Around Privacy Policy
Last updated: October 23, 2026
Around ("we", "us") is made by Around App, Inc. Around lets you and the people you follow back see which city each of you is in, and keeps a Passport of the places you've been. This policy explains what we collect, why, and what you control.
The short version
- Friends see a city or neighborhood, never a street, a pin, a route, or when you got there.
- Your phone turns its location into a city. Exact coordinates never leave your phone.
- Only people you both follow can see your city.
- We never sell your data, show ads, or track you across other apps.
- Delete your account in Settings and everything is erased.
What we collect
| Data | Why | Shared with |
|---|---|---|
| Name and profile photo you choose | So friends recognize you | People you're connected with |
| Sign in with Apple / Google account ID | To sign you in. When you delete your account we also ask Apple to revoke Around's access to your Apple ID. | No one |
| Your phone number, as a one-way hash computed on your phone | So friends who have your number can find you | No one; it's never shown to anyone |
| Current city or neighborhood (a place name and its city-center point, never your coordinates) | The core feature | People you both follow |
| Your Passport: cities and countries you've visited or added | Passport and its counts | Only if you turn on sharing, and then only the counts |
| Time zone and the approximate city of your network connection | A rough fallback when your phone can't report a city | It may be shown as your city, marked as approximate |
| Push notification tokens and whether you've added the widget | To refresh your widget and send notifications you've allowed | Apple, to deliver notifications |
| Who you follow and who follows you | To connect you | The people involved |
| People you block, and reports you file | To keep you safe and to review reports | No one. The person you block or report isn't told |
Speed and altitude. When your phone reports a city, it also says roughly how fast it's moving. We use this only to keep places you drove through or flew over out of your Passport. It isn't stored.
What we don't collect
- Your precise location, your routes, or a map of where you've been.
- Your address book. To find friends, your phone hashes the numbers in your contacts. We compare those hashes with existing accounts and discard them; we never store them.
- Location while Around is closed. We ask only for "While Using the App" (which on iOS also covers the Around widget while it's on your screen), never "Always".
- Advertising identifiers. Around has no ads and no third-party trackers.
AI features
Around asks before anything goes to an AI provider, and you can always keep things on your iPhone instead.
- Voice and text import (Passport). Without cloud import, Around understands your places on your iPhone, using Apple's on-device speech recognition and Apple Intelligence where available. If you turn on cloud import (we ask once), your text and recording are sent through Vercel's AI Gateway: Mistral turns speech into text, and Anthropic (Claude) picks out the place names. Both are used with zero data retention, so they don't store it. Around doesn't keep the recording or the text.
- Around-style avatar. If you choose to make one, your photo is sent through Vercel's AI Gateway. Anthropic (Claude) first checks it's a suitable photo of one person, with zero data retention. OpenAI then draws the portrait. OpenAI may keep requests for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring, and they're never used to train its models. Around doesn't keep your photo; only the picture you choose becomes your profile photo.
- Feedback. If you record feedback (Settings → Give feedback), the recording and the names of the screens you visited are sent through Vercel's AI Gateway: Mistral turns speech into text and Anthropic (Claude) summarizes it, both with zero data retention. We keep the text, summary and screen names with your account to improve Around; the recording itself is never stored. Deleting your account deletes your feedback.
- City illustrations. The widget's city pictures are made from the city's name only. No personal data is sent.
Service providers
We use a few companies to run Around. Each processes data only on our behalf:
- Cloudflare: hosting and network security.
- Neon (on Amazon Web Services, United States): database.
- Apple: sign-in and push notifications.
- Google: sign-in, if you choose it.
- Vercel (AI Gateway): routes the AI features above.
- Mistral and Anthropic: Passport cloud import, only if you turn it on.
- Anthropic and OpenAI: Around-style avatar, only if you make one.
Your choices
- Pause sharing at any time; friends then see that you've paused.
- Unfollow anyone. They stop seeing your city immediately.
- Passport sharing is off by default.
- Location, Contacts, Microphone and Notifications permissions can be changed in iOS Settings at any time.
- Delete your account in Settings → Delete account. This permanently erases your profile, connections, city, Passport and device tokens from our database right away. Backups roll off within 30 days.
Retention
We keep your data while you have an account. Friends only ever see your current city, which is replaced each time it updates. To work out Passport visits (and leave out places you only passed through), the server keeps your 50 most recent city check-ins: the city's name, never coordinates. They're never shown to anyone, and they're erased with your account. Your Passport keeps the list of places you've been, which you can edit.
Children
Around isn't intended for children under 13 (or the minimum age in your country), and we don't knowingly collect their data.
Security
All traffic is encrypted (HTTPS). Around's own sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes. The token Apple gives us, used only to revoke our access when you delete your account, is stored encrypted. Access to production data is limited to the people who run the service.
Changes
If we change this policy in a meaningful way, we'll tell you in the app before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions or requests: info@aroundmeet.com