Safety
Safety on Together
The short version: visitors appear on the live map only as coarse, unnamed dots, and nobody can be found or contacted through it. A small, invite-only beta lets members become pen pals, with block, report and a moderation queue from the start.
What protects you on the live map today
- You appear only as an unnamed dot at a city of 100,000 people or more, or your whole country. Your IP address is never stored or shown.
- Your name appears only if you choose, after a warning, and you choose again each visit. Names can hold letters only: no numbers, links or @, so nobody can post contact details.
- Waves from visitors are wordless and anonymous. Only signed-in members can become pen pals, and only when both wave.
- Nothing is kept: you disappear within a minute of leaving, with no history, timestamps or join order.
- There are limits on how often anyone can change their name or wave, and I can pause the live map at once if I need to.
- Appearing with a name is for adults only. This is by your own confirmation; there is no age check.
Facts cannot be used to find you
When two places are compared, distances are rounded to the nearest 100 km, no direction is given, and times of sunrise and sunset are rounded to the quarter hour. Everything uses the centre of a large city or a country. Nothing about which two places were compared is stored.
Pen pals in the beta
Members join only with an invite from me, and must be 18 or over. Pen pals can also talk in a small chat dock. Visitors who allow the community chat cookie can use regional rooms under an automatic anonymous name or a temporary name that does not belong to a member. People sharing a city, country or continent can open a local room, and others can deliberately join an active regional conversation they discover on the map. What is in place:
- a wave has to be returned before two people can write; passing is silent, and a wave is never repeated after a pass;
- block and report on every letter and pen pal; blocking works both ways and ends the connection at once;
- a moderation queue that I review, with every action I take written to an audit log;
- letters are plain text, encrypted where they are stored, and cannot contain links, email addresses, phone numbers or handles;
- chat messages are screened before delivery; ordinary swearing is allowed, while threats, exploitation, targeted hate and personal contact details are held for review;
- every incoming chat message can be reported, and messages from a blocked member are hidden;
- every picture is re-made on the server, which removes hidden location data; face photos are only seen by pen pals;
- limits on waves, letters and reports each day;
- downloading and deleting everything, at any time, from your account.
Still to come before the beta grows beyond friends: verified email (once mail is set up), published response times for reports, written rules with a way to appeal, and a UK legal review of privacy and online safety duties.
Not a crisis service
Together cannot help in an emergency. If you or someone else is in danger, contact your local emergency services.
Report a problem
Visitors and members can report chat messages. Members can also report any letter, picture or pen pal. If anything else on Together worries you, email me. Reports come to me directly.