Location & privacy

4gatherers is in development. Residential map coverage and mobile background execution are not perfect.

Discovery is the consent

When you turn discovery on, your current location can be returned to other eligible 4gatherers users nearby, and their current locations can be returned to you. There is no friends list. Tapping a nearby person sends a ping; only reciprocal pings enter the directional pairing mode. Pause discovery whenever you do not want to participate.

Residential areas are excluded

The server checks OpenStreetMap residential land-use polygons. If your accepted location is strictly inside a mapped residential area, you are removed from nearby results. Exact polygon boundaries, mapped nonresidential pockets, and unclassified areas remain allowed.

The phone continues sending location updates while residential suppression is active so the server can detect when you leave. Missing map coverage, inaccurate GPS, delayed updates, or lost connectivity can delay suppression. Use Pause when you need an explicit guarantee from the app itself.

Current presence

Nearby results use short-lived current presence records. Old locations expire and stop being discoverable. Notifications contain no coordinates. The application does not need a public travel-history feature to provide discovery.

Personal activity statistics

4gatherers records the time between a discovery session and its most recent accepted location updates. It uses these timestamps to estimate the hours you spent in discovery mode without storing a public travel history. When two people ping one another, the app starts a temporary pairing. A meetup counts only after both people independently confirm meeting in person. Your account can see its private monthly counts of meetups and unique people met.

Welcome and monthly emails

After you finish account setup, we send a one-time welcome message. Optional monthly summaries show your confirmed meetup count, unique people met, and estimated time spent in discovery. Monthly emails are off unless you choose to enable them during onboarding or in Account settings. You can turn them off at any time. We send transactional mail through Resend, which receives the address and message needed to deliver it; raw GPS coordinates are not included.

Safety controls

You can block another user so you stop appearing to each other, report a profile, pause discovery, or request account deletion.

Map data

Residential data: © OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database License. Regional extracts are provided by Geofabrik.