Safety
centre

Our approach to safety

Pin My Map is a map of people you actually know, and most of what keeps it safe is what we chose not to build. There is no public feed. There is no way to browse strangers. There is no live location, and there never has been.

You add friends by invite, so nobody appears on your map because they searched your name. And every pin on your map is there because you typed it in. The app does not learn anything about your movements on its own.

The rest of this page explains exactly what that means, and what to do if someone on here makes you uncomfortable.

What we never collect

This is the question we get asked most, so here it is plainly.

• No GPS tracking. The app does not follow your phone, in the foreground or the background. We could not show a friend where you are right now even if we wanted to.
• No precise locations. A pin is a city. It is not an address, a neighbourhood, or a place you check in to.
• No dates by default. A trip is a month and a year, so your map says "Lisbon, March" and nothing more precise.

There is one exception, and it is yours to make: when you share a trip with Close Friends only, you can add the exact days. Nobody outside that tag ever sees them, and if you do not turn it on, the dates do not exist.

This is a deliberate trade. It makes some things impossible, such as ever telling you that a friend is three streets away, and we think that is the right price for a map of the people you love not doubling as a tracking tool.

Who sees your pins

Your friends are not one group, so the app does not treat them as one. You tag people as Close Friends, Family, Workmates, or anything you invent, then decide which tags can see each kind of pin.

• Past trips, future trips and your wishlist each have their own audience. Future trips can be tighter than past ones, which is what most people want.
• Your home base city is visible to all your friends. It is the part that makes meeting up possible, so it stays on.
• Any single pin can also be hidden from specific friends, without changing any of your other settings.

Hiding is enforced on our servers, not just in the app: a friend you have hidden a pin from is never sent that pin, and never gets a notification about it.

You can change all of this whenever you like, in Profile → Privacy.

Blocking and reporting

If someone on Pin My Map is bothering you, you have three options, and you can use them in any order.

1. 1

   Block them

   Immediate and mutual. They lose all access to your map, you disappear from theirs, and neither of you can contact the other through the app. Your blocks are listed in your profile, and you can undo one at any time.

2. 2

   Report them

   Sends the account to us for review, with whatever you want to tell us about what happened. Reports help us act faster and spot someone doing the same thing to other people.

3. 3

   Remove them as a friend

   Not everything is a safety problem. If a friendship has simply run its course, removing the friend is quiet, is not a punishment, and takes away their access just the same.

If you are ever in immediate danger, please contact your local emergency services first. We can take an account down; we cannot help quickly enough in an emergency.

Good habits

• Only accept friend requests from people you actually recognise. Your map is only as trustworthy as the people on it.
• Look over your privacy tags now and then, especially after adding a group of new people at once.
• Travelling somewhere you would rather not broadcast? Narrow that one pin to a single tag, or hide it from specific friends.
• Keep your wishlist as open as you like, because it is the pin type most likely to find you company.