Privacy Policy

Effective October 12, 2026.

This policy says what The Christmas Joyride collects on christmasjoyride.com and in the Christmas Joyride app for iPhone and Android, why we collect it, who else gets it, and how to have it deleted. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.

Who we are

The Christmas Joyride runs the contest, the map and the app, and is responsible for the information described here. Write to us at The Christmas Joyride, 111 Ungerboeck Park, Dardenne Prairie, MO 63368, or email the support address at the bottom of this site.

The short version

• You can browse the map and the feed without giving us anything.
• We ask for your email when you vote, enter a house, post or comment.
• When you vote, your email goes to us and to the real estate agent who sponsored that house, and that agent may contact you about real estate.
• Vote on several houses and you can become a lead for several agents.
• Nobody texts you. Email and app notifications only.
• You can delete your account yourself, from the app, and it really deletes.

How we recognize you

Homeowners and joyriders do not get passwords. When you open the app or the site we create a random device ID and a private token for that phone or that browser. In a browser the token sits in a cookie. That device record is your account. If you give us an email address, we attach it to the record. You can move the record to a new phone or a new browser with a sign in link we email you, or by scanning a short lived code shown on the website. Agents, assistants, sponsors and our own staff log in with a WordPress account and a password.

What we collect

• Your email address, only when you hand it over: to vote, to enter a house, to post or comment, or to have us email you a route or a sign in link. We store it once and link your activity to it.
• Your house, if you enter one: the street address, its position on the map, the name you gave it, your description, your photos, your video and the tags you put on it. All of that is public, because the point is that people find the house and drive by.
• Your name, if you give us a display name for the feed. We do not require your legal name and we do not ask for your street address unless you are entering a house.
• Your activity: the houses you look at, pin, add to a route and vote for, the routes you build and drive, your posts, comments and likes, and which onboarding cards you have seen.
• Device details: whether you are on iPhone, Android or the web, the app version, when the device was last seen, and a push notification token if you allow notifications.
• Approximate location, if you allow it: the app asks your phone roughly where you are so the map opens on your neighborhood instead of the middle of the country, and so your route can start from where you are. It is used at that moment and we do not keep a trail of where you drive. Say no and everything still works; the map just opens on the market instead.
• A scrambled IP address: when a vote is cast we store a one way hash of the IP address it came from. We cannot read the address back out of it. It exists to spot one machine casting hundreds of votes, and it is used for nothing else.
• Agents and sponsors: name, email, phone, brokerage, their photo and bio, and their billing records. Card numbers are handled by Square and never reach us.

Why we collect it

To run the contest and count votes honestly. To show houses on the map and in the feed. To build and hand off routes. To email you the things you asked for. To check posts before they go live. To spot vote fraud. To bill agents and sponsors. And, plainly, to pass voter and homeowner emails to the sponsoring agent, which is what pays for the contest and the prizes.

Who gets your email address

• When you vote, your email goes to The Christmas Joyride and to the real estate agent who sponsored the house you voted for. That agent may email you about real estate. Because you can vote for many houses and different houses have different sponsoring agents, you can become a lead for more than one agent. Each agent sees only the people who voted on their own houses, and one agent never sees another agent’s list.
• When you enter a house, your email goes to The Christmas Joyride and to the agent whose link you came in on, so they can help you with your entry and get you a yard sign. If you came in without a link, our own team is your sponsor.
• Homeowners never see who voted, viewed, pinned or liked their house. They see totals only. That separation is deliberate.
• We do not sell your email to anyone outside the contest, and agents are told not to sell or trade the lists they get from us.
• Agents can export their own lead list. Once they have, they hold their own copy, and their own privacy practices apply to it.

How we contact you

By email, and by app push notification if you turn those on. We never send text messages, and we never hand your phone number to anyone so they can text you. Turn push off in the app or in your phone settings. Every marketing email has an unsubscribe link. Mail you asked for, like a sign in link, a verification link or a route you asked us to send, still goes out.

Confirming your email

After you vote we offer to send a one time link to confirm your address. Confirming makes every vote from that address count twice. We keep the confirmed status across seasons so you never have to do it again. Confirming also tells us the address is real and deliverable, which is worth something to the sponsoring agent, and we would rather say that than pretend otherwise.

Photos and video

Photos and video you upload are stored on our web host and shown in public on the map, the house card, the feed and the leaderboard. Phone photos are resized before they are sent, and we strip nothing else out, so do not upload a picture you would not want public. Video is optional and can be turned off for a whole site.

The post filter

Posts and comments can be checked automatically before they appear. The text, and any picture attached to it, is sent to Anthropic’s Claude with instructions about what to hold back. Anthropic does not use it to train their models. Anything the filter flags waits for someone on our team to approve or remove. We keep a short record of what the filter decided alongside the post.

