What Patrol knows, and what it will never know

An Eircode has seven characters. The first three are the routing key, which covers a whole town or a Dublin postal district — thousands of households. The last four identify one letterbox.

Patrol reads the routing key and places you at the geographic centre of that area. That centre is the location the product uses for everything: your alert radius, the distance shown on an alert, the count of neighbours near you. It is typically several hundred metres from where anybody actually lives, and it is the same point for every member in the area.

Your full Eircode is stored on your account so we can tell which area you belong to and so you can change it. It is never sent to another member, never included in an alert, never shown on a map, and never passed to an advertiser or a data broker. There is no feature, for members or for us, that turns a Patrol record into a street address — because the street address was never collected.

The short version: the most precise thing Patrol knows about where you live is “somewhere in Dublin 6”.

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 any map pin near your house
• 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, 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, because Patrol never knew — members are placed at an area centre, not an address.
• 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.