What Patrol knows, and what it will never know

Two things, and neither of them is an address. Patrol has never asked for one and has nowhere to put one.

Your Eircode's first three characters. That is the routing key — a whole town or Dublin postal district, covering thousands of households. The remaining four characters identify a single letterbox and are never used to locate you, never shown to another member, and never included in an alert.

A point you tap on a map. A routing key is far too big to be a neighbourhood — a Dublin postal district runs to tens of thousands of households — so when you join we ask you to tap roughly where you live. Your road is close enough; we are not asking for your house, and the map says so.

Whatever you tap is rounded to about 100 metres before it is stored. That rounding happens on our server, on the way in, so it is not a promise the app could quietly break. What lands in the database is a stretch of road shared by a number of households — and two neighbours on the same street frequently round to the identical point, which is the intended effect.

It is used for one thing: working out which alerts are near enough to show you. It is never displayed, never sent to another member, and never passed to an advertiser or a data broker.

Why we ask you instead of looking it up: Eircode's last four characters are deliberately randomised, so location genuinely cannot be derived from them. The alternative is licensing the national address database — which would hand us your actual front door whether you wanted us to have it or not. Asking you is less invasive, and it leaves you in control of how precise you are.

You can decline. Skip it and nothing is blocked — your alerts simply cover your whole Eircode area, which is a great deal less useful. You can set or change the point at any time from settings, and clearing it is a matter of tapping somewhere vaguer.

Members inside your area, and only members inside your area, see:

• Your first name and last initial, on anything you post — nothing else from your profile
• The approximate area an alert relates to, as you describe it
• The time you posted

They cannot see, and there is no way to obtain:

• Your address, your Eircode, or the point you tapped on the map
• Your email address or phone number
• A list of who else is signed up nearby — no member directory exists, for anybody
• Anything at all if they are not a verified member in your area

Nothing posted on Patrol is public. There is no public feed, no shareable alert page, and nothing for a search engine to index. A logged-out visitor — including anyone reading the homepage — sees no real reports at all.

Patrol is for describing what happened, not for identifying who you think did it. The difference is the entire difference between a neighbourhood watch and a mob, and it is not a matter of tone — naming somebody in a false accusation can be defamation, and it is your name on the post.

Patrol also does not exist to organise a response. Do not confront anyone, do not follow anyone, and do not investigate. If it is worth acting on, it is worth the Gardaí.

Every alert carries a report control. It takes one tap, asks for a reason, and comes to us. We read every one.

Alerts that name or accuse an individual, that identify a house, or that carry abuse or a slur are removed. Accounts that do it repeatedly are removed. Posting is also rate-limited and requires a confirmed email address, which is what stops somebody creating an account to make one accusation and disappearing.

Being straight about the current state: moderation is a small team reading reports, not an automated system and not a 24-hour desk. There is no in-product blocking or muting of another member yet, and coordinator tools for residents' associations are not built. We would rather write that here than have you discover it. Anything urgent: hello@patrol.ie.

• Not an emergency service — nobody is monitoring it, at any hour
• Not the Gardaí, and not affiliated with An Garda Síochána or any government agency
• Not a way to report a crime — posting here reports it to nobody official
• Not a source of verified information — every alert is one neighbour’s account
• Not a place to name suspects, organise a response, or investigate anyone
• Not a surveillance system — Patrol has no cameras, no sensors and no location tracking

Patrol stores your name, email address, Eircode, the area it resolves to, an approximate location rounded to about 100 metres if you set one, and anything you post. Optionally a phone number, if you give one. That is the whole list. Data is held on EU servers and is not sold, rented or shared with advertisers.

You can delete your account from your dashboard, yourself, without emailing anybody and without being asked to reconsider three times. Deleting removes your account and everything you posted from the database — it is not a hidden flag on a row we keep.

Under GDPR you can also ask for a copy of what we hold, or have it corrected. Email hello@patrol.ie and you will get an answer from a person. Full detail on the privacy policy and GDPR pages.

Worth answering directly, because the honest answer to “could a neighbourhood app be turned against a neighbour” is that it is the first thing anyone building one should worry about. What the design does about it:

• Nobody can find where you live through Patrol. There is no address in the system, the point you tap is rounded to ~100m, and it is never sent to another member — not in an alert, not in an API response, not anywhere.
• Nobody can enumerate who is signed up near them. There is no member list and no endpoint that returns one; area lookups return a count and nothing else.
• Nobody can post as somebody else. Alerts are attributed by the logged-in session, never by anything the sender can set.
• Nobody can post before confirming an email address, and posting is rate-limited per account.
• Nobody can quietly build a picture of which areas are unwatched: the public lookup is rate-limited and only ever returns a count.

If you find something we have missed — a way to identify a member, or to reach data you should not — email hello@patrol.ie. It will be treated as urgent and you will get a reply.