Other companies involved

• Square takes payments from agents and sponsors. Card details go straight to Square. We store the payment id, the amount and the status, not the card.
• Anthropic runs the post filter described above.
• Expo, with Apple and Google, delivers push notifications. They get the push token for your device and the notification text.
• OpenStreetMap draws the web map, and turns an address into a point on the map. If a Google key is configured we use Google for that lookup instead. In the app the map is Apple Maps on iPhone and Google Maps on Android, and your route is handed to whichever maps app you drive with. Looking up a house address sends that address to whichever service is doing the lookup.
• The US Census Bureau supplies county outlines that we use to draw market boundaries. No personal information goes to them.
• Our web host stores everything, and our email service sends the mail. Both keep normal server logs.

Each of these only uses what we give them to do their job for us. We may also hand over information when the law requires it, or to protect people from harm or fraud, or if the business is ever sold, in which case the buyer has to honor this policy.

Cookies and what is stored on your device

The website uses a cookie to hold your device token, a cookie to remember which agent link you arrived on so your signup is credited to them (30 days), and your browser’s own storage for the route you are building. Agents and staff also get the normal WordPress login cookies. The app keeps your token, the route you are building and whether you have seen the onboarding cards on the phone itself. None of these are advertising cookies, and we do not run third party ad trackers.

Deleting your account

Open the app, go to your profile and delete your account. It is not a request queue. Here is exactly what happens:

• Your profile, your devices and your sign in tokens are deleted.
• Your pins, your routes and their stops, your likes, your posts and your comments are deleted.
• If you entered a house, the house is stripped: the title, description, address, map position, photos, video and tags are deleted, the photos are removed from the media library, its posts come down, and it disappears from the map and the feed. An empty record stays behind only so other people’s vote rows do not break.
• Votes you cast are deleted along with your email address, unless somebody else’s account is still using that same address, in which case the votes stay but stop pointing at you.
• Votes other people cast on your house stay in the contest record. We cannot delete another person’s vote for them.

You can also email us from the address on your account and ask us to do it. One thing we cannot undo: an agent who already received your email as a lead holds their own copy. Ask them to remove you, or tell us and we will pass the request on.

How long we keep things

• Your account, your house and your history stay until you delete them. Route history is kept on purpose, so next December we can show you the joyride you took this year.
• Votes are kept with their season. Past seasons are archived rather than deleted, so we can show history and settle a question about a prize.
• Sign in links, route handoff codes and verification links expire on their own, from two minutes to thirty days.
• Hashed IP addresses are kept with the vote record they belong to.
• Payment and order records are kept as long as tax law requires.
• If the plugin behind the site is ever removed, whoever removes it chooses whether the data goes with it.

Security

The site and the API run over HTTPS. Device tokens and sign in links are stored as one way hashes, so a copy of the database does not hand somebody your account. IP addresses attached to votes are hashed with a site secret. Card numbers never touch our servers. Access to the operations console is limited to accounts we have given the admin capability to, and an agent’s dashboard only ever shows that agent’s own leads. No system is perfect, and we cannot promise a break in will never happen, but if one affects you we will tell you.

Children

The Christmas Joyride is a family event and kids are welcome in the car. Accounts, votes, posts and house entries are for people 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from a child under 13. If you think a child gave us something, email us and we will delete it.

Your rights over your information

Wherever you live, you can ask us what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Deleting your account in the app does most of that in one tap. To ask for anything else, email us from the address on your account so we know it is you. We answer within 45 days. We will not treat you differently for asking.

California. If you live in California, you have the right to know what personal information we collect, use and disclose, the right to a copy of it, the right to correct it, the right to delete it, and the right to opt out of its sale or sharing. The categories we collect are listed under “What we collect” above. We collect them from you, from your device, and from the agent link you arrived on.

Handing your email address to the sponsoring real estate agent so they can market to you is likely a “sale” or “share” under California law, and we are telling you so rather than arguing about it. To opt out, email us and say you do not want your address passed to agents. Doing that means we cannot count your vote as a lead for the house you voted on, so we will tell you plainly what it affects before we apply it. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of anyone under 16. We do not use your information to make automated decisions about you, and we do not collect sensitive personal information as California defines it.

You can have an authorized agent make a request for you if you give them written permission we can check.

Where your information lives

Our servers are in the United States. The service is aimed at people in the United States. If you use it from somewhere else, your information is handled here.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The date at the top says when the current version took effect, and we post a notice on the site when a change matters. If the change affects how we use something you already gave us, we will say so before it applies.

Contact

Questions, a request about your information, or a complaint about an agent who contacted you: email the support address at the bottom of this site, or write to The Christmas Joyride, 111 Ungerboeck Park, Dardenne Prairie, MO 63368. Tell us what you want and which email address is on your account, and we will get to it.