Privacy

Meshbell collects no personal data. There are no accounts, no analytics, no advertising and no tracking. What is yours stays on your device.

What stays on your device

• Your signing key, and the keys of neighbors you have enrolled. Stored in the iOS keychain and local storage on this device, never uploaded and never published. A directory of who lives in a neighborhood is a safety risk we refuse to create.
• Your watched places. Stored on the device only.
• Bulletins you have received. Held in a local log on your device.

Permissions, and the narrow reason for each

• Bluetooth. Used only to reach a paired LoRa mesh radio, to send and hear bulletins. Nothing else.
• Location. Used only to center a watched place when you tap to add one, and to work out the coarse area you may choose to attach to a report you send. It is never tracked. Attaching a place to a report is off by default, and what goes out is an area about a kilometre across, never your exact position.
• Camera. Used only to scan a neighbor's key QR code during in-person enrollment. Nothing is photographed, stored or sent. The receiver page at meshbell.com/r/ also uses the camera, entirely on your device and only while you hold that page open, and neither an image nor anything it receives ever leaves your phone.
• Local network. Used only to reach a Meshbell Wi-Fi bridge on the network you are already on. That traffic stays on your local network.
• Notifications. Used only to alert you to hazards near a place you watch.

What travels over the mesh

Bulletins you or others create are broadcast over the local radio and Wi-Fi mesh so neighbors can see them. That is the point of the app. They carry no account and no personal identifier beyond a public signing key you control, and each recipient's own device does the checking. A report you send reaches everyone in radio range, signed, and it cannot be taken back.

Records are signed, not encrypted. Meshbell is not private messaging. Treat anything you put on the air as readable by anyone in range.

The coordination layer

The roll-call, the shared lists and the board live on a neighbor's bridge on your local network, not on any server of ours. The roll-call shares an aggregate count and nothing else: no names, no addresses, no locations, and no roster of who checked in. Board posts carry whatever name you type.

Third parties

Meshbell may display public government hazard alerts, for example United States National Weather Service data. We share your information with these and with anyone else exactly never, because we do not have your information.

Children

Meshbell is a general audience safety app and does not knowingly collect information from anyone.

Changes and contact

If this policy changes, the updated version appears here. Questions go to meshbell.com.

Back to the overview