Purcell Ventures LLC operates Rufus. Rufus is not affiliated with or endorsed by Georgia College & State University.
What we collect
School email address
To confirm you are a current student and to send sign-in links · Yes
Display name, derived from your email
So the other person knows who they are meeting · Yes
An attestation that you are 18 or older
Eligibility · Yes
Gender (woman / man / prefer not to say)
Only to apply ride-matching preferences. Never shown on a profile. · Optional; defaults to "prefer not to say"
Phone number
Released to the other party only after a ride is agreed, so you can coordinate · Yes to complete a ride
Vehicle make, model, colour, and the last four characters of the plate
So a rider can identify the car and tell someone which car they got into · Drivers only
Payment app handles (e.g. Venmo)
Displayed so you can settle the cost directly · Drivers, optional
Ride records: origin, destination, time window, offers, who rode with whom
To run the service and to produce anonymous usage statistics · Yes
Push notification token
To tell you about a matching request or a new offer · Optional
Product usage events (e.g. "posted a request", "opened the board")
To understand what to fix and build next, and to produce anonymous totals · Yes
Anything you write in the feedback box
So we can act on it · Optional
What we collect about your location
Updated 2026-09-18 to match a real change to the app: Rufus now reads your device's location once, in the foreground, only when you open the map to choose a pickup point. You can decline this and still use Rufus, by typing an address or picking a listed campus spot instead.
What we deliberately do not collect
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Continuous or background location. Rufus does not track you between rides, and does
not read your location at any time other than the moment described above. We do not build a history of everywhere you have been.
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Your contacts, calendar, photos, or microphone.
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Your full licence plate, driver's licence, or date of birth. We store an over-18
attestation, not a birthdate.
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Payment card or bank details. Rufus processes no money and has no payment system.
What we never do
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We do not sell your information.
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We do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.
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We do not use it to train anything.
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We use no third-party analytics. No Firebase, Amplitude, Mixpanel or similar. Usage
events are recorded in our own database and go nowhere else. This is a deliberate constraint, not an oversight: an analytics SDK would ship your behaviour to a company you have no relationship with.
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Usage events never contain your email, phone number, licence plate, or anything you
typed into a ride request.
Who sees what
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Before a ride is agreed: a driver sees your display name, pickup and destination,
time window, seats, and any note you wrote. Not your phone number. Not your gender.
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After a ride is agreed: you and the other person each see the other's phone number,
and the rider sees the vehicle details.
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Anyone you send a share link to sees the driver's display name, whether they have
chosen to support Rufus, the vehicle and partial plate, and the destination. Never a phone number or an email address. The link stops working 24 hours after the ride completes.
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Service providers who host the app and send our email, bound by their own terms. We
do not give them your data for their own purposes.
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Law enforcement, only if legally compelled.
Retention
Ride records and usage events are kept for 12 months, then aggregated into anonymous statistics and the identifying records purged.
Statistics we may share with the university are aggregate only — totals such as rides completed, or how many requests went unanswered. They contain no names, no addresses, and no individual's ride history.
Share links expire 24 hours after a ride completes. Sign-in links expire after 20 minutes and work once.
Be aware: making ride coordination legible also makes it a record. If a serious incident occurs, these records may be subject to legal process. We keep as little as the service allows, deliberately, for exactly this reason.
Your choices
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Delete your account at any time, from inside the app. Deletion removes your account
and your personal details. Completed ride records are retained in anonymised form, detached from your identity, because the other party has an interest in the record of a ride they took.
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Turn off push notifications in your device settings.
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Leave gender as "prefer not to say." You will only be matched with people who set no
preference, which may mean fewer matches. That trade is yours to make.
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Block any user. They are not told.
Security
Sign-in links are single-use, short-lived, and stored hashed. Session tokens are held in your device's secure storage. Access to ride requests is filtered on our servers, so a driver is never sent a request they are not eligible to see.
No system is perfectly secure, and we will not claim otherwise.
Children
Rufus is for people 18 and older. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If we learn an account belongs to a minor we will delete it.
Changes
We will require you to accept a materially changed policy before continuing to use Rufus, and we record which version you accepted and when.
Contact
Purcell Ventures LLC `support@purcellventures.co`