligaregatherings.com, our guest and host applications, our text messaging programs, our surveys and Connection Profiles, our email and printed communications, and our in-person gatherings.
2. information we collect
2.1 information you give us
- Contact information. Name, email address, phone number, and postal code or ZIP code.
- Connection Profile responses. Answers to our profile survey, including interests, preferences, values, social and personality measures, life stage, and free-response writing.
- Event information. Which gatherings you register for, attend, or decline; dietary needs or accessibility requests; guests you arrive with or ask to be seated with; feedback you give afterward.
- Things you write. Messages you send us by text or email, responses submitted through our applications, and any writing you contribute to a shared or relayed feature, such as an anonymous message intended for another participant.
- Payment information. Processed by our payment provider. We receive confirmation of payment and limited transaction details. We do not collect or store full payment card numbers.
- Pledge information. If you pledge interest in a gathering in your area, we collect your contact information and location. If you make a pledge that saves a payment method, that method is stored by our payment provider, not by us.
2.2 sensitive information
Some of what we ask is personal. Depending on the survey or engagement, our questions may touch on subjects such as relationship status, parenting or caregiving, faith or religious background, cultural identity, health or accessibility needs, or experiences of belonging and exclusion.
Every question of this kind is optional. You can skip anything, and skipping will not exclude you from a gathering. We ask because thoughtful table pairing depends on understanding what people share and what they are looking for — not because we need a complete record of you.
We treat this category with additional care: it is used for pairing and for our own aggregate understanding, it is never displayed to other guests, and it is never reported at an individual level to a client, employer, host, or organizer.
2.3 information collected automatically
When you use our website or applications, we and our analytics providers may collect standard technical information: device and browser type, IP address, pages viewed, referring links, and general location inferred from IP address. We use cookies and similar technologies for this. See Section 10.
2.4 information from others
We may receive information about you from our ticketing platform when you register for an event, from a client or host organization that has invited you to a private gathering, or from a person who registers on your behalf.
3. how we use your information
- To seat you. Our pairing system uses your profile responses to assign you to a table with people you are likely to connect with. This is the core of what we do.
- To write to you. Personalized letters, programs, invitations, confirmations, reminders, and follow-ups by email, text, or print.
- To run gatherings. Registration, check-in, dietary and accessibility accommodations, materials, and logistics.
- To operate our programs. Including multi-day text experiences, correspondence features, and community content, where you have opted in.
- To improve the experience. Analyzing patterns across guests to refine our pairing model, our questions, our formats, and our programming.
- To communicate about Ligare. News, new gatherings, seasons, and offerings — you can opt out of marketing at any time.
- To keep things safe and lawful. Screening content, preventing abuse, enforcing our terms, and meeting legal obligations.
4. automated processing and artificial intelligence
AI helps us do the invisible work: matching, drafting, sorting, and screening.
Some of what we send you — a letter, an invitation, a message — is drafted by AI in our voice. Some of it a person reviews first. Either way, it is coming from us, and we stand behind it.
Here is the line we do not cross: when we pass you another person’s words, they are actually that person’s words. If we tell you a stranger wrote something, a stranger wrote it.
We do not use AI during a gathering. The technology stops at the table.
We use artificial intelligence and automated systems in the following ways:
- Pairing and seating. Algorithmic optimization across your profile responses to construct tables.
- Drafting. Generating personalized letters, invitations, and other communications from Ligare, written to your profile. Some are reviewed by a person before they are sent or printed; some are generated and delivered automatically. All of them are communications from us.
- Moderation and screening. Automatically reviewing submitted writing for content that would be harmful, abusive, identifying, or otherwise unsuitable to relay to another person. Flagged material is reviewed by a person.
- Analysis. Identifying patterns across responses to improve our programs.
Communications from Ligare may be AI-drafted. Communications attributed to another person never are. Where we relay writing from one participant to another, the text you receive is that person's own words, passed along after review — we do not generate it, embellish it, or compose it on their behalf. Where we say a stranger wrote something, a stranger wrote it. AI carries the mail between people; it does not write it.
We do not use automated processing to make decisions that produce legal effects or similarly significant effects about you. We do not use your personal information to train publicly available AI models, and our vendor agreements are selected with that intent.
