Privacy
Crowd Beam does not collect personal information.
There are no accounts, no sign-up, no names, no email addresses, no phone numbers, no location, no contacts access, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party software in the app. This page says exactly what does exist, because "nothing" deserves to be checkable.
What the app keeps on your phone
Your current pairing: a random pairing identifier, a random participant tag, which of the two seats is yours, the two colours and the address of the live connection. It is removed when the pairing ends. The app has no other stored data.
What the service keeps
For each pairing: the random identifier, the two random participant tags, the two assigned colours, timestamps and state for the pairing's lifecycle, and at most one pending nudge. All of it is deleted when the pairing ends — when either person taps Found them, when a link goes unopened, or in any case no later than six hours after the link was created. None of it identifies a person.
Your network address
The service runs on Cloudflare. Like any internet service it receives your IP address in order to answer you and to limit abuse; Beam does not write it to its own records or logs. The only records the service logs are counts of refused requests, without addresses, identifiers or URLs.
The link is the key
An invitation link is the only way into a pairing, and anyone holding it can take the second seat. Send it to the person you are meeting and nobody else.
In a browser
The web version keeps your seat in the pairing in your browser's local storage for up to six hours, so a reload lights the screen again, plus whether you chose a steady or pulsing beacon. It sets no cookies of its own.
Permissions
The flashlight is switched through the camera's torch control without ever opening the camera; the app never captures photos or video and never asks for camera access. Haptics and screen brightness need no permission. There are no notifications.
Changes
If any of this changes, this page changes with it, and the app's privacy details on the App Store are updated to match.