Privacy policy
This privacy policy says what Community holds about you, who can see it, and how to have it removed. It covers the Community website and the Community app for iPhone and Android. Last updated September 19, 2026.
Who this is about
Community is software built and run by ABIE, LLC for the property manager of your community. Your community decides what is collected and who can see it. ABIE runs the service and keeps it working.
Two kinds of people appear in Community, and they are in very different positions.
- Residents and staff have an account. You signed in, so you can see what is held about you and ask for it to be removed.
- Visitors do not have an account. Their details are entered by the resident who invited them, or by the guard at the gate. A visitor never agreed to any of this, which is why the sections below are strict about what is kept and who can see it.
What is held about residents and staff
- Your name and email address. The email address is how you sign in, and there is no password.
- Your phone numbers, in the order you want the guard house to try them.
- Which home you belong to, and if you rent, when your lease ends as your property manager recorded it.
- Your vehicles: plate number, state, type, and a description if you add one.
- The names of anyone living at your home who has no account of their own, such as a child.
- Pets you register for your home: name, kind, breed, colour and any note you add.
- Your notification settings, and on a phone a delivery token so an arrival can reach you.
- Which announcements reached you and whether you opened them.
- What you send the office and what it sends you: maintenance and architectural requests with the photos you attach and the replies on them, notices about your home and your replies, and packages the guard house logged for you and when you collected them.
- What you take part in: your answers to surveys and polls, amenities you book, events you sign up for, and classifieds you post. Where your community shows these to neighbours, it is your name and home that appear with them.
- Your entry in the neighbour directory, only if you choose to be listed, and only the details you choose to show.
- If your community lets you open a clubhouse door from the phone: each time you ask a door to open, the phone's position at that moment is sent with the request and kept with it, so the community has a record of who opened which door and from where. The phone asks your permission first. If you refuse, you cannot open doors from the phone and nothing else changes.
- If you are a property manager: the secret your authenticator app shares with Community for two-step sign-in, and your recovery codes, both stored in a form that cannot be read back.
What is held about visitors
- The name on the pass, and which resident invited them.
- When they arrived, which home they came to, and which guard let them in.
- Their vehicle's make, model, color, plate and state, as the guard noted it.
- What they said they were visiting for.
- If they were turned away, that it happened and the reason given.
- Where a community has cameras at the gate that read plates: the plate as the camera read it, with the time and the lane. The read is matched against the community's residents, passes and deny list so the guard sees who is arriving. The camera image itself is not stored by Community.
Driver's licenses
This is switched off unless your property manager turns it on. Where it is on, and only when a guard scans the barcode on the back of a card:
- What the card holds is stored: name, date of birth, license number, address, expiry date, and the physical description printed on it.
- The barcode itself is never stored, so nothing can be read back out of it later.
- One line is ever shown on a screen: the visitor's name, the town and state the card was issued to, and a warning if the card has expired. Everything else stays in the database and is not sent to the browser at all.
Several states set rules on scanning driver's licenses and keeping what is on them. Deciding whether to switch this on is your community's responsibility.
Photos
The app can take a photo, or pick one from your library, only when you choose to attach it to a request. The photo goes to the community's file store and is shown to the office and to you with that request. Nothing else in your library is read, and the app never opens the camera on its own.
Location and network address
When a guard admits or turns someone away, the app asks their browser for a position. If the browser gives one, it is stored with that entry so it is clear where the record was made. It is the guard's device position, not the visitor's. Browsers ask permission first, and everything works if permission is refused.
On the phone, location is used for one thing: opening a clubhouse door, as described above. The app does not track where you are at any other time and never reads your location in the background.
The network address a request came from is stored the same way, with gate entries and with the change log, so an entry can be traced back to where it was made.
Who can see what
- A resident sees their own home: their household, their vehicles, their visitors, their requests and notices, and who arrived at their home. The property manager sets how far back that reaches. Neighbours see only what you choose to share: your directory entry, your classifieds, and the results of polls and surveys as totals, never your answers.
- A guard sees what the gate needs: who lives at a home, the numbers to ring, current passes, the deny list, plate reads, and packages and keys held at the guard house.
- A property manager sees their whole community, and every change made in it along with who made it.
- ABIE staff can reach the database in order to run and repair the service. That is not routine and is not used to look around. When ABIE opens a community to help its manager, that support session is written to the community's change log.
Nothing is sold. Nothing is shared for advertising. There is no advertising in Community, no analytics, and no tracking of any kind. The site loads nothing from anyone else's servers.
Other companies involved
- Microsoft sends email on behalf of your community and relays notifications to phones.
- Google delivers notifications to Android phones, and holds a gate pass if a visitor chooses to add one to Google Wallet.
- Apple delivers notifications to iPhones, and holds a pass added to Apple Wallet.
- Cloudflare carries traffic between you and the service.
How long things are kept
- Gate entries, plate reads, door openings and the change log are kept as your community's record of what happened.
- Requests, notices, packages and the photos on them are kept with the community's records for as long as it keeps them.
- Survey and poll answers are kept with the survey or poll.
- Driver's license details are kept for as long as the visit they belong to.
- A sign-in code expires after ten minutes and works once.
- A pass stops working when it expires or when the resident switches it off.
Having your details removed
If you have an account, open your account screen and choose Delete my account. That ends your access straight away and takes your name, email address, phone numbers, vehicles, door access and phone registration out of ABIE's records. Your property manager can do the same for you on request. Entries in your community's gate record and change log, and the requests, notices and answers you sent while you were a member, stay either way, because they are the community's record of what happened rather than yours.
If you are a visitor and want what was recorded about you removed, ask the property manager of the community you visited. They can do it, and ABIE will help them if needed.
Children
Community is not intended for children to use. A resident may add a child's name to their household so the guard house knows who lives there. That is a name and nothing else: no account, no email address, and no way to sign in.
Getting in touch
For anything about your own community, your property manager is the right first stop. For anything about the software itself, ABIE can be reached through www.abie.com.