Privacy
nearby needs to know roughly where you are. Here is exactly how rough, and what we keep.
Location
- Your browser asks before sharing location, and only after you tap “Use my location”.
- Your phone rounds the position to a grid square about 150 m across before sending it. The server rounds it again and only ever sees and stores the centre of that square.
- Other people see a rough distance band (“under 300 m”, “about 1 km”), never a position, a square or a map.
- Your network’s approximate region (from Cloudflare) is compared with your square to stop people faking a location from far away. It isn’t stored.
What we store
| Data | Why | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Your posts and replies, with their grid square | To show them to people nearby | 24 hours, then deleted. Reported or hidden posts: up to 7 days for review |
| A random device code (made in your browser), stored as a one-way hash | To let you delete your posts, count one vote per person and enforce limits and blocks | With your posts and votes; blocks stay until lifted |
| A one-way hash of your IP address | Rate limits and blocking abuse | With your posts; blocks stay until lifted |
| Places: name, centre square, radius | To run the place feed | Until 30 days without a post |
No accounts, names, emails, phone numbers or profiles. No advertising or third-party trackers. Your browser keeps the device code, your reach setting and whether you’ve confirmed you’re 18+ in local storage; clearing site data removes them.
Services we use
nearby runs on Cloudflare. Posts are checked by an AI safety model running on Cloudflare (Workers AI); the text isn’t used to train it. We count visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and doesn’t track you across sites.
Contact
Questions or removal requests: hello@steele.app.
Last updated 10 November 2026.