Location Sharing Done Right: Our Privacy-First Approach

When we tell people that InTown shows friends when you're nearby, the first reaction is often skepticism: "That sounds like it could get creepy fast." It's a fair instinct. Location sharing has a troubled track record in consumer apps - features that start as convenience tools can become surveillance tools if the design incentives aren't right.

So we want to be explicit about how InTown works, what it doesn't do, and why the design decisions we've made aren't just policy commitments - they're built into the product at a fundamental level.

What We Show: A Zone, Not a Point

The single most important design decision in InTown is this: your friends never see your exact location. They see that you are within a radius - a circle you define - not a street address, building, or GPS coordinate.

The difference matters more than it might seem. An exact location tells someone where you are right now, in real time. A radius tells them you're in the general area - close enough that it might be worth reaching out, not close enough to find you without your involvement.

Think of it like an area code. If someone knows you're in the same zip code, they know you're nearby. They don't know if you're at home, at the gym, at a coffee shop, or somewhere you'd prefer to keep private.

You Control the Radius

The radius you broadcast is entirely up to you. You can set it to a tight area (a few city blocks), a medium zone (a couple of miles), or a broad region (useful when traveling). A smaller radius means higher relevance - only people genuinely close will be notified. A larger radius means wider reach - good for when you're in a new city and want to surface any connections.

This gives you a meaningful privacy dial. If you're somewhere you want to keep low-key, set a small radius or pause sharing entirely. If you're at a public event where you'd love to run into friends, open it up.

Sharing Is Opt-In and Pauseable

InTown never shares your location without your explicit action. You are always in control of:

• Whether you appear in the map at all
• Which friend groups can see you
• How large your visible radius is
• Whether you're currently sharing or paused

Pausing is a first-class feature, not an afterthought. It's available from the home screen in two taps. When you're paused, you're invisible - no one sees you on the map, no notifications fire, no record is kept.

What We Don't Store

We don't build a location history. InTown is designed for presence awareness, not movement tracking. We don't create logs of where you've been, heatmaps of your patterns, or records that could be used to reconstruct your routine over time.

Your location data is used in the moment to determine proximity - and then discarded. We're not in the business of building behavioral profiles, and we have no commercial incentive to do so.

Who Can See You

Only mutual connections - people you've both followed and who follow you back - can see your proximity. You can't be discovered by strangers. Your visibility is limited to a circle of people you've explicitly chosen to include in your InTown network.

This mutual-follow requirement is another structural privacy protection. It means the only people who know you're nearby are the people you've already decided to stay connected with.

The Honest Tradeoff

To use InTown, you do have to share something about your location with people you trust. That's the value exchange, and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Social proximity-awareness requires some form of location signal.

What we can promise is that we've worked to minimize what that signal reveals, maximize your control over it, and eliminate the data collection practices that have made other location-sharing products feel invasive. The radius illustration you see on the map is just that - an illustration. Your exact address is never shown, never stored, and never shared.