We do not use AI-driven tools during the gathering itself. The experience in the room is human.
5. what we do not do
These are commitments, not aspirations.
- We do not sell your personal information for money, and we never sell, license, rent, or disclose your Connection Profile, your survey responses, or your writing to anyone. That database exists for one purpose: seating you well at a table. It is not a product and it is not for sale.
- Our website does use advertising cookies that share online identifiers with Google and Meta so we can advertise gatherings and measure whether those ads work. Some state privacy laws classify that activity as "sharing" or "targeted advertising" rather than a sale. Section 10 explains exactly what happens and how to opt out. We would rather name it than hide behind a definition.
- We do not share your individual survey or profile responses with your employer, a client, a host, or an organizer — only aggregated findings, and only above a minimum group size.
- We do not give another guest your phone number, email address, or last name without your permission.
- We do not publish anything you write with your name attached unless you have agreed to it.
- We do not use your personal information to train publicly available AI models.
- We do not present AI-written text to you as though another person wrote it.
6. sharing and service providers
We share information with service providers who help us operate. These include, by category: our database and customer records platform; survey and form tools; email delivery providers; text messaging providers; payment processing; event ticketing; scheduling and automation infrastructure; hosting; analytics; and AI model providers.
These providers act on our instructions and are permitted to use your information only to provide services to us. We select vendors with reasonable security practices, but we do not control their systems and cannot guarantee their security.
We may also share information: with a venue or host organization to the limited extent needed to run a gathering (for example, headcount and dietary needs); with a client organization for a private event, subject to the limits in Section 14; where required by law, subpoena, or legal process; to protect the rights, safety, or property of Ligare, our guests, or others; and in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, in which case we will notify you.
7. content you share with other participants
Some of our programs invite you to write something that may be shared with another participant — for example, an anonymous message passed to another guest, or a correspondence exchange conducted through our text line.
- Participation is voluntary and opt-in.
- Submitted writing is screened before it is relayed. We remove or hold content that is abusive, harmful, identifying, or otherwise unsuitable.
- Your name and contact information are not attached to relayed content. Contact details are never exchanged between participants through these features.
- Do not include your full name, phone number, email address, home address, or social media handles in writing intended for another participant. We screen for this, but we may not catch everything.
- Once your writing has been relayed to another person, we cannot retrieve it from them. You may ask us to remove your writing from future circulation at any time.
- We may retain and reuse anonymized writing in future programs, printed materials, or publications. See the license in our Terms of Service, Section 10.
8. text messages
We send text messages only to people who have given express written consent, or who have asked us to contact them this way. When you provide consent, we tell you what kind of messages to expect and how often.
- Reply STOP to any message to stop receiving texts. Reply HELP for help.
- Message and data rates may apply. Message frequency varies by program.
- Consent to receive text messages is not a condition of purchasing anything from us.
- We maintain a suppression list. If you opt out, we keep a record of your opt-out so that we do not contact you again.
- We do not share your phone number with third parties for their own marketing.
Full messaging terms are in our Terms of Service, Section 12.
9. how long we keep your information
We keep your information for as long as we have a relationship with you and for as long as it remains useful for the purposes described in this policy — including seating you well at a future gathering, which works better the more we know about you over time. We do not delete your history on a fixed schedule.
You can ask us to delete your information at any time, and we will. See Section 11.
Some records we keep regardless: transaction and tax records for as long as the law requires; and opt-out and suppression records indefinitely, because keeping a record of your opt-out is how we honor it. Anonymized or aggregated information that can no longer identify you may be kept without limit.
10. cookies, analytics, and advertising
Our website uses cookies and similar technologies for basic functionality, to remember your preferences, to understand how people find and use the site, and for advertising.
- Essential cookies keep the site working — navigation, forms, and checkout.
- Analytics. We use a tag management system and web analytics to understand traffic and site performance.
- Advertising and conversion tracking. We use advertising and measurement technologies from Google and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) across our website, including our ticket and season pass purchase pages. These place cookies and share online identifiers — such as a device or browser identifier, the pages you viewed, and whether you completed a purchase — with those companies. We use this to show ads to people likely to be interested in a gathering, to show ads again to people who visited us and did not buy, and to understand which ads led to ticket sales.
