Privacy & Security
Beacon is built for trust and safety. We collect the minimum data needed to provide public incident reporting while protecting your anonymity and securing your evidence.
Trust principles
- No account required. Use the app without email, phone, or sign-up. We don’t know who you are.
- Encryption on your device. Sensitive data (exact location, full narrative, media) is encrypted on your phone before it is sent. Our servers store only ciphertext and cannot decrypt it.
- Location privacy. Your precise GPS is never stored in plain text. Public maps use a coarse ~400m grid with jitter so your exact position stays private.
- No advertising or tracking. We don’t use advertising IDs or sell data. Session tokens are anonymous and rotatable.
What we store (servers)
On our systems we store only what’s needed for the service:
- Public incident fields: category, short public summary, timestamp, coarse location (grid cell), and optional public media you choose to share.
- Encrypted bundles: ciphertext of your full report and media. We cannot decrypt these; only authorized partners with the right keys can.
- Anonymous session and device identifiers for rate limiting and abuse prevention—not linked to your identity.
What we don’t collect
- No account or identity data (email, phone, name)
- No precise GPS in any public or server-side database
- No advertising identifiers or cross-site tracking
- No device fingerprinting for identification
Safety and abuse prevention
We use rate limiting, anonymous session checks, and abuse scoring to reduce spam and misuse. We do not use your data for marketing or third-party sharing. For security or privacy inquiries, contact the address provided in the app or documentation.
Transparency
Our design system, security overview, and privacy practices are documented so you can see how Beacon works. We prioritize clarity and predictability—no hidden tracking or surprise data use.