Privacy policy

Last updated 12 November 2026

halfwhere (halfwhere.com) helps groups find a fair place to meet. It's built so that we learn as little about you as possible. In short: no accounts, no ad trackers, and we can't see where anyone is.

Your spot

  • When you add a spot (a suburb, a tap on the map, or your device location), your browser blurs it to about 500 m or 1 km and adds random jitter, before anything leaves your device.
  • The blurred spot, and your optional nickname, are then encrypted in your browser (AES-256-GCM) with a key that exists only in the meetup link, after the #. Browsers never send that part of a link to a server, so we store only encrypted data we can't read.
  • If you use "My location", your browser asks permission first. The exact position is used only on your device to make the blurred spot.
  • Every meetup, including all its encrypted spots, deletes itself 24 hours after it starts.
  • Anyone with the full meetup link can see the shared meeting area and nicknames, and add a spot. Share it only with the people you're meeting.

What our servers do receive

  • The meeting point, rounded to about 100 m, to find nearby places. It's worked out in your browser from the blurred spots. Search results may be kept in our edge cache for up to 5 minutes; the point isn't written to our logs.
  • Your IP address and browser details, as for any website, which our host Cloudflare uses to deliver the site and protect it from abuse. To rate-limit requests we use a one-way hash of your IP address and don't store it.
  • Anonymous daily counts: totals such as meetups started, meetups where a second person joined, plans shared, calendar adds, clicks through to each venue's website (per venue per day), and visits from links tagged with a channel (for example ?via=tiktok). These are just numbers per day, with no identifiers.
  • Aggregate traffic statistics from Cloudflare (for example requests per country and error rates). We don't set cookies or use advertising or analytics trackers. Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie if it needs to check that a visitor isn't a bot.

Stored on your device

Your browser keeps a random token for each meetup you join (so you can change your spot), the last nickname you used, a marker for meetups you started, and, for the current tab only, the channel a tagged link came from. Meetup tokens are removed after about 25 hours. You can clear all of it in your browser settings.

Other services

  • Cloudflare hosts halfwhere and stores its data, on servers that may be outside Australia.
  • Stripe processes optional support payments on its own page; we don't receive your card details. Stripe's privacy policy applies there.
  • Google Maps and Google Calendar are only involved if you tap "Directions" or "Google Calendar"; those links send the place (never anyone's spot) to Google.
  • Maps use OpenStreetMap data served from our own storage, so viewing the map doesn't contact a map provider. Venue information comes from public sources (Overture Maps Foundation and state liquor registers).
  • AI assistants can use halfwhere's public venue search (see halfwhere.com/auth.md). They can't read meetups.

Your choices and rights

Because there are no accounts and spots are encrypted, we hold no information that identifies you, and nothing to correct or delete beyond what deletes itself. If you have a question or a concern about privacy, including under the Australian Privacy Principles, email obaldwin@outlook.com.au. If you're not satisfied with our response, you can contact the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (oaic.gov.au).

Changes

If this policy changes, we'll update it here and change the date above.