Under some state privacy laws, this kind of advertising activity is called "targeted advertising" or "sharing," even though no money changes hands and we are not selling lists of names. We want to name it plainly rather than hide behind a technicality.
We do not allow advertising technologies to run on our Connection Profile or other survey pages. What you tell us in a survey does not go to an advertising network.
opting out of targeted advertising
- Email questions@ligaregatherings.com and ask us to stop processing your information for targeted advertising. We will honor it.
- Use your browser settings to block or clear cookies, or a browser privacy signal such as Global Privacy Control, which we honor where technically able.
- Adjust your ad settings directly with Google and Meta through their own account controls.
Opting out of advertising does not stop you from receiving gathering invitations you have signed up for.
11. your rights and choices
Wherever you live, you may ask us to:
- Tell you what personal information we hold about you.
- Give you a copy of it.
- Correct anything that is wrong.
- Delete it.
- Stop sending you marketing email or text messages.
- Stop processing your information for targeted advertising.
To make a request, email questions@ligaregatherings.com and tell us what you want us to do. We ask for requests in writing so that we have a clear record of what you asked for. We may need to verify your identity before we act — we are not going to delete someone's history because a stranger emailed us about them.
We will respond within 45 days. Where we delete, we remove your information from our active systems and instruct our service providers to do the same. We may decline a request where the law permits — for example, where we must keep transaction or tax records, or where we keep a record of your opt-out in order to honor it. If we decline, you may appeal by replying to our response, and we will explain our decision.
If you are a Texas resident, the Texas Data Privacy and Security Act gives you these rights, including the right to appeal a refusal and to complain to the Texas Attorney General. Residents of other states with comprehensive privacy laws have similar rights, and we extend the rights above to everyone regardless of where you live.
We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights.
12. security
We take reasonable measures to protect your information, including access controls, encryption in transit, and limiting who on our side can see what. Our vendors maintain their own security programs.
No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that your information will never be accessed without authorization. We tell you this plainly rather than asking you to waive claims you may have — a promise we could not enforce anyway. If a breach affecting your personal information occurs, we will notify you as required by law.
13. age requirements
Our services are intended for adults. You must be at least 18 years old to complete a Connection Profile, register for a gathering, join a text program, or otherwise use our services. Gatherings held at venues serving alcohol may require you to be 21 or older.
We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If we learn that we have, we will delete it. If you believe a minor has provided us information, email questions@ligaregatherings.com.
14. corporate, client, and host engagements
If your employer or organization hired us, your individual answers stay with us.
We report patterns, not people. No group smaller than five people is ever broken out in a report.
Nothing you tell us goes into your personnel file, because your employer never sees it attached to your name.
When an organization engages Ligare for a private event or program, we act on that organization's behalf for certain purposes, and we handle participant information under the following commitments:
- Individual responses to profile surveys, feedback instruments, or inclusion and belonging questions are not disclosed to the client organization, its leadership, or its human resources function.
- We report findings only in aggregate. We do not report any demographic breakout, subgroup finding, or verbatim response where fewer than five individuals make up the group, because smaller groups can identify people.
- We may share operational information with the client — attendance, headcount, dietary and accessibility needs, and general feedback themes.
- Verbatim comments are shared only where they have been reviewed and cannot reasonably identify the person who wrote them, and only with the participant’s understanding that comments may be shared in that form.
- Participation in any survey is voluntary.
Where a host operates a gathering under license from Ligare, that host receives only the information necessary to run the event. Guest profile data remains with Ligare, and hosts are contractually bound to the commitments in this policy.
15. changes to this policy
We may update this policy. If we make a material change to how we use your information, we will notify you by email or text before the change takes effect, where we have a way to reach you. The current version and its effective date will always be posted here.
16. contact us
Questions, requests, or concerns: questions@ligaregatherings.com
Ligare Gatherings LLC
815 Robin Street, Houston, Texas 77019
By using our website, completing a Connection Profile, joining a text program, making a pledge, or attending a gathering, you confirm that you have read and agree to this Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service.
it means to